Beautiful Child

Everybody knows about “Silver Springs.” This is the other one.

“Beautiful Child” is Stevie Nicks at her most vulnerable, writing about her feelings for Mick Fleetwood while Mick Fleetwood plays drums on the recording. That’s insane. That’s Fleetwood Mac. The band that turned interpersonal devastation into a business model.

Tusk was their impossible follow-up to Rumours—a double album that cost a million dollars to make and confused everyone who bought it. Where Rumours was polished heartbreak, Tusk was experimental, weird, deliberately uncommercial. “Beautiful Child” is one of the few tracks that could have fit on the earlier record, a straightforward ballad about longing and distance.

“You fell in love when I was only ten.”

The lyric refers to their age difference—Stevie was significantly younger when they first met. The whole song has this quality of looking back, of trying to understand a relationship that never quite became what it could have been. The piano is sparse. The vocals are barely above a whisper. And somewhere in the room, playing drums, is the man she’s singing about.

I don’t know how they did it. I don’t know how you sit in a studio with your ex-lover and your current bandmates and play backing tracks for songs about your own romantic failures. The professionalism required is almost sociopathic. But that’s what made them great—the willingness to strip their lives for parts and turn the wreckage into songs.

“Beautiful Child” doesn’t have the drama of “Silver Springs” or the anger of “Go Your Own Way.” It’s quieter than that. Sadder. More resigned.

Some loves don’t end. They just become songs.