Don Henley Thought Stevie Nicks Wrote This Track for Him, She Says “He Wishes”

Considering their brief, whirlwind love affair in the late 1970s and a few suspiciously recognizable lyrics, Don Henley long thought Stevie Nicks wrote a Tusk track for the former Eagles drummer. However, when Nicks responded years later, she offered a glib, “He wishes!”

To Henley’s credit, he’s not the only person who believes they’re the subject of Nicks’ emotional track, nor is his suggestion the first that the former Fleetwood Mac frontwoman turned down.

Don Henley Thought Stevie Nicks Wrote This Song For Him

In an infamous GQ interview from 1991, Eagles founder Don Henley made his case for why he believed his former girlfriend Stevie Nicks wrote “Sara” about him. “I believe, to the best of my knowledge, she became pregnant by me,” Henley said. “And she named the kid Sara, and she had an abortion and then wrote the song of the same name to the spirit of the aborted baby.

“I was building my house at the time, and there’s a line in the song that says, And when you build your house, call me,” Henley continued (via Far Out Magazine). The rest of the interview was no less confessional, including Henley’s account of an underage sex worker overdosing in his Los Angeles home. Simply put, the GQ interview didn’t paint Henley in the most flattering light, and Nicks’ response to her part in the conversation didn’t help.

“He wishes!” Nicks responded when asked if “Sara” was an ode to Don Henley. “If Don wants to think the ‘house’ was one of the 90s houses he built—and he did build house after beautiful house, and once they were done, he would move because he wasn’t interested in them anymore. No. He is one of my best friends in the world, and if anything happened to me, he would be there, always. But if someone said that, they’re so full of s***!”

Many People Believe The Song To Be About Them

Stevie Nicks publicly denying that “Sara” was about Don Henley or the pregnancy they had in their short, two-year fling might have been embarrassing if he was the only one to make such a claim. But luckily for the Eagles founder, he’s one of several people who vehemently believed Nicks wrote “Sara” for them (certainly a beautiful testament to her universally relatable songwriting).

“I knew that “Sara” would be very popular because I loved writing that song,” Nicks said in a 1994 interview with Tommy Vance. “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. 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.”

In a 2014 Billboard interview, Nicks acquiesced to the notion that her pregnancy with her “Leather and Lace” duet partner inspired part of “Sara.” However, as she explained a decade earlier, the song she called her “most personal” was about many things. And the house line? “When you build your house was about when you get your act together, then let me know because until you get your act together, I really can’t be around you,” Nicks said in a 2009 interview (via Far Out).

So, technically, Henley wasn’t wrong…but he wasn’t really right, either.

Photo by Stephen Lovekin/Shutterstock