Influenced Jeff Tweedy, Lucinda Williams, John Hiatt
There is something about Levon Helm’s voice that is contained in all of our voices. It is ageless, timeless and has no race. He can sing with such depth and emotion, but he can also convey a good-old fun-time growl.
I wrote Sara on the piano, by myself. The original Sara was 16 minutes long. …
I knew that Sara would be very popular because I loved writing that song. I’ve had more fun writing that…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. Its about all of us at that point. There’s little bits about each one of us in that song and when it had all the other verses it really covered a vast bunch of people. Sara was the kind of song you could fall in love with,
Mick … was the ‘great dark wing’. And, ah, it was about everything that was going on at that particular time, too, but he was the, the reason for the, you know, the beginning of it.
When I was a young girl well, I had me a cowboy
He weren’t much to look at, just free rambling man
But that was a long time and no matter how I try
The years just flow by like a broken down dam.
Make me an angel that flies from Montgom’ry
Make me a poster of an old rodeo
The song is about the complicated relationship that Buckingham and fellow Fleetwood Mac member Stevie Nicks were having. None of the members knew they were writing songs about each other until the album (Rumours) was released. …
