Why Stevie Nicks considered Mick Fleetwood her best friend in Fleetwood Mac
For someone like Stevie Nicks, it probably takes a lot to have heart. Making sure you’re someone who constantly has a lot of love to give doesn’t just take guts, it takes patience and resilience, and Nicks is no doubt someone who has had to have a long fuse through some of her biggest and most career-defining moments and milestones.
Perhaps that’s also why it’s easy to feel a sense of protectiveness, especially now. It might be a strange thing to feel, to naturally go on the defence with a famous figure you’ve never met, but it says a lot about Nicks’ heart that she’s always felt like a friend, one who knows exactly what you’ve been through, and who always feels right there when you need her. A helping hand, but also that stern voice in your head that tells you to pull yourself together.
But this is only possible because Nicks has had to be that for herself since day one. Showing up for herself, in every sense of the phrase, has been one of her only ways of truly getting through and surviving life’s insufferable sense of humour. It’s been her only respite from countless broken hearts and addictions, and her only source of resilience when everything else felt like it was falling apart. At the same time, it’s also allowed her to face up to the mirror and own the parts of herself even she felt ashamed of.
That said, and as much as we love to imagine Nicks is a truly mystical entity who has no space to entertain anybody else but herself (which is true), she’s also human. And that means needing people who will always be there for you and get you on a level others don’t. It also means letting others reach for your hand even when things between you aren’t great, because, even in the dark, the only thing that matters is offering the ground when your head’s in the sky.
Most will probably assume that, for Nicks, this figure is Lindsey Buckingham, which is understandable. Buckingham was a constant in Nicks’ life since they started out, and navigated the brutality of the industry together while figuring out their own romance. He also respected her in ways she almost always never expected, never losing sight of those crucial moments of gravity when everything else soared into the ether. However, while all of this is true, Nicks’ dearest friend was actually Mick Fleetwood.
“Mick Fleetwood is my dear friend,” she told the Scotsman in 2007. “We, too, had a bad break-up because Mick fell in love with my best friend Sara, hence the song ‘Sara’.” Expressing how “painful and terrible” it was losing Fleetwood, she also said she “lost my best friend”, which was perhaps the hardest part of the whole thing, as it also felt she lost a piece of her heart. “I forgave Sara three months later and forgave Mick six months later,” she said. “They were married for 18 years, and now I’m godmother to his two five-year-old girls from his current marriage.”
Looking at the reasons why Fleetwood would grow closer to Nicks than someone like Buckingham and even Christine McVie, it actually makes a lot of sense. For starters, Nicks and McVie always made it known how much Fleetwood felt like the band’s anchor, which is something they definitely needed when things got tough, and it did, almost irreparably so in some situations. But Fleetwood was also the much-needed voice of reason who could look at things with an unbiased eye and provide the perspectives they needed to move on to the next thing.
It also says a lot that, even in the fires of a “bad” break-up when everything should feel prickled with angst and sourness, Nicks would write something like ‘Beauty and the Beast’ about a relationship that could never be, one that she will forever hold on to dearly, even though she knows it’ll always be exactly what she wants. But, perhaps that’s why having him as her best friend won out in the end, as it’s always better to have important people by our side than to have nothing at all, filling up hollowed hearts.
