The song Stevie Nicks wrote for Waylon Jennings

On their 1981 duet album, Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter sidelined their usual devotion to outlaw coun

Btry to give way to more love songs, an ode to their marriage. When they sought an outsider to write the record’s eponymous track, ‘Leather and Lace’, there seemed no better choice than Fleetwood Mac frontwoman Stevie Nicks.

There are few songwriters more experienced in turning the pains, problems and pleasures of relationships into musical masterpieces. On Fleetwood Mac’s magnum opus, Rumours, Nicks had demonstrated her flair for writing about – albeit failing – relationships and marriages. Accordingly, Jennings approached Nicks and asked her to pen a track for the duo to sing together.

Writing what she knew, Nicks stated in the liner notes for TimeSpace that she “worked very hard trying to explain what it was like to be in love with someone in the same business, and how to approach dealing with each other.” This was undoubtedly a topic she had approached many times before – her turbulent relationship with Fleetwood Mac bandmate Lindsey Buckingham had provided a constant source of songwriting inspiration.

According to Nicks, balancing love and business is “the hardest thing in the world to do because it falls out of your hands and into the hands of the world, which tends to want you to not be able to handle it.” She certainly channelled that difficulty into the lyrics for ‘Leather and Lace’, which opens with the words, “Is love so fragile and the heart so hollow?”

Nicks wrote the track alongside Eagles founder and her partner at the time, Don Henley, noting that he was “pretty much responsible for it”.

“He came over every day and told me to either start over, or that I was on the right track, and he made me finish it (because I almost gave up many times),” she explained.

After the two musicians finished writing the track, they recorded a demo together, but by the time it reached Jennings and Colter, they were breaking up. Upon finding out that Jennings wanted to sing the song alone, Nicks was far too attached to the song as a duet.

“After all the work I had put into the philosophy of two people dealing with this problem, I told Waylon that only four people in the world could sing this song: he and his wife, or myself and Don Henley,” she stated. The song was not included on the duet album, and instead, Nicks featured it as a duet with Henley on her solo debut album, Bella Donna.

“As fate would have it,” she reminisced, “It became one of the most special love songs that I would ever write… and remains that, even today, after all these years. All in all, it was an unforgettable experience, as was he. Blame it on my wild heart.”