View high resolution

Thanks - final post

There are some words and an image that have been with me during the 366 Days of Sara. The words come from the poet Allen Ginsberg, and are often quoted as

Follow your inner moonlight, don’t hide the madness.

In fact he didn’t ever quite say or write them like that (as this reveals - read it, it’s great) but coming across that in the autumn of 2011 was enough to give me the ‘mad’ idea to try and blog about one song for a whole year. And in that year I’ve discovered that I couldn’t have chosen a better song. Stevie said she always knew ‘Sara’ was a song “you could fall in love with”, because she did. It called her, and she followed, and that took courage - so many times it took courage for her to stay with that strange, transcendent song, but she did.

The image that’s been with me is the one above this post. Stevie, eyes closed, singing to and about the poet in her heart, a poster child for the beauty and power of inner-moonlight. Over the past year I just grew to admire her more and more. For me, she’s the best, just the best.

And you guys. I can’t thank you all enough for following and being alongside at the end of this journey. I’ve loved seeing my dashboard fill up every day with your posts. You are without exception funny and insightful and passionate people, and I hope someone somewhere is telling Stevie that she can be very proud of the sort of fans she attracts on the big bad internet!

A half dozen or so of you have given me ‘likes’ and other encouragement when it mattered most. I’m not going to name names because I’m terrified of overlooking someone, so hopefully you will know who you are, and that you have my heartfelt thanks.

I am, though, going to have to name a few people who have specifically helped me to complete this, in various ways:

battleofthedragon – You keep changing your name, and I know I don’t always ‘get’ you, but you were a frequent correspondent when I didn’t realise how much I needed one. Thank you.

girlboymusic – Your brilliant essay about Stevie simply inspired me to write more (so all the reading’s her fault, everyone).

goldduststevie – Truly, where would this fandom be without you? You never fail to come up with amazing pictures and seem to know everything! We are all in your debt.

ogypsybird – Reblogging you was the first post I made, and your Tumblr was the one that made me wonder if here was a place where it’s okay to think out loud about why we feel so much for music and musicians.

And in the non-Tumblr world…

Sara Fleetwood – We never did quite manage to connect, Sara, but it was thrilling to know that you knew about this and thought it was fun. I didn’t share the story you told because I haven’t been able to ask you if I could, but it was great and made me laugh!

The Ivory Keys Facebook group – An essential resource for anyone interested in Stevie rareties, and I made full use of it for versions of ‘Sara’.

The Ledge – The fan forum at www.fleetwoodmac.net was great for Tusk info, Q&A transcripts and the articles index.

On Twitter, @CA_Dream has been wonderful. Thank you so much for all the RTing and talking to me.

Love & thanks to you all. 

*****

New blog link: As you know, I’m moving now to a new Stevie/FM blog called smile-at-the-sea. I’ll still answer messages and stuff here, but there won’t be any new posts.

View high resolution

‘Sara’ interpretation: Part 2 of 7

Lyric from the Album Cut from Tusk vinyl release (1979 – 6min 27sec)

 

Lyric variations

Most live versions from the Tusk tour (and through the 80s) have a more emphatic version of the second line, such as ‘I know every one of you…’ or ‘I swear every one of you would just love to drown’ or ‘Every one of us…’.

I’m not entirely sure that the last word in this verse is ‘home’. It sounds to me awfully like Stevie sings ‘Call me… call’ – which could be correct, given that she does sing simply ‘Call me’ in the Piano and Remastered demos. (Also see below, under ‘Stevie’s poetry’.)

 

Biographical possibilities

The much-reduced ‘Sara’ lyric is known to reference at least three different male lovers of Stevie, but there is also her love affair with her fans, her music, her band, her entourage. That’s the real sea of love.

Stevie has spoken about the mid-to-late 70s being a time when she was young and beautiful and fast, moving from person to person, and love ‘was around every corner’. In fact, Mick Fleetwood’s account of his own convoluted ‘love’ life around the time ‘Sara’ was written gives a good insight into the bubble they were all living in, and how the parameters shifted.

