The Fleetwood Mac album Stevie Nicks compared to “being a hostage in Iran”
When discussing musical legends today, it’s often through a lens of comfortable appreciation or acknowledgement of the challenges they encountered. However, many of these seem to be manifestations of the past, or pieces to the puzzle that formed the makeup of their being—old musings about the darkness that once threatened to dismantle the light. Stevie Nicks is no exception.
It’s easy to claim a musician has lived a thousand lives, but with Nicks, this seems particularly true. Before joining Fleetwood Mac, Nicks had a thorough understanding of all the difficulties musicians face to make it, her only means of knowing the potential pitfalls of a life of uncertainty emerging from the fact that she had been through it long before she even got started.
However, despite the richness of Nicks’ story back then, she had yet to grow through the persistent hurdles the industry would toss her way, from relationship breakdowns and financial uncertainty to fighting to have her voice heard. After all, being a woman in rock wasn’t always the easiest venture, especially at the juncture she found herself in when Fleetwood Mac suddenly gained a lot more traction than she initially bargained for.
And while she had suffered and survived several hardships by the time Rumours was in action, nothing could have prepared her for the intensity of working alongside a group constantly darting between varying struggles, as well as her own, all while channeling each of these pinpricks into the music itself like some unsuspecting, though all-knowing, lifeblood.
It’s easy to view the countless stories as symptoms of the mythologisation of Fleetwood Mac and Rumours, but the hardships here seem meticulous and genuine, especially when it came to Nicks’ convoluted relationship with Lindsey Buckingham. The pair’s mutual respect never wavered, but the hot and cold also served them well, dredging up some of the best songs in music, including ‘Dreams’ and ‘Go Your Own Way’.
However, the anguish was palpable, too, reaching a point of breakability, even beyond the perceived creative productivity it seemed to benefit in the first place. According to Nicks, this feeling became most prominent on songs like ‘Second Hand News’, even though it persisted throughout the entirety of the sessions. In Nicks’ view, the song platformed the band’s shared desire to call it a day, reflected in its darker lyrics.
“We were all trying to break up and when you break up with someone you don’t want to see him,” she is quoted in Seventies Rock: The Decade of Creative Chaos. Continuing, “You especially don’t want to eat breakfast with him the next morning, see him all day and all night, and all day the day after.” On creating Rumours in general, she said: “It lasted thirteen months and it took every bit of inner strength we had. It was very hard on us, like being a hostage in Iran, and to an extent, Lindsay was the Ayatollah.”
While this isn’t exactly a surprise, it speaks to the sheer explosiveness of a record like Rumours that Nicks would echo such descriptions with the same feverish anguish—recalling every push and pull it took to finish it amid the chaos. Rumours is defined by its own flames, but there’s also something about the raw authenticity of it that makes it feel more distant and timeless, as if its roots continue to twist and with time, though never free from their own frayed edges.
