Stevie Nicks wrote "Gypsy" at a time when Fleetwood Mac exploded in popularity and she longed for a simpler time. She explains in a March 31, 2009 interview with Entertainment Weekly:
"Oh boy, I've never really spoken about this, so I get verklempt, and then I've got the story and I start to screw it up. Okay: In the old days, before Fleetwood Mac, Lindsey [Buckingham] and I had no money, so we had a king-size mattress, but we just had it on the floor. I had old vintage coverlets on it, and even though we had no money it was still really pretty... Just that and a lamp on the floor, and that was it—there was a certain calmness about it. To this day, when I'm feeling cluttered, I will take my mattress off of my beautiful bed, wherever that may be, and put it outside my bedroom, with a table and a little lamp. That's the words: 'So I'm back to the velvet underground'—which is a clothing store in downtown San Francisco, where Janis Joplin got her clothes, and Grace Slick from Jefferson Airplane, it was this little hole in the wall, amazing, beautiful stuff—'back to the floor that I love, to a room with some lace and paper flowers, back to the gypsy that I was.' So that's what 'Gypsy' means: it's just a search for before this all happened. And later, I tacked on a line for my friend Robin, my best friend, who died of leukemia: 'I still see your bright eyes.' But then, Robin wasn't sick yet. She got cancer, and died within a year."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soioqrYorq4
