Stevie Nicks wasn’t lying when she said that her life at 28 was better than average. The singer was living in sunny southern California with her romantic and musical partner, Lindsey Buckingham, when a British blues band by the name of Fleetwood Mac asked them to join their group. Nicks and Buckingham’s decision to say yes would change their lives—and rock ‘n’ roll in general—forever.
In a 2020 interview from her Los Angeles home, Nicks recalled what life looked like in her 28th year, and it’s every bit as glamorous as you’d imagine. She even got to have her own Pretty Woman moment, although she didn’t know it at the time. (The rom-com with the famous boutique scene wouldn’t come out until 15 years later.)
Stevie Nicks Had a Life at 28 Most of Us Would Dream of at Any Age
During the height of the pandemic in November 2020, Stevie Nicks participated in Bustle’s 28 Q&A series, in which the online magazine interviewed iconic women about what their lives looked like at 28 years old. The Fleetwood Mac frontwoman used a landline to speak with journalist Samantha Leach from her Los Angeles home, a conversation Nicks prefaced with, “I probably have the best 28 story of anybody that you will interview.” And as far as we’re concerned, she was right.
Nicks was months away from being 27 years old when she and her partner, Lindsey Buckingham, received an invitation from Fleetwood Mac to have dinner with them at a Mexican joint in Hollywood. Nicks and Buckingham had been cutting their teeth for a while, and that included the odd cleaning and waitressing jobs Nicks took on to make ends meet when music wasn’t paying the bills. Saying yes to joining Fleetwood Mac was an easy decision for the two young musicians. Their last album as a folk-rock duo flopped, and this offer honestly couldn’t have come at a better time.
And frankly, neither could Nicks and Buckingham. Their inclusion skyrocketed the now-British-American band’s success into the mainstream with the release of their eponymous 1975 album. Nicks’ otherworldly, ethereal flavor on tracks like “Rhiannon” and Buckingham’s West Coast-tinged folk-rock offerings like “Monday Morning” helped establish a new sound for the band that would only continue to mature on the career-defining album they released the following year, Rumours.
Victorian Photoshoots, ‘Pretty Woman’ Moments, and More
As Fleetwood Mac singer Stevie Nicks told Bustle in 2020, “There was nothing not fun about being a rock star.” The singer recalled dressing up in ornate period pieces from the 1900s and 1920s just because “it was like playing dress-up.” Other days, she’d hop on a plane and fly somewhere with a “fantastic hotel,” hole up in her suite with a “nice living room and hopefully a fireplace,” and write and watch television.
In the months leading up to her gaining international celebrity, Nicks even got to have a Pretty Woman moment 15 years before the rom-com with Julia Roberts and Richard Gere came out. You know the scene: after being laughed off by snobby boutique workers, Roberts’ character comes back in far nicer clothes and asks the judgmental women if they work on commission. “Big mistake. Huge.” That scene.
One day, while walking down Sunset Boulevard, Nicks and her posse walked past a Jaguar dealership when a red Jaguar caught Nicks’ eye. When the group walked into the car dealership, the salesperson accused Nicks of not being able to afford the car. “In our world, we were dressed really beautifully,” Nicks said. “But in the people that owned the Jaguar store’s world, we looked like hookers or cultish hippies.”
Nicks recalled her designer, Margi Kent, quickly retorting, “You don’t know who she is right now. But you’re going to know who she is really soon, and she could buy every car in this entire building. She wants that Jaguar, and she wants it now.”
“And I got it,” Nicks added.
That she did: the Jaguar, the clothes, the lifestyle, the stardom, the rock ‘n’ roll royalty status. Nicks got it all, and she managed to snag it before her 30th birthday.
Photo By Rick Diamond/Getty Images