(Credits: Far Out / Polydor)
Tue 7 October 2025 21:30, UK
It would be hard for anyone like Lindsey Buckingham to go back to the “good” old days of Fleetwood Mac.
There has to be a lot of fondness for when the tracks came out perfectly, but since he was working out his differences with Stevie Nicks in real time whenever he walked into the studio, there were also some bittersweet feelings tied up in every track. But even if their history was complicated, he was professional enough to realise that their music was going to outlive any of their unsavoury moments.
Because as much as they might have hated each other in between the takes of Rumours, it’s not like the music didn’t speak for itself. ‘Dreams’ would have a perfectly acceptable Stevie Nicks tune if she had released it on her own, but for a song all about trying to move on from a past relationship, the echo of Buckingham’s guitar almost feels like all of those pent-up emotions rising to the surface in between the verses.
The fact that the album worked was a miracle, but as soon as Tusk started, all of that magic started to slowly slip away. Buckingham simply didn’t want to help Nicks write her tunes, and since a lot of the tunes on Rumours were about them breaking down, it would have been hard for anyone to commit to completing a song that had nothing more to say other than that they were an asshole.
But after the band took a break to work on solo projects, Mirage at least felt a little bit more quaint. They all had time to recharge their batteries, and even if Bella Donna was the biggest runaway success of all of their solo records, Buckingham wasn’t going to let his resentment get in the way of anything. He had his way on Tusk, and it was time to remind everyone that there was a lot more to him than making avant-garde takes on pop music.
Although Tango in the Night did see them taking a lot more chances, Mirage might be a better transition record than an outright classic. There are definitely echoes of the old version of Fleetwood Mac in between the new keyboard sounds, but even with the 1980s effects, Nicks’s ‘Gypsy’ seems to exist outside of any trendy fashion. This was one of her most openly honest songs about losing her friend, and as much as Buckingham was in his own lane at this point, he knew a handful of his tunes were a cut above the rest.
Even when working in his own lane, Buckingham singled out ‘Gypsy’ as the perfect example of him and Nicks working together to create a perfect song, saying, “If you were to just pull the melody out from that without any of what’s going on beneath, it wouldn’t hang together. Without having the instrumental parts that allow the potential of what she’s doing to come out, it wouldn’t make it. So she needed that. Maybe that’s my favourite example of it [Stevie’s writing and my production] coming together.”
That kind of approach also worked beautifully when they wanted to pull out their hair one album later. ‘Little Lies’ might have been Christine McVie’s handiwork, but even for how fractured everyone’s relationships were at the time, the chorus wouldn’t have worked if Buckingham and Nicks’s backing vocals didn’t tie the tune together.
There are a few pieces of the backing track that do have some echoes of Brian Wilson’s production style, but this proved that Buckingham and Nicks really were the band’s Lennon and McCartney in many respects. McVie may have been the rock that kept everything moving and came up with timeless tunes, but sometimes it’s better to have that one artistic maverick and pop tunesmith under one roof.
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