Stevie Nicks on Mick Fleetwood: “Definitely one of my great, great loves”
For Stevie Nicks, love and art have always been inseparably linked. She created some of her finest music alongside her best friend, Christine McVie, and their deep bond and mutual trust shaped the band’s live performances and recordings.
Much of her discography, however, was also crafted in collaboration with men she loved—relationships that not only inspired her lyrics but also served as creative catalysts, driving her artistry forward with their direct contributions in the studio. Yet, one man in particular stands out in Nicks’ memory as her greatest love.
Immediately, the mind goes to Lindsey Buckingham. Without Buckingham, the world may never have known Nicks. But especially, without the love between the two musicians, the world would never have heard Fleetwood Mac in their most celebrated form with the couple in the lineup. After meeting way back in high school, the pair took on the music world today, first as a duo called Buckingham Nicks and then as part of the band, where they demanded to be accepted into the fold together as a package deal.
Not only did they work together on so much of Fleetwood Mac’s music and their songs as a duo, but their love, or really the end of their love, gave the band some of the biggest songs like ‘Dreams’ or ‘Go Your Own Way’ as they processed their heartbreak in real-time in the music. In the history of Fleetwood Mac, there’s no doubt that the tumultuous romance and split between Buckingham and Nicks is an essential puzzle piece to their story.
But in the history of Stevie Nicks, it’s a different man she looks to as the essential puzzle piece to her heart. In the line of musical men that the musician has loved and worked with, including Don Henley, JD Souther, Jimmy Iovine and more, it’s her other Fleetwood Mac band member, Mick Fleetwood, who stands out as her great love.
“Mick is definitely one of my great, great loves,” she said, decades on from their brief trieste in 1978. But while the romance was short, perhaps the measure of a great love lies in its drama or possibly even in its destruction. Like Romeo and Juliet or Bonnie and Clyde, Nicks and Fleetwood certainly fit the bill for a wild and tragic affair that causes some real personal carnage.
After the band had barely survived the split of Nicks and Buckingham or the McVie’s, the revelation of Nicks and Fleetwood’s affair was chaotic, to say the least. “Never in a million years could you have told me that would happen. That was the biggest surprise,” Nicks recalled of how the pair wound up falling into each other’s arms.
It was already a bad situation given the fragile tensions in the group at the time and the sheer amount of drugs they were all taking, but add on top of that, the matter of Fleetwood’s family, and it was a recipe for disaster. “That really wasn’t good for anybody,” Nicks said as a true understatement. “Everybody was angry, because Mick was married to a wonderful girl and had two wonderful children. I was horrified. I loved these people. I loved his family. So it couldn’t possibly work out. And it didn’t. It just couldn’t.”
However, there is no inspiration quite like a dark and twisted love affair. Off the back of their brief fling, Nicks wrote ‘Beauty and the Beast’ for her second solo album, The Wild Heart. “My love is a man who’s not been tamed,” she sings on the song, crooning, “Oh, my love lives in a world of false pleasure and pain.” Taking inspiration from the classic fairytale that gives the song its name, unlike in the Disney flick, Nicks always knew that their love would not have a happily ever after, stating simply, “Mick and I could never be.”
