“Loving you isn’t the right thing to do”: What happened between Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham?
Musical history is built on the back of iconic couples, