The songs Stevie Nicks wrote about Lindsey Buckingham
Decades on from their break-up, the turbulent romance between Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham remains one of rock history’s most highly publicised relationships. High school friends turned lovers and bandmates; they would channel their resulting heartache into some of Fleetwood Mac’s biggest hits, using their songwriting prowess to take sonic digs at one another while the world watched.
Though the band’s writing and recording processes were plagued by this relationship drama, particularly around making their 1977 magnum opus Rumours, Nicks and Buckingham never stopped admiring each other’s talent. “We were couples who couldn’t make it through,” Nicks once lamented in a conversation with The Daily Mail. “But, as musicians, we still respected each other – and we got some brilliant songs out of it.”
They certainly did get some brilliant songs out of it. While Buckingham penned the biting ‘Go Your Own Way’ about the famed frontwoman, Nicks infused her own songwriting with her feelings towards the guitarist, one of which would go on to sell over a million copies.
Following the release of ‘Go Your Own Way’ as the lead single from Rumours, Nicks retaliated with ‘Dreams’. A track just as lulling as its title suggests, the song finds the frontwoman contemplating her relationship with Buckingham, musing, “Listen carefully to the sound of your loneliness, like a heartbeat, drives you mad, in the stillness of remembering what you had.”
Comparing the difference between their writing in the wake of their relationship, Nicks once told Q, “It was the fairy and the gnome. I was trying to be all philosophical. And he was just mad”. Though ‘Dreams’ certainly has a philosophical quality, there are glimpses of anger in bitter lines like, “Players only love you when they’re playing.”
Despite their anger, the two put their differences aside and collaborated to bring the song together. “I remember the night I wrote ‘Dreams’,” Nicks recalled. “I walked in and handed a cassette of the song to Lindsey. It was a rough take, just me singing solo and playing piano. Even though he was mad with me at the time, Lindsey played it and then looked up at me and smiled. What was going on between us was sad.”
‘Dreams’ wasn’t the only song Nicks penned about Buckingham to feature on Rumours. ‘Silver Springs’ charted the frontwoman’s regrets and vows for vengeance, with damning lyrics like, “You’ll never get away from the sound of the woman that loves you.” It seems like a promise, a curse even, that Buckingham will be reminded of her wherever he goes, but Nicks was aware that this fate was also her own.
“It was me realising that Lindsey was going to haunt me for the rest of my life,” she once told Rolling Stone, “and he has”.
His haunting has extended far beyond Fleetwood Mac and into her solo catalogue decades later, spawning the Twilight-inspired track ‘Moonlight (A Vampire’s Dream)’ from her seventh album, In Your Dreams. In the lyrics, Nick blends her own relationship with Buckingham with the relationship between Bella and Edward from the Twilight series. “He loves her, but he loves his life alone as well,” she laments in the emotional song.
Decades on from Buckingham Nicks, from Rumours, from Fleetwood Mac’s heyday, Nicks and Buckingham still haunt one another in their songwriting and on the radio.
