(Credits: Far Out / Stevie Nicks)
Fri 28 November 2025 19:00, UK
A few major historical moments occurred in the world of music in the year 1966. Bob Dylan released Blonde on Blonde. John Lennon said The Beatles were more popular than Jesus. Pet Sounds changed the landscape forever. Stevie Nicks performed with Lindsey Buckingham for the first time.
They’d met at a school gathering when Nicks saw Buckingham playing ‘California Dreamin” and decided to join in, harmonising with him. The lifelong musical partnership between the pair wouldn’t officially begin, however, until a couple of years later, when Buckingham invited Nicks to be a part of Fritz and Nicks, equipped already with a love for music and thinking Buckingham was “darling”, agreed.
The tumultuous relationship between Nicks and Buckingham is one of the most iconic in music history, and, with the recent reissue of Buckingham Nicks, it seems the world has yet to loosen its grip on mythologising the entire story. The pair are woven into each other’s stories like threads from the same fabric, something close to what people would probably call destiny in spite of the uglier, more explosive moments they endured at the peak of fame.
This is, of course, with notable reference to Fleetwood Mac’s magnum opus, Rumours, which saw the pair airing their personal dirty laundry like pages from a diary come to life – no sugarcoating, no tricks, just raw emotion, bubbling up to the service and appearing in the magic of masterful rock ‘n’ roll. Each member of the band brought their own intensity to the table while recording the album, but Nicks and Buckingham pulled out all the stops – no matter how much it left their relationship in fragments all over the sound equipment.
Even better is that, whenever any of them discuss the record now, they know how much they chased and secured lightning in a bottle. Some of the songs on the record remain among their favourites in their discography, not only because they captured specific moments in time but because they embody the delicate balance between authenticity and artistic storytelling, blending the two in ways that will likely never be replicated ever again.
Whenever Nicks is asked her favourite Fleetwood Mac songs, it’s the usual suspects – ones that feel personal to her, including ‘Sara’, ‘Gypsy’, and ‘Landslide’. But there’s also poignancy in the fact that, when she was once asked her favourite Stevie Nicks song, she also opted for one she wrote for the Mac, also because of how personal it was to her, but because it demonstrated the different writing approaches between her and Buckingham.
“Probably my favourite Stevie Nicks song – that’s a hard question,” she told CHUM Radio in 2001. “But I would probably say that ‘Dreams’ is probably my favourite song. ‘Cause it’s the one that I always enjoy doing on stage, no matter what. It’s the song that never gets kicked out of the set. I wrote ‘Dreams’, Lindsey wrote ‘Go Your Own Way’. That was our two different reactions to the same thing that had happened.”
She added, “His was nasty and bitter, you know, ‘Packing up, shacking up’s all you wanna do.’ Which was totally not true. And you know, and I was like ‘When the rain washes you clean, you’ll know.’ That was the difference in Lindsey and my songs. I was trying to have the Indian philosophy about it, and you know, he was like downright angry.”
Their distinctive approaches to heartbreak and heartache are precisely why Rumours is such a dynamic and timeless listen. In every song, you can hear the strengths of each member and how they often worked against each other to make it all work, ultimately coming together in the end, no matter how much steam still occupied the room. Often, groups fall apart when things become too heated, but this was one case where it achieved the exact opposite.
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