Beautiful Child

The piano is sparse. The vocal barely clears a whisper. And behind the drum kit, keeping the time the whole song is built on, sits Mick Fleetwood — the man Stevie Nicks is singing about. Everybody knows about “Silver Springs.” This is the other one.

“Beautiful Child” came out in 1979 on Tusk, the album that had to follow Rumours. Rumours was polished heartbreak, a record everyone bought and understood. Tusk was a double album that cost a million dollars and confused the people who bought it — experimental, weird, deliberately uncommercial. Most of it sounds nothing like the band that made it. “Beautiful Child” is one of the few tracks that could have sat on the earlier record. A straightforward ballad. Longing and distance, nothing else.

The lyric is about an age difference. You fell in love when I was only ten. Stevie was significantly younger than Mick Fleetwood when they first met, and the whole song is built out of looking back — trying to understand a thing that never quite became what it could have been.

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 is what made them what they were — the willingness to strip their own lives for parts and turn the wreckage into songs. They did it over and over. They built a band on it.

“Beautiful Child” doesn’t have the drama of “Silver Springs” or the anger of “Go Your Own Way.” It is quieter than that. Sadder. More resigned. It is the sound of a person who has stopped fighting the fact that the relationship is over and started doing the only thing left to do with it.

Which is this. She wrote it down. He played on it. Some loves don’t end. They just become songs, and the man you loved keeps the time while you sing it.