Can someone please explain the backstory/narrative implied by the lyrics to the Fleetwood Mac song "Beautiful Child"?

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Okay, I can't seem to sort this out, so perhaps ILM can help. Here are the lyrics to the Stevie Nicks penned "Beautiful Child" as it appears on the "Tusk" album:

Beautiful child
Beautiful child
You are a beautiful child
And I am a fool once more

You fell in love when I was only ten
The years disappeared
Much has gone by since then
I bite my lip, can you send me away
You touch
I have no choice
I have to stay
I had to stay

Sleepless child
There is so little time
Your eyes say yes
But you don't say yes
I wish that you were mine

You say it will be harder in the morning
I wait for you to say, just go
Your hands, held mine so few hours
And I'm not a child anymore

I'm not a child anymore
I'm tall enough
To reach for the stars
I'm old enough
To love you from afar
Too trusting... yes?
But then women usually are

I'm not a child anymore
No, I'm not a child, oh no
Tall enough to reach for the stars
I will do
As I'm told
Even if I never hold you again
I never hold you again

I can't figure out what's going on here. The first stanza seems to set up an opposition: the speaker is a "fool" who is addressing a "beautiful child", but then the next stanza flips this, because if "you" are old enough to have fallen in love when "I" was only ten, then we must have jumped perspectives- which is fair enough. But I can't seem to hold the scenario straight over the course of these words, and it's particularly weird and narcissistic the way that the "I'm not a child anymore" kind of revises/perverts the opening gaze upon the beauty of the "child". What is Stevie trying to tell us? What is up here? My boyfriend says that it's just a symptomatic expression of cocaine use and sleep deprivation but I'm not so sure.

― Drew Daniel (Drew Daniel), Sunday, 5 June 2005 17:03 (twenty years ago)

A little from column A, a little from column B, I'd guess.

― miccio (miccio), Sunday, 5 June 2005 17:10 (twenty years ago)

The jump from the third to the fourth stanza is also pretty opaque to me. The "your eyes say yes but you don't say yes" could be some reference to desire on the part of the "child", but it could also be the projection of the speaker, who wishes to possess this child. It's really, really creepy. It sort of telegraphs a variety of possible explanatory contexts- prostitution, actual "infantile"/prepubescent sexuality, darker scenarios of sexual abuse- but it really doesn't cash out into any of them clearly. Some kind of contact has occurred by the fourth scenario, but again, Stevie keeps the cards close to her chest. Help me out here, people. I don't get it.

― Drew Daniel (Drew Daniel), Sunday, 5 June 2005 17:12 (twenty years ago)

This seems like the standard Stevie Nicks "oh our sweet innocent love I miss it but its gone and I am a queen not a princess and yet I love you, you egotistical LA record industry cowboy, but o, the pain of our magical existance *sniffle* *SNIFF*."

She's always hopping around grammatical logic. I heard that in the documentary for the reunion album Buckingham was bitching about it and she said that its her poetry and he wouldn't do that to Dylan. And she may be right.

― miccio (miccio), Sunday, 5 June 2005 17:15 (twenty years ago)

Yeah, I guess the last two stanzas are the coke-addled egotistical sublime section, she's getting all pumped up and reaching for the stars etc. But it's the fragmented first two-thirds that puzzle me.

I seem to recall a catty remark from Christine McVie about the "private" nature of Nick's thought process / lyrics on that Rumours DVD.

― Drew Daniel (Drew Daniel), Sunday, 5 June 2005 17:20 (twenty years ago)

Originally I thought McVie was boring and that Stevie was neat but over time I've grown to appreciate Christine's literal nature and get annoyed with Stevie's need to dive into fantasy to make sense of her life (though she has some gorgeous songs in her repetoire and as an archetype she's invaluable). I'd rather hear I make lovin' fun than that I ride the white steed to Avalon or whatever.

― miccio (miccio), Sunday, 5 June 2005 17:24 (twenty years ago)

o dear, anthony,
you have fallen into the
either/or mac trap!

― Haikunym (Haikunym), Sunday, 5 June 2005 19:51 (twenty years ago)

dude I enjoy both! I'm just talking in a hypothetical TS situation.

― miccio (miccio), Sunday, 5 June 2005 19:53 (twenty years ago)

RESIST THE DARK SIDE

― Haikunym (Haikunym), Sunday, 5 June 2005 19:54 (twenty years ago)

STEVIE AND CHRISTINE = LUKE SKYWALKER AND HAN SOLO

― Haikunym (Haikunym), Sunday, 5 June 2005 19:55 (twenty years ago)

Now I'm imagining Lindsey with the earmuff cut.

― miccio (miccio), Sunday, 5 June 2005 19:56 (twenty years ago)

MICK = CHEWIE

― Haikunym (Haikunym), Sunday, 5 June 2005 19:57 (twenty years ago)

http://www.swgalaxy.ru/encyclopedy/heroes/images/admiral_akbar.jpg

where is the love for John McVie

― Haikunym (Haikunym), Sunday, 5 June 2005 19:58 (twenty years ago)

http://wwwse.fhs-hagenberg.ac.at/se/projekte/2001/2505/contents/pics/ewok.gif
"real savage-like"

― Haikunym (Haikunym), Sunday, 5 June 2005 20:00 (twenty years ago)

So Yoda was Peter Green, yeah?