Furthermore, Stevie’s habit of switching up the intensity of the second line when she sang the song live on the Tusk tour (and beyond) reinforces the idea that she and all the other people living in the bubble believed that they were privileged. Notice how the second line switches ‘love’ from abstract noun to a verb synonymous with ‘desire’, and so invites envy – in effect, these lines are saying ‘Who wouldn’t want to be us, doing this?’

The ‘it’ in the third line could mean the love affair with Don, or it could mean giving up the prospect of motherhood, or both. And then in the fourth line, I always understand ‘It doesn’t matter what for’ as meaning ‘It doesn’t matter why’ or ‘what you did it for’.

And then we have the house. Famously, Don said this referred to his house that he was building at the time, and double famously Stevie has both confirmed that that is true and said that it’s a load of rubbish (I’m being polite). For what it’s worth, I’m with Don, and therefore with Stevie when she’s in agreeing-with-Don mode.

‘Call me’ seems to match the tone of ‘Wait a minute’ and ‘Stay with me’ from earlier. Not wanting to be separated without the hope of reunion, however far off.

 

Stevie’s poetry

The sea of love… an age-old metaphor that once again invokes elemental force. And ‘drowning’, the act of surrender or being overcome. Important distinction, but none is made here. In fact, drowning here is deliberately and deliciously double-edged: darkness and struggle coated in the bliss of being innocently overcome. She’s describing blameless and universal hedonism – the sin that isn’t a sin because, among so many sinners, who on earth can or even wants to remember where the boundaries are?

The ‘it’ in ‘now it’s gone’ is deliberate. It’s the vaguest pronoun anyone could use in this context. Designed to be impenetrable.

The house is an interesting symbol, although I suspect it’s in the song because it is literally a house and literally in the process of being contructed. I’ve read an interview where Stevie says it’s a metaphor for getting your shit together – and yes, that’s fair enough – but to me it’s most interesting effect is that, even while being literal, it introduces the concept of home that Stevie raises so high later in the song.

My not being sure whether it’s ‘home’ or a repetition of ‘call’ in the last line of this section is tweaked again by another variation in the live versions. Stevie often changes it to ‘Call me – I’ll be home’ – which is a completely different spin on ‘call’, very literally a phone call rather than the sense of beckoning. So maybe that’s a real change in meaning that she makes.

Other posts that might be of interest:

Day 108, on another possible source of ‘Drowning in the sea of love’.

Day 188, on what Stevie’s world was like in 1977/78.

Day 193, on living a rock n roll soap-opera lifestyle.

[Go to Part 3]

View high resolution

‘Sara’ interpretation: Part 1 of 7

Lyric from the Album Cut from Tusk vinyl release (1979 – 6min 27sec)

 

Lyric variations

Some pre-Album Cut demos/mixes have ‘But you never showed me ’bout the fire’. This part doesn’t vary all that much in live performance.

 

Biographical possibilities

Comments from Stevie Nicks, Mick Fleetwood, Don Henley, Tom Moncrieff and Sara Recor (later Fleetwood) confirm that there are two women and at least three men who figure in the whittled-down lyric of ‘Sara’. The women are Stevie and Sara, and the men are Mick, Don and J.D. Souther. I think there could be two more men as well: Lindsey Buckingham and Tom Moncrieff.

In these four lines, the ‘you’ Stevie is addressing stays the same throughout, and I think that it’s Don. The reason I think that is to do with the time this was written: lyrically, ‘Sara’ was at an advanced stage when Mick and Sara got together, so the theme of trust-betrayed didn’t fit with Mick when Stevie wrote those lines. (Although see this for some alternative views on that.)

Stevie has also spoken of Don in terms that resemble a mentor-protégé relationship, that he taught her to spend money, and about fame and stardom. So it fits the portrait of someone who was a source of guidance and protection but who turned cold when the going got tough.

 

Stevie’s poetry

‘Sara’ sets out on a theme of loss and separation. These words are trying to, if not prevent, then at least delay the end of an affair. There’s also a nip of reproach in casting up to the guy who’s bailing out the fact that he used to present himself as a source of good things – light being a metaphor for truth and knowledge. But he apparently didn’t say he also brought fire, the light that burns.

