Here's what Stevie said in 1989. I understood why she took the dogs, her tapes and her writings, but I'm not sure about the blanket. Still, if there's really a fire and you're stranded outside, you're going to need something to keep you warm. BTW, if the house really had been on fire, she'd have been dead a long time ago, while she ran around the bathroom 15 times trying to decide. The smoke would have gotten her, long before the flames made their way upstairs.
She was talking about Fire Burning:
"The original inspiration for this was when I lived in a house on Doheny and my garage caught fire because somebody else's house caught fire down the street and a cinder hit my garage. And I woke up because I heard all this noise. And I looked out my front window and there's, like, 50 firemen running up my driveway and I thought, well, 'what is this for?'
And I ran around to all the windows and finally I got to the back of the house. And I looked out and the entire garage was, like, 50 feet of burning flames. And I ran around to the bathroom about fifteen different times, saying 'what can I take? What should I take?'
So what I took was the dog, the blanket, all my writings and tapes, my jewelry. And I thought, you know, the stairs may be on fire. But she'll get down, she said. I'll get out, I'm not burning up in this house. So that's where the whole beginning and idea of this song came from, was 'what can I take and still survive the fire' or how much time can I spend to decide and not be burned up on the second story?
It's frightening, to see flames that high and know that at any point those flames could hit your house and I didn't know whether the bottom story was on fire already or not. But it was very hard for me because I thought, 'what do I take out of this room?' I did! I ran around in circles three times, four times, five times, and I said, 'I'll take the dog, cashmere blanket, all my tapes, and my writing.' Everything else can be, doesn't matter, material things, at this point, don't matter."
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