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Sunday, 5 June 2005 20:03 (twenty years ago)

as twirling-witchy-poo shiksa hippie chicks go, stevie is unbeatable. it's not really an archetype i generally like, but she shows it can be done well.

i love christine but i always wondered what she'd be like in more of a "frontwoman" position (in a more rockstarish way than she was in her chicken shack days).

― to let - flats (Jody Beth Rosen), Sunday, 5 June 2005 20:11 (twenty years ago)

http://www.elverta.k12.ca.us/students/Webs/jkaupanger/ig-88.jpg

Mick Fleetwood

― Brooker Buckingham (Brooker B), Monday, 6 June 2005 02:29 (twenty years ago)

Possible explanation: She is talking to someone much older than her, but that person is a lover of hers later, not a parent figure at the time she was 10.

Beautiful child is simultaneously Nicks and her lover depending on the stanza.

He knew what love was when she was only 10. She is telling us the age difference here. That he fell in love with someone at that time in the past.

She fell for an older man who doesn't want to continue the relationship. Read between the lines and think like you're stoned in a swirly dress.

She's now his lover, and they are having some sort of emotional moment where they both want each other but he thinks it's not right. She had to stay the night for emotional reasons. He wanted her to go because it would just be harder to say goodbye in the morning.

She looks at this lover and sees a child, and sees the child in herself that wants to grow up and have a mature love, but it can't happen because the lover won't let it. The lover has evidently made some comment about her being too young, or the basical incompatibility of their ages, to bring on the response "I'm not a child" in the last part.

That is what it seems to say to me, knowing her trippy mindset.

― Orbit (Orbit), Monday, 6 June 2005 03:07 (twenty years ago)

Thanks, I like your reading and it seems to hang together. thanks also to ILM for those clarifying illustrations from the Star Wars films- I think the Stevie Nicks = Carrie Fisher continuum has a lot going for it.

― Drew Daniel (Drew Daniel), Monday, 6 June 2005 04:54 (twenty years ago)

thank god this record is so damn pretty, because the lyrics don't really withstand scrutiny.

― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Monday, 6 June 2005 07:44 (twenty years ago)

I don't think the song's about paedophilia, no.

― Marcello Carlin (nostudium), Monday, 6 June 2005 07:45 (twenty years ago)

Separated at birth?

http://wwwse.fhs-hagenberg.ac.at/se/projekte/2001/2505/contents/pics/ewok.gif

http://www.borderlandnews.com/photogalleries/fleetwoodmac/fleetwoodmac6.jpg

― The Mad Puffin, Monday, 6 June 2005 12:55 (twenty years ago)

The Stevie songs I love either tend to be these lushly produced soundscapes with her wailing atop ("Sara," "Storms,' "Gold Dust Woman") or schlocked-up, synthed-up quasi-New Wave like "Stand Back" or "Seven Wonders."

― Alfred Soto (Alfred Soto), Monday, 6 June 2005 12:59 (twenty years ago)

"Beautiful Child" and "Sarah" both allude to Nick's unhappy, drug-fueled relationship (and the aborted child that came of it) with Mick Fleetwood at the time. Both are also incoherent in a way that songs about unhappy drug-fueled relationships usually are.

― Colin Meeder (Mert), Monday, 6 June 2005 13:15 (twenty years ago)

Whoa?!
Stevie had a relationship with Mick Fleetwood?

Did he talk about that in his autobiography?

― Brooker Buckingham (Brooker B), Monday, 6 June 2005 13:30 (twenty years ago)

"Stevie had a relationship with Mick Fleetwood?"

Oh yeah – this is fairly common knowledge. It began during the "Rumours" toor, I think.

― Alfred Soto (Alfred Soto), Monday, 6 June 2005 13:33 (twenty years ago)

the way I have it (if you can ever have a song that's so elusively for any amount of time, really) I think there's only the one narrator, a woman, who like most women was once a child, ten years old even, and that a man fell in love with her, there are all kinds of love in the world of course and it'd be silly to say or think differently, she has grown up now as a lot of women do, into someone wiser, they're called adults, and this draw or desire has been re-awoken or re-found I dunno but it has definitely came to light again ("the years disappeared... I have to stay".) (incidentally the line that ends tht stanza - "I had to stay" - flipping the tense like a switch is some powerful bittersweet self-convincing rationalisation.) ... the first half of the song is so conflicted: she recognises she loves him in some sense, or is drawn to him ("beautiful child, beautiful child") but that maybe not that she shouldn't be but that she doesn't want to be or won't be just won't be (though she does uh 'give in') ("and I am a fool once more"; "I bite my lip..."). there's two children in the song of course: the ten year old (who doesn't really figure all that much beyond being a narrative left-hand bookend) (left-hand, if we assume we're reading left-to-right) (switch to taste) and the man, who is a child in the girls judgement, or, to be less loaded, assessment, only. remember: she's now uh-huh 'wiser' and older and his love I'm not sure is sexual. the second half is yup probably nicks' conflict-resolution reaching for the sublime: she's can't do this, it doesn't make sense any more, she's not a child, and he is, she'll reach for the stars.

it's a great song, unbelievably pretty.

― cozen (Cozen), Monday, 20 June 2005 09:25 (twenty years ago)

I mean, that's what I think

― cozen (Cozen), Monday, 20 June 2005 09:26 (twenty years ago)

Err..?

― Die Emanzipation von Baaderonixx (redukt) (Fabfunk), Monday, 20 June 2005 09:29 (twenty years ago)

what a song, basically.

― cozen (Cozen), Wednesday, 22 June 2005 21:06 (twenty years ago)

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