(Credits: Far Out / Klaus Hiltscher)
Sat 17 January 2026 20:50, UK
The art behind every great Stevie Nicks song didn’t have anything to do with being perfect.
A lot of her greatest tunes had a moody spirit before they had even been recorded, and it was only a matter of her and her band playing the song in the studio and capturing a feeling rather than trying to nail everything down a million times. It was all about the way that the final take made everyone feel, but that wasn’t always the way that Lindsey Buckingham operated when putting together all of Fleetwood Mac’s greatest tunes.
As much as Nicks and Buckingham were perfect foils for each other, that didn’t always make for the greatest recording sessions. Even when working on some of their comeback songs on The Dance and even Say You Will, Nicks remembered that there were a lot of times where she would see Buckingham trying to tweak the vision of what she wanted her songs to be, half the time. It’s not exactly right, but honestly, telling Buckingham not to focus on those things is like asking a dog to politely wait on the stoop as the mailman goes by: it’s not impossible, but it’s insanely hard.
For years, Buckingham had spent time trying to uncover the details of his favourite tunes, and while that made for some fantastic tracks, it was in direct opposition to what Nicks wanted half the time. She liked the idea of making the best kind of song she could with the set of tools that she had, but sometimes even the greatest partnerships need some space, especially when their comeback tour in the 2000s wrapped up.
While no one was necessarily on bad terms, Nicks had been looking to make more music on her own ever since coming back on Trouble in Shangrila. Everything was poised to be great when releasing some of her old tunes, but Dave Stewart was the perfect foil to her when she started writing songs. He was often her translator when it came time to put chords to what she was doing, but there was something missing when working on the song ‘Soldier’s Angel’.
The song is already one of the heavier tunes that Nicks has ever made, but when approaching a guitar part like that, she was going to need more than a simple session player picking their way through it. This demanded Buckingham’s involvement, and while the guitarist knew that he was working on Nicks’s record, he managed to sprinkle in some of that magic that most people had missed since the days of Say You Will.
And despite having a touch-and-go relationship with her bandmate at the time, Nicks felt that Buckingham was the only person to do that song justice, saying, “I had done a really good demo of it and we had tried to cut it as a band, and we just couldn’t do it. And I finally said, ‘We need to call Lindsey. Lindsey is the only person who is going to be able to make this.’ And he did. I think that Lindsey and I are more Buckingham/Nicks than we have been since 1973.”
For all the things that could have gone wrong, though, this is the perfect combination of Buckingham Nicks that everyone loved from the first time they heard ‘Landslide’. The subject matter is a lot more heavy than what Nicks was used to, but when hearing Buckingham’s guitar coming in, he can send chills running down your spine in a way that even Stewart wouldn’t have been able to do back in the day.
Nicks has said time and time again that she owes a lot to Tom Petty for helping her rediscover herself, but this song is what helped remind everyone of what she and Buckingham could sound like together. It’s not the most comfortable relationship, and it can go into some strange places, but when they get together to sing, it often feels like the world is able to come to a complete stop for a few seconds.
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