Kevin Winter/Getty ImagesStevie Nicks has now confirmed what previously was only one of those he-said-she-hasn't-responded rock-and-roll legends.
Don Henley has said that Nicks was once pregnant with his child and that the Fleetwood Mac song "Sara" was titled after the name that they were going to give to that baby. (Nicks has never had children, though she ended up being close to ex-husband Kim Anderson's son from his previous marriage. She has candidly talked about never wanting to have her own kids, telling InStyle in 2002, "It's like, Do you want to be an artist and a writer, or a wife and a lover? With kids, your focus changes. I don't want to go to PTA meetings.")
But when asked about one of her new songs, "Hard Advice," and its similarities to "Sara," Nicks admitted in a new interview with Billboard that Henley's explanation of "Sara" is "accurate" but that's not "the entirety" of the song.
"Had I married Don and had that baby, and had she been a girl, I would have named her Sara," the Fleetwood Mac singer said. "But there was another woman in my life named Sara, who shortly after that became Mick's wife, Sara Fleetwood."
Nicks, whose past relationship with Lindsey Buckingham is also the stuff of rock-band legend, hooked up with Mick Fleetwood as well back in the day, though she said last year in an episode of Oprah's Master Class that she and Mick "never would have had an affair had we not had a party and all been completely drunk, messed up and coked out."
Speaking of her pasts struggles with drug abuse, which she has been extremely candid about in recent years, Nicks told Billboard that a doctor warned her in the 1980s that, if she did one more line of cocaine, "he said I'd have a brain hemorrhage, actually."
"The documentary [about actress Mabel Normand, whose tragic life inspired Nicks to check into the Betty Ford Center and get clean] really scared me, because I saw this beautiful girl go downhill so fast," she explaied. "Sometimes you can't see it in yourself, but you sure as heck can see it in someone else. And suicide was never my MO. I'm basically a happy person. I was a happy person back then. I just got addicted to coke, and that was a very bad drug for me. It was obviously a very bad drug for Mabel too. She had a gang of rich kids, like Lindsay Lohan today. That same bunch of girls comes around every 15 years."
She explained that "Hard Advice," while being about a traumatizing relationship, was inspired by "a lecture Tom Petty gave me one day about something that was going on in my life.
"I'd asked him to write a song with me—this was about two months after I came out of rehab for [addiction to] Klonopin. I was still in a fragile state, after 48 days of hell in rehab. And Tom said, 'You don't need help to write a song. You just need to get over this experience that bummed you out so bad. The relationship you were in is over, it was over a long time ago, and you need to move on.' And I went home and wrote this song."
24 Karat Gold: Songs From the Vault, Nicks' eighth studio album—made up primarily of new versions of songs she first wrote between 1969 and 1987, plus a couple from the 1990s—is due out Oct. 7.