(Credits: Far Out / Stevie Nicks)
Mon 20 October 2025 20:19, UK
Stevie Nicks is one of the biggest names to emerge from the 1970s classic rock era thanks to her position as a vocalist in Fleetwood Mac. After joining the band in 1975 alongside her then-boyfriend Lindsey Buckingham, Nicks’ star power rose as she proved to be both an incredible singer and a powerful songwriter.
In 1981, Nicks pursued a solo career, releasing her debut album Bella Donna to great success, topping the Billboard charts and selling records the world over. Renowned for her personal lyrics, Nicks often drew from aspects of her life that would otherwise remain private. Of course, Nicks often explored her romantic relationships, as do most great musicians, granting fans access to intimate details about her affairs with different men.
Too often women are categorised or remembered by the men they spent their time with. Nicks, certainly shouldn’t be addressed that way. Not only is she a supremely successful singer, being a double Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, but a truly gifted songwriter. While she is far more than the men she loved, the songs the relaitonships left behind in their wake are worthy of their place in history.
Nicks became synonymous with using her music to shed a light on her relationships. Joe Walsh, Lindsey Buckingham and other fellas lucky enough to spend some time with Nicks have been gifted a track. But one of the most contentious set of tunes came from within the Fleetwood Mac camp.
Yes, one of these men was Mick Fleetwood, a founding member of the band. They began their affair in 1977, during the Australian dates of their Rumours tour. At this point, Fleetwood was married to Jenny Boyd, the sister of Pattie Boyd. Fleetwood and Boyd were married for seven years before he cheated on her with Nicks, although Boyd had previously had an affair with band member Bob Weston.
(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Meanwhile, Nicks was in a relationship with the Eagles’ Don Henley. In his book, Play On, Fleetwood wrote: “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.”
Nicks penned several songs about Fleetwood, with multiple appearing on the band’s 1979 album Tusk. The latter half of the ’70s was a rocky period for Fleetwood Mac due to rising tensions caused by romantic affairs within the band. On ‘Storms’, Nicks holds her hands up, admitting that her affair with Fleetwood was not the best of ideas. In the liner notes of Tusk, Nicks wrote, “Here’s that song in a nutshell: Don’t break up other people’s marriages. It will never work and will haunt you for the rest of your miserable days.”
Later, she told The Guardian: “Oh, that one was a – excuse my language – fuck-you to Mick,” adding, “I sat at my piano, a feminist woman, and I wrote it, to say that nothing you or anybody else can do to me can change the fact that, as the opening line goes: ‘Every night that goes between / I feel a little less.’”
Another Tusk cut written about Fleetwood is ‘Sara’, which addresses Nicks’ heartbreak when she discovered he had been seeing someone else – a woman named Sara. Although Nicks told Ophrah Winfrey that she and Fleetwood’s affair was “a doomed thing [that] caused pain for everybody,” she still loved him at the time and found herself devastated when she learnt he had eyes for others. The song is also rumoured to have lines about Henley, although she asserted in the liner notes that “Mick was the ‘great dark wing within the wings of a storm.’”
On The Tommy Vance Show, Nicks explained; “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.”
Finally, Nicks addressed Fleetwood a few years later in The Wild Heart through the song ‘Beauty and The Beast’. Nicks told Entertainment Weekly: “It was definitely about Mick, […] but it’s also based on the 1946 Jean Cocteau movie. I first saw it on TV one night when Mick and I were first together, and I always thought of Mick as being sort of Beauty and the Beast-esque, because he’s so tall and he had beautiful coats down to here, and clothes made by little fairies up in the attic, I always thought, so he was that character in a lot of ways.”
She added: “And also, it matched our story because Mick and I could never be. A, because Mick was married and then divorced and that was not good, and B, because of Fleetwood Mac.”
In the song, Nicks sings, “My love is a man who’s not been tamed/ Oh my love lives in a world of false pleasure and pain,” referring to her tumultuous relationship with Fleetwood.
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