The album Lindsey Buckingham said Stevie Nicks never wanted
A lot of the appeal around Fleetwood Mac around the time of Rumours usually came back to the dynamic between Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks.
Both of them wrote fantastic songs on their own, but since they were breaking up in the midst of the recording, there were just as many people interested in their music for the drama as they were for the massive choruses that they made together. There was no way that Nicks was going to walk away from the band for a second, but Buckingham did admit that she had some reservations about what her bandmates were putting out.
Granted, it’s not like Nicks didn’t have a small point. It’s one thing to put all of those personal hang-ups aside for the sake of the song, but if you were going to work one day trying to perfect a song that says how much of an emotional monster you are, there’s a good chance that you would want to walk out more than a few times as well.
It didn’t even stop there, either. There was already a lot of tension going into making the album Tusk, but the title track, being slang for genitalia, wasn’t what Nicks wanted to be identified with. She didn’t think that ‘The Mac’ needed to have songs that were overtly sexual, and while the band did end up feeling the same way when the album underperformed, it’s not like Buckingham didn’t have a good vision for what they wanted to do.
Each album with the classic lineup was another excuse to push themselves into new territory, and even when they started to become 1980s hitmakers, they could still turn that drama into gold on tunes like ‘Gypsy’ and ‘Everywhere’. But once they finally got the time to reunite after so long, Nicks did have more than a few hangups when it came time to get back in the studio with her old flame all over again.
She wasn’t ready to give up songs from her solo career, which explains why Say You Will ended up being as long-winded as it was. Since Christine McVie wasn’t there to play peacekeeper anymore, the whole project feels like two albums shoved together half the time. It does make for some interesting moments across its runtime, but when the band decided to welcome Christine back into the group, Buckingham was shocked to see that Nicks didn’t want to go back into the studio.
Putting out an EP only made people more desperate to hear new music, but the guitarist explained that the only reason why he cut a record with Christine was because Nicks couldn’t be bothered to work on any new songs, saying, “That effort to engage her was revamped again when Christine returned, because it was like, well, Christine’s back, maybe now Stevie will want to do this. Christine had a bunch of song ideas and I helped her with those, and we eventually went in the studio and cut those. And we were still hoping to make that a Fleetwood Mac album, and Stevie wouldn’t do it. That became the duet album that Christine and I did.”
To be fair to Nicks, it was going to be impossible for someone to juggle that big of a solo career and also Fleetwood Mac at the same time. And while it’s a shame that we never got to hear what Nicks could have added to a new Fleetwood Mac project, it was nice to hear Christine back in her element making the best tunes that she knew how with Buckingham’s ear for production.
Nicks might not have been around to enjoy the party, but Lindsey Buckingham Christine McVie did at least give everyone one last chance to hear the kind of genius that Christine could be before her passing. The door might still be open for Buckingham and Nicks to do something in the future, but there’s now always going to be something missing without that signature alto voice behind them.
