The Story Behind The Song: How Stevie Nicks created her most personal exploration, ‘Sara’
After joining Fleetwood Mac in 1975, Stevie Nicks and her then-boyfriend Lindsey Buckingham helped to propel the blues rock band to new pop-rock heights. As the vocalist behind hits such as ‘Dreams’, ‘Rhiannon’ and ‘Landslide’, to name just a few, Nicks’ contributions to Fleetwood Mac allowed them to become one of the most successful groups of all time.
However, despite their success, relationships within the band were incredibly messy behind the scenes, with multiple members engaging in affairs. After splitting from Buckingham, Nicks began dating Eagles’ Don Henley, although the touring schedules meant they didn’t get much time to see each other. Feeling lonely, Nicks started sleeping with her fellow bandmate Mick Fleetwood, later telling Ophrah Winfrey that “it was a doomed thing [that] caused pain for everybody”. The result of this complicated set-up was one of Nicks’ greatest and most personal songs, ‘Sara’, taken from Fleetwood Mac’s 1979 album Tusk.
At the time, Fleetwood was married to Pattie Boyd’s sister, Jenny Boyd, who had recently cheated on him with his bandmate Bob Weston. Thus, during a rocky period in his relationship, it wasn’t hard for Fleetwood to find himself falling for Nicks. Reflecting on this period, he wrote in his book, Play On: “Eventually I fell in love with [Nicks] and it was chaotic, it was on the road, and it was a crazy love affair that went on longer than any of us really remember — probably several years by the end of it.”
Although Fleetwood and Nicks’ relationship was an affair, she was still devastated to discover that he had been seeing someone else, a woman named Sara Recor. Fleetwood and Recor eventually married in 1988, and remained a good friend of Nicks, despite the hurt she initially felt.
In an interview with The Tommy Vance Show, she revealed: “I remember the night I wrote it. I sat up with a very good friend of mine whose name is Sara, who was married to Mick Fleetwood. She likes to think it’s completely about her, but it’s really not completely about her. It’s about me, about her, about Mick, about Fleetwood Mac. It’s about all of us at that point.”
Nicks continued: “There’s little bits about each one of us in that song and when it had all the other verses, it really covered a vast bunch of people. ‘Sara’ was the kind of song you could fall in love with because I fell in love with it.”
However, for a long time, the song was rumoured to be about Henley, who even spoke to GQ about ‘Sara’ in 1991. He said: “I believe to the best of my knowledge [Nicks] became pregnant by me. And she named the kid Sara, and she had an abortion and then wrote the song of the same name to the spirit of the aborted baby. I was building my house at the time, and there’s a line in the song that says, ‘And when you build your house, call me.'”
Nicks was angry when she found out that Henley had so openly discussed such private topics with the media, although she revealed in a 2014 interview with Billboard that his claims were partly true. She said: “Had I married Don and had that baby, and had she been a girl, I would have named her Sara. But there was another woman in my life named Sara, who shortly after that became Mick’s wife, Sara Fleetwood.”
Lyrics such as “heartbeat that never really died (Sara)” certainly allude to an aborted pregnancy, attesting to Nicks’ confirmation that the song “covered a vast bunch of people”. Still, she asserted to MTV that ‘Sara’ is “pretty much about Mick”. A few years after the song’s release, Nicks checked into rehab following many years of cocaine addiction, using the name Sara as a pseudonym. The song clearly has an intensely personal meaning to the musician, even leading her to revisit the name in 1987’s ‘Welcome to the Room…Sara’.
