View high resolution
‘Sara’ interpretation: Part 3 of 7
Lyric from the Album Cut from Tusk vinyl release (1979 – 6min 27sec)
Lyric variations
There’s a live version from the 80s where Stevie sings ‘Within the wings of a storm, always a storm’. Much more common is that ‘He was singing’ becomes ‘He was singing to me’ during the Tusk tour, and then she tacks on ‘for a change’ (or ‘that’s a change’) sometimes during the Wild Heart tour. The ‘to me’ was still happening on the Soundstage in 2008.
Biographical possibilities
The ‘he’ in the first line is Mick. Mick and Stevie have both said that ‘the great dark wing’ is him. And, as many other people have noted, when you recall that Stevie refers to herself as ‘a storm’ on the same album… well, that might be the most fancy description of coupling you’ll ever hear.
A more likely reading is that the ‘great dark wing’ connotes a place to shelter under, and that the ‘wings’ of the storm are the outer extremities of Stevie’s feelings. Mick and Lindsey have both said that Mick was attracted to Stevie from the beginning, and she has hinted heavily that it was mutual. Remember, too, that Mick was Stevie’s boss – so it’s possible that she felt she had to tell him about her situation with Don, and that that drew them closer together during a time of huge stakes for the whole band, even if the whole band didn’t actually know that it was threatened.
The next three lines change the identity of ‘he’ dramatically. Sara Recor (later Fleetwood) has said that these lines refer to singer-songwriter and sometime Eagles associate J.D. Souther, whom Stevie has said she got together with briefly around this time. The idiom ‘met my match’ has two meanings: it can mean that she’d met someone as good as her (if not better) or that she’d met herself in male form. The first meaning seems more likely than the second, given how peripheral JDS turned out to be even at the time of writing ‘Sara’, but one thing is clear: that singing-and-undressing move sounds smoooooth.
Stevie’s poetry
The ‘great dark wing’ has been mentioned as maybe having come from some of the books of mythology that Stevie has said she likes, but it’s still satisfyingly gothic in a rock song. It’s bold, too, to not care about elegant variation in choosing the repeat of ‘wings of a storm’.
Typical Stevie to do a strange thing with her tenses in ‘I think I had met my match’. My inner editor would prefer ‘I thought I had met my match’, but my inner editor has, like Lindsey, to accept that I wouldn’t say that to Bob Dylan.
I almost can’t describe how much I love the ‘undoing the laces’ lines in ‘Sara’ – but I’m going to try. What’s so clever is that the lines themselves are a tease. They’re strung out over about thirty seconds, and she makes you wait to put them together so you can finally form the image. I also really love the fact that it’s ‘the laces’, like we might know the ones she means.
[Go to Part 4]
