“Trashy sound”: The bitter song Lindsey Buckingham wrote about Stevie Nicks
The stormy relationship between Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks spawned both heartbreak and hits in equal measure.
Buckingham and Nicks met while at high school in Palo Alto, playing together in a psych-folk band called Fritz. The two remained friends after the band’s disbandment, and eventually, a romance blossomed. Together, they began a new musical project under the name Buckingham Nicks in the early 1970s, securing a recording contract with Polydor.
Despite initial optimism, the duo’s first album was a commercial failure leading the label to drop them, but the silver lining arrived as Mick Fleetwood stumbled across the project. After meeting with him, guitarist Buckingham agreed to join Fleetwood Mac on the premise that vocalist Nicks was also included. The couple went on to write some of the band’s most celebrated songs, often about each other.
Rumours, Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 album, has often been recognised as their magnum opus and the ultimate breakup album. The record was written during a particularly tumultuous time for the band – Buckingham and Nicks were in the midst of a breakup, while Christine McVie and John McVie were going through a divorce. Fleetwood was also enduring marriage troubles.
What made Rumours so compelling was how little distance there was between the band’s personal lives and their music. Instead of masking their emotions, each member leaned into the chaos surrounding them, using songwriting as a way to process everything in real time. That immediacy gave the album a raw honesty that few records have managed to replicate.
It also set a precedent for how the band would operate moving forward. Once those boundaries had been crossed, there was no real way to separate their relationships from their art again. Every argument, breakup and reconciliation became potential material, blurring the line between private conflict and public performance.
The record became the soundtrack to the band’s collective heartbreak. But Fleetwood Mac’s use of music to express their emotions and frustrations towards each other didn’t stop at Rumours. Two years later, Fleetwood Mac released Tusk, which included a bitter song Lindsey Buckingham wrote about Stevie Nicks.
Featuring on the second side of the double album, ‘What Makes You Think You’re the One?’ is an angry song that bluntly tells Buckingham’s ex-lover that he doesn’t care about her anymore. With thumping drums and gruff vocals, it’s a scathingly bitter track, letting Nicks know that Buckingham is no longer willing to answer her calls or catch her when she falls. It’s a bold statement to make to a bandmate he still had to perform alongside.
The lyrics claim detachment from the situation, declaring, “What makes you think I’m the one who will love you forever? Everything you do has been done and it won’t last forever”. But the anger in Buckingham’s vocals gives him away, working against his feigned declaration of indifference.
The track was written by Buckingham alone, but he recorded it with drummer Mick Fleetwood. The two worked together to create the pounding percussion that only enhanced the song’s bitterness. Buckingham recalled the process in Uncut, sharing, “That was just me and Mick, and we were really looking to get some kind of crazy drum sound.”
He continued, “That was back in the day when everybody had boomboxes, and we had an old cassette player with these really crappy mics. But you could record on it, and the system had built-in compressors, and we took the output. We put that right in front of the drums, and I think we put another one overhead, too, as opposed to mic’ing the whole thing as you usually do. And we ran that cassette player into the console and it just made this really explosive, trashy sound.”
That explosive, trashy drum sound reflected the band’s explosive inner workings at the time. Still, Buckingham and Nicks managed to work together for almost another decade until the friction became too much for Buckingham in 1987, causing him to exit the band. Since then, the band’s pioneering rock music has often been associated with the dysfunctional relationships that inspired it. Few other bands have had their personal lives publicised in the same way, forming an essential part of their legacy.
Listen to the bitter song Lindsey Buckingham wrote about Stevie Nicks below.
