The 1977 song that reminds Lindsay Buckingham of Stevie Nicks: “The essence of what we could be”
For a time, Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham were inseparable. A
fter fruitlessly attempting to achieve mainstream success for many years, together, they would eventually achieve their dream and take on the world following their decision to join Fleetwood Mac. With the creative triumph, heartache, fame and all the other pitfalls that followed them around, Buckingham and Nicks are still tied together, despite no longer being on speaking terms.
Buckingham and Nicks started to get to know one another when they were music-obsessed college students. Immediately, they bonded over their love of the arts and started to hatch plans to start making songs together. Their first venture was in the band Fritz, which Nicks was invited to join, and on a local level, they enjoyed relative success.
While Fritz supported a number of recognisable artists, including the great Jimi Hendrix, Buckingham and Nicks decided to break off from the band in order to begin their own project together after moving to Los Angeles. They formed the appropriately named duo Buckingham & Nicks and secured a major label deal with Polydor Records in 1973. However, their album flopped, and Polydor dropped them as an act.
Before the opportunity arose to join Fleetwood Mac, the two musicians almost parted ways romantically and professionally. It was a lifeline that changed their lives and took them to unexpected heights.
What made Buckingham and Nicks such a compelling creative partnership was the tension between their contrasting artistic instincts. Nicks brought emotional vulnerability, mysticism and instinctive lyricism, while Buckingham obsessed over arrangements, production details and sonic architecture.
Together, they created a balance that became central to Fleetwood Mac’s most celebrated work, particularly on Rumours, where heartbreak and collaboration existed side by side.
That emotional push-and-pull ultimately gave the band its defining edge. Songs like ‘Dreams’, ‘Go Your Own Way’ and ‘Silver Springs’ weren’t simply inspired by personal conflict — they actively documented it in real time. Few bands have managed to channel romantic collapse into music so successfully, which is part of the reason Fleetwood Mac’s catalogue continues to resonate decades later. Even after years of public feuds and fractured relationships, the chemistry between Buckingham and Nicks remains inseparable from the magic of the band itself.
Although Nicks gave her bandmates an ultimatum in 2018 on whether to keep her or Buckingham, it wasn’t always as toxic. For Buckingham, whenever he listens to ‘Dreams’, he’s reminded of happier days with his former soulmate, which transports him back to a special time.
He explained to Vulture: “There are a lot of reasons for that. Obviously, it was written about me. So there is that. [Laughs.] We were all writing about each other on Rumours, but that song also represents a sort of quintessential marriage of what Stevie brought to the table and what I brought to the table for her. I brought it to the table for Christine McVie too and for myself, but Stevie, in particular, needed it more. That was the architecture around the song.”
Buckingham continued: “So, that reminds me of her, but it also reminds me of us as a musical force together. It speaks to the quintessential essence of what we could be together, in terms of her and me coming together and adding our own things to make something greater than the sum of its parts.”
Poignantly, for Buckingham, the song reminds him of 1976 and a turbulent time in their relationship when their break-up seemed inevitable, but they still had immense love for one another. The guitarist recounted that he “was watching her move away from me” and said ‘Dreams’ is “the embodiment of that whole thing I had to deal with in the aftermath, which was to choose to do the right thing for her on a professional and human level”.
Despite their relationship burning out, Buckingham and Nicks had to work together daily, which only increased the tension between them. However, the dying embers of their relationship proved to be fertile ground for songwriting, as ‘Dreams’ proves.
