The Fleetwood Mac album Stevie Nicks can’t stand: “The tour was very hard for me”
By the 2000s, Fleetwood Mac was basically done. Lindsey Buckingham hadn’t been in the group for a while, and with Stevie Nicks departing after Behind the Mask, Time was the result of one of rock’s longest-lasting bands seemingly going out with a sad whimper instead of a bang.
The classic lineup did have one more ace up their sleeve, though, but Stevie Nicks wasn’t all that satisfied going through Say You Will.
The album arrived carrying enormous expectations. It marked the first studio project from the band’s most famous lineup in years, giving listeners hope that Fleetwood Mac still had one final creative statement left to make.
Granted, it was going to take a miracle to get Nicks and Buckingham into the same room before they even thought about recording. Their physical fight was half the reason why the classic lineup didn’t work anymore, and if he hadn’t maintained some level of control, chances are everything would have been called off.
So, instead of thinking of it as a Fleetwood Mac album, Buckingham had most of the tunes squared away for what would become one of his solo records. Once producer Rob Cavallo got his hands on the tapes, he knew that this had the makings of a proper ‘Mac’ project, especially since he was recording a new version of ‘Bleed to Love Her’ that had turned up on their live album, The Dance.
Although there is a respectable comeback album somewhere in Say You Will, fans will have to go digging in there to find it. Despite being solid from top to bottom, its only crime is that it’s far too long, which might have been down to every member getting an equal billing on the final product.
Even Nicks was less than thrilled with the results, saying, “I didn’t like it all. I didn’t like making it; I didn’t like the songs, so the tour was very hard for me.” Then again, that might have been because a huge piece of the puzzle was missing from the road.
As opposed to every tour since the 1970s, this would be the first without Christine McVie on keyboards, which led to a huge hole in the setlist whenever the group played. It also probably didn’t help that Buckingham was getting fairly on the nose with some of his song choices at every show, including adding a song entitled ‘Come’ that Nicks wouldn’t even join him onstage for.
That kind of dissonance is also present on the record. Though Buckingham and Nicks’s songs work great on their own, seeing them next to each other and often back-to-back on the same album tends to feel a little disorienting, as if they made two separate records and decided to smush them together rather than cut the fat off the final cut.
The result is an album that contains plenty of strong material but struggles to establish a unified identity. Rather than sounding like a fully collaborative effort, it often resembles parallel solo projects sharing the same cover artwork.
Given the animosity that was still ongoing in the group, Nicks eventually figured that the group was better off without Buckingham, electing to let him go in the 2010s after one too many dramatic altercations. There’s a good chance that the former couple will be forever entwined in rock and roll history, but Say You Will was the last straw for Nicks in terms of trying to compromise with her old flame.
Despite its flaws, Say You Will remains a fascinating final chapter in the Buckingham-Nicks story. The album captures two gifted songwriters attempting to coexist creatively despite decades of unresolved history, making it as much a document of their relationship as it is a Fleetwood Mac record.