The opening lines also set out the language of extremes, of elemental power. Extremity is all the way through ‘Sara’, from the light and fire, to the always and never, everyone drowning and flying for days and staying home all the time. It just hammers on the door to your heart with both fists until you let it in.

Other posts that might be of interest:

Day 104, on the mystery of discussing someone else’s inspirations.

[Go to Part 2]

View high resolution

‘Sara’ interpretation: Part 4 of 7

Lyric from the Album Cut from Tusk vinyl release (1979 – 6min 27sec)

 

Lyric variations

The Piano Demo and the Remastered Demo both have the chorus beginning ‘He cried Sara …’. It also sounds on some of the Tusk tour bootlegs as if Stevie is singing ‘I said Sara’, but it’s hard to be sure.

 

Biographical possibilities

Stevie’s sudden addressing of an entity called Sara comes completely out of nowhere in this song. It arrives on the back of lines that speak about heterosexual love affairs gone bad or just gone by, and then BOOM. A girl. But who is she?

Well, it’s at this point in the song that interpeting meaning biographically divides into pre-Henley and post-Henley contexts: that is, how you might understand the song before or after 1991, when Don breached Stevie’s privacy about a painful decision she had to make, to end an unplanned pregnancy.

Pre-Henley audiences must have been a bit puzzled by this song that seemed to take a strange 90-degree turn into Stevie serenading her muse – the ‘poet in [her] heart’ can mean nothing else – but post-Henley listeners may well hear something almost unbearably sad. Listen, with hindsight, to some of the Tusk tour live versions where Stevie sings ‘my Sara’ during the fade-out and you’ll hear the pain. It’s in that, and so much in the massive expansion of her voice when she sings the name – almost all the live versions, no matter how fragile she starts out, have Stevie nailing that soaring note on ‘Sara’ at the last chorus, and you know for all that ‘Rhiannon’ was an exorcism or a taunt, this is coming from a different, softer place. Stevie’s magic here is porous and helpless, and all the more beautiful for her effort to shape pain into something meaningful - for us, as much as for herself, and I want to stress that I’m only talking about this because it’s an acknowledged fact of Stevie’s past, and it does make so much sense of both ‘Sara’ and - in fact - just about everything Stevie has ever said about the relationship between her ambition and what she has given up in order to achieve it.

So we know that one Sara represents passing up the possibility of motherhood at this time. And we know from Mick, Tom, Stevie and Sara herself that another Sara is Stevie’s friend Sara Recor (later Fleetwood). Interestingly, there’s a live boot that memoriesearthquakesandflashes sent me a transcription from: it’s a show on 31 August 1983 in Austin, in which Stevie introduces the song by saying ‘Well, this song is about just another… girl who is, like, kinda a nice friend, but then of course it could have been about my dog Sara… Belladonna. Then again it was really about Fleetwood Mac [laughs]. Do you know really who it is about? [laughing] No, you don’t. I do.’ She says similar things like ‘You know this girl’ at a couple of other Wild Heart shows, too.

Also pause a moment to remember that the Piano Demo and the Remastered Demo both have the chorus beginning ‘He cried Sara …’. Now obviously that became something like ‘Said Sara’, and I always thought that that was how it was meant to be, or that if anything was missing then it would be missing the word ‘I’, as in ‘I said Sara’. But ‘He cried’ really threw me for a loop until I was remembered Tom Moncrieff saying that he had ‘a very bad crush’ on Sara Recor, and Stevie saying repeatedly that the song was about things that were going on ‘for all of us at that time’ (my emphasis), and Tom saying that the recording of the demo was ‘very emotional’ for him and Stevie. So I wonder if the ‘he’ of ‘he cried’ was initially Tom? Or a combination of Tom and a sort of slight veil for Stevie to avoid a too literal lesbian connotation that she later felt she didn’t need? The timings, as ever, are hard to pin down. It’s certainly possible that there was some work done on the demo post-Mick getting together with Sara, but really all the signs point to the vast majority of the writing of the song being in the period when Mick was ‘with’ Stevie, and Sara was… well, I’m pretty sure nothing happened with her and Tom, and of course she was still married to Jim (the sea of love notwithstanding).

