Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham announced on Wednesday that their 1973 album Buckingham Nicks will be reissued for the first time since the 1980s. The album will be released across all platforms on Sept. 19.
Buckingham Nicks was the duo’s only album release before they joined Fleetwood Mac in 1975. As of reporting, the single “Crying in the Night” from the remastered album is already available to stream on Spotify and Apple Music.
“It stands up in a way you would hope it would, by these two kids who were pretty young to be doing that work,” Buckingham said about the album.
On Monday, fans got excited after a billboard showcasing the Buckingham Nicks album cover appeared on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, less than two weeks after Fleetwood Mac celebrated its 50th anniversary.
To reissue an album is a process that adjusts the sound and quality of older music for modern platforms. Rhino, the album catalogue division under Warner Music Group, says the reissued music was sourced from the original analog tapes and will now be available for fans to listen to digitally and on CDs for the first time, the Associated Press reported. Rhino is also releasing 5,000 vinyl copies and 2,000 special edition vinyl copies, which will include replica 7-inch vinyl singles for three of the songs.
The announcement also comes a few days after Nicks and Buckingham posted lyrics from “Frozen Love” off the Buckingham Nicks album on their social media accounts.
The posts prompted speculation that some sort of collaboration might be in the works, which came as something of a surprise for fans familiar with the pair’s tumultuous romantic history.
In an October 2024 interview with Rolling Stone, Nicks said the last time she spoke to Buckingham was at Fleetwood Mac member Christine McVie’s funeral in 2022. Nicks said the conversation lasted “about three minutes.”
“I dealt with Lindsey for as long as I could,” Nicks told the magazine. “You could not say that I did not give him more than 300 million chances.”
In anticipation of the upcoming Buckingham Nicks reissue, here’s a look back at the 57-year relationship between the two singers.
Nicks’s and Buckingham’s relationship history: Before, during and after Fleetwood Mac
Nicks and Buckingham first met in high school in 1968 in Northern California, when the pair were in a psychedelic rock band called Fritz with some of their classmates. Fritz broke up in 1972, after years of opening for performers like Ike and Tina Turner, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, and Nicks and Buckingham decided to move to Los Angeles together to continue pursuing music careers.
While in L.A., they started dating and, in 1972, released their joint album, Buckingham Nicks. According to Nicks, it was about a year later, around 1973, that their relationship started to face some hurdles.
“When we moved [to Los Angeles], it was lonely. I didn’t have any girlfriends. And I was the one who worked,” Nicks said in a September 2014 interview with Billboard. “I had to be a waitress, and a cleaning lady, in order to support us.”
In December 1974, the couple officially joined Fleetwood Mac. Nicks told the New Yorker in 2022 that the two had thought about breaking up before joining the band, but once Fleetwood Mac was in the picture, she wanted to save the relationship.
“We’d only been in Fleetwood Mac for a year and a half, and we were breaking up when we joined Fleetwood Mac,” Nicks told the New Yorker. “So we just put our relationship kind of back together, because I was smart enough to know that, if we had broken up the second month of being in Fleetwood Mac, it would have blown the whole thing.”
From left, John McVie, Christine McVie, Stevie Nicks, Mick Fleetwood and Lindsey Buckingham pose for a Fleetwood Mac portrait in 1975. (Michael Ochs/Getty Images)
The couple stayed together until 1976, which is when the relationship “blew up,” as Nicks described in her Billboard interview.
The breakup happened right as Fleetwood Mac was recording their second album, Rumours, for which Nicks wrote the song “Silver Springs” about their relationship. Before the album came out in early 1977, band members Mick Fleetwood and Buckingham told Nicks the song wouldn’t be on the main track list but on the B-side of the album. (Meanwhile, Buckingham’s song about his own breakup with Nicks, “Go Your Own Way,” was featured on the album.)
In 1990, Nicks left the band due to frustration over fighting over the rights to “Silver Springs,” according to Rolling Stone.
Seven years later, Fleetwood Mac would reunite for the live album, The Dance, where “Silver Springs” was featured on the main track list and would later earn a Grammy nomination. Even though it had been over a decade since they broke up, Nicks would sing “Silver Springs” directly to Buckingham on stage during The Dance tour in 1997, rather than to the audience. (Nearly 30 years later, clips showing Nicks’s “Silver Springs” performance went viral on TikTok, and Buckingham even acknowledged them with his own video.)
The last public fight between the couple was in 2018 when Buckingham was kicked out of Fleetwood Mac. The reasoning seemed ambiguous until Buckingham did a September 2021 interview with People magazine and said, “Stevie basically gave the band an ultimatum that I either had to go or she would go.”
Nicks denied Buckingham’s claims and told People, “I did not demand he be fired. Frankly, I fired myself. I proactively removed myself from the band, a situation I considered to be toxic to my well-being.”