(Credits: Far Out / Atlantic Catalog Group / Lindsey Buckingham)
Sun 10 August 2025 17:00, UK
For a long time, or really from the second Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham joined the band, Fleetwood Mac became a vehicle for the emotional turmoil playing out in their life.
The mics in their studio seemed to become the only place they could truly speak their mind, and for a long time, the recording booth was a romantic confessional.
When the band initially spotted Lindsey Buckingham and offered him a spot in the lineup, he said yes with one stipulation: they had to take his girlfriend too. But Nicks was always more than a girlfriend. In a romantic sense, she was Buckingham’s partner and closest confidant, and had been since they were kids who first met at high school.
“I loved him before he was a millionaire,” Nicks once said tenderly. “I loved him for all the right reasons.”
But beyond that, Nicks was more than just a girlfriend because she was also a fierce, creative talent in her own right. Already harnessing the hypnotic, mystic power that’s imbued in all her lyricism and performances, the demand that Fleetwood Mac had to take her too was absolutely no burden on the group, who then bagged two bright talents for the price of one.
The issue is that pretty soon after, the two split. To look at the situation optimistically, the tumult of that breakdown gave the band Rumours, an album powered and charged by the pain both of the band’s couples were going through. With songs like ‘Go Your Own Way’ and ‘Dreams’, the group were taking that anger and upset and turning it into cash and fame, levelling up their reputation on the back of the punching power of those pieces.
But on the flip side, or the more human side, the rapture of the breakups was deeply personal, deeply difficult and long-running. Sure, Rumours ended up great, but it wasn’t like the pain of the split ended the second that album was cut and released. Instead, the sharpest tracks Buckingham and Nicks wrote about one another came on the follow-up record, Tusk, when the situation was still delicate.
It seemed delicate in different ways, though, as both artists wrote very different tracks about each other. Similar to the battle of their Rumours songs, as Buckingham spat, “You can go your own way,” while Nicks crooned more poetically about the “stillness of remembering what you had,” their songs on Tusk traced the same divide between anger and tenderness.
On his side, Buckingham seemed to still be raging as he threw ‘What Makes You Think You’re the One?’ at Nicks. “What makes you think I’m the one / Who will love you forever?” he sings harshly, throwing out any suggestion the couple may previously have had that they were destined to be together, or any idea that they’d always find their way back somehow. Despite their years of devotion and their long history together, Buckingham was throwing it back in Nicks’ face, saying that if they were done, they were done.
On her side, Nicks’ ode to Buckingham was softer. “I still look up when you walk in the room,” she sings on ‘Angel’, doing exactly what he failed to do by honouring their long connection in a song about struggling to change how she sees her old love.
But as they drew their dividing lines and attempted to navigate the painful split, clearly both parties fell into the camp they needed to fall into, whether that be cruelty or kindness, harsh lyrical digs or tender poems.
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