The one musician Stevie Nicks called her “love for all time”
Anyone looking to become a rock star would probably think twice if they saw what Stevie Nicks went through.
The idea of playing to millions of people every single night might sound appealing for those with stars in their eyes, but there’s a chance that anyone who’s actually lived through wit ould have given it all up if they didn’t have to deal with the heartache and the physical toll that they put on their bodies over the years. Nicks had already dealt with the harshest realities of being in a band when she joined Fleetwood Mac, but there was always something that brought her back to music.
And that’s simply because she loved making music. No matter what hangups she was going through, she knew that having the right song in her arsenal was always going to make everything feel alright, whether that was when she was facing years of drug abuse or trying her best to hold everything together when she started dealing with songs that were written about her on Rumours.
I mean, think about it for a second. Most people who were being forced to play on songs all about them sleeping around would have probably quit after the first few hours in the studio, but Nicks was more than willing to let that go for the sake of the song. That didn’t stop her from getting into screaming matches with Lindsey Buckingham every time he said the wrong thing, but as soon as the red light came on, she was going to give it everything she had.
Because as much as she resented her ex for playing with her emotions, they were two halves of the same whole in many respects. Nicks would have never had the chance to jam with the band had Buckingham not asked the rest of the group if she could join, and even when working on some of her best tunes, it usually fell on Buckingham to help turn a song like ‘Dreams’ into one of the most moody tunes they ever made.
There was bound to be a lot of resentment there over the years, but Nicks felt that Buckingham understood her music in a way that very few people could, saying, “He is my love. My first love and my love for all time. But we can’t ever be together. He has a lovely wife, Kristen, who I really like, and they are expecting their third child. The way he is with his children just knocks me out. I look at him now and just go, Oh, Stevie, you made a mistake!”
That also explains why her solo music ended up sounding so different from what Fleetwood Mac were working on. While Buckingham can be known for being a bit of a perfectionist in the studio, hearing her work in her own space gave her a lot more room to jam whenever she worked on her own, whether that was finding the right tunes with Tom Petty or having Waddy Wachtel filling in the gaps where Buckingham couldn’t.
And it’s not like Buckingham didn’t have some real heart behind his mellower songs. People like to dwell on the animosity every single time they sing together, but he certainly has a reverence for her tunes whenever he kicks off the fingerpicking part in ‘Landslide’ or when they pulled out every single emotion in their body when they performed Nicks’s ‘Silver Springs’ on their comeback album The Dance.
Their lives have gone in much different directions ever since their breakup, but even if they have not played together in years, there’s always going to be that same sense of tension whenever they get back together. The romance wasn’t meant to last, but the reason why they came together in the first place was to put their emotions down on tape.
