Nutation has been recognized as of great significance for spintronics; but justifying its presence has proven to be a hard problem, since overdamping has long been assumed to wash out its effects. In this paper we show that nutation can be understood as emerging from a systematic expansion of a kernel that describes the history of the interaction of a magnetic moment with a bath of colored noise. The parameter of the expansion is the ratio of the colored noise timescale to the precession period. In the process we obtain the Gilbert damping from the same expansion. We recover the known results, when the coefficients of the two terms are proportional to one another, in the white noise limit; and show how colored noise leads to situations where this simple relation breaks down, but what replaces it can be understood by the appropriate generalization of the fluctuation–dissipation theorem. Numerical simulations of the stochastic equations support the analytic approach. In particular we find that the equilibration time is about an order of magnitude longer than the timescale set by the colored noise for a wide range of values of the latter and we can identify the presence of nutation in the non-uniform way the magnetization approaches equilibrium.