 

Stevie’s poetry

The language of ‘Sara’ is unflinchingly romantic – just like one of the many sides of Stevie Nicks. ‘The poet in my heart’ indeed. Who says that? Who even thinks it? Well, the answer is someone who doesn’t live ‘on that critical level’ that most of us live on, because if she did she couldn’t write these songs. (See extra posts below, for more about innocence.)

‘Sara’ is a song about emotional alchemy, about transforming pain into something useful: inspiration. But that’s too small a word. It sounds exploitative, and yet that’s also the honest grist that art consumes. Margaret Atwood wrote a poem that contained the line ‘Please die so that I can write about it’. She was being a terrible girlfriend and a really good writer. The two often go together.

So ‘the poet in my heart’ is the spirit of sacrifice, or perhaps even the sacrificed spirit (as Don Henley suggests). And when the next two lines are ‘Never change, never stop’, you know that the bargain is forever. Again, the extremity of the language is uncompromising, the path unalterable.

In the second four lines, it’s sublime the way that little ‘Oh’ on the front of ‘Call me home’ ups the stakes just a little. But it’s still only a marker for how this line pays off in the run-up to the second chorus.

Other posts that might of interest:

Day 85, on the Muse and the line ‘Never change, never stop’.

Day 125, on the theme of ‘innocence’ that Sara Recor/Fleetwood has spoken about.

Day 127, on how much of her personal life Stevie puts in her songs.

Day 348, on why Stevie has herself said that ‘Sara’ might be her ‘most personal’ song.

[Go to Part 5]

View high resolution

‘Sara’ interpretation: Part 3 of 7

Lyric from the Album Cut from Tusk vinyl release (1979 – 6min 27sec)

 

Lyric variations

There’s a live version from the 80s where Stevie sings ‘Within the wings of a storm, always a storm’. Much more common is that ‘He was singing’ becomes ‘He was singing to me’ during the Tusk tour, and then she tacks on ‘for a change’ (or ‘that’s a change’) sometimes during the Wild Heart tour. The ‘to me’ was still happening on the Soundstage in 2008.

 

Biographical possibilities

The ‘he’ in the first line is Mick. Mick and Stevie have both said that ‘the great dark wing’ is him. And, as many other people have noted, when you recall that Stevie refers to herself as ‘a storm’ on the same album… well, that might be the most fancy description of coupling you’ll ever hear.

A more likely reading is that the ‘great dark wing’ connotes a place to shelter under, and that the ‘wings’ of the storm are the outer extremities of Stevie’s feelings. Mick and Lindsey have both said that Mick was attracted to Stevie from the beginning, and she has hinted heavily that it was mutual. Remember, too, that Mick was Stevie’s boss – so it’s possible that she felt she had to tell him about her situation with Don, and that that drew them closer together during a time of huge stakes for the whole band, even if the whole band didn’t actually know that it was threatened.

The next three lines change the identity of ‘he’ dramatically. Sara Recor (later Fleetwood) has said that these lines refer to singer-songwriter and sometime Eagles associate J.D. Souther, whom Stevie has said she got together with briefly around this time. The idiom ‘met my match’ has two meanings: it can mean that she’d met someone as good as her (if not better) or that she’d met herself in male form. The first meaning seems more likely than the second, given how peripheral JDS turned out to be even at the time of writing ‘Sara’, but one thing is clear: that singing-and-undressing move sounds smoooooth.

 

Stevie’s poetry

The ‘great dark wing’ has been mentioned as maybe having come from some of the books of mythology that Stevie has said she likes, but it’s still satisfyingly gothic in a rock song. It’s bold, too, to not care about elegant variation in choosing the repeat of ‘wings of a storm’.

Typical Stevie to do a strange thing with her tenses in ‘I think I had met my match’. My inner editor would prefer ‘I thought I had met my match’, but my inner editor has, like Lindsey, to accept that I wouldn’t say that to Bob Dylan.

I almost can’t describe how much I love the ‘undoing the laces’ lines in ‘Sara’ – but I’m going to try. What’s so clever is that the lines themselves are a tease. They’re strung out over about thirty seconds, and she makes you wait to put them together so you can finally form the image. I also really love the fact that it’s ‘the laces’, like we might know the ones she means. 

[Go to Part 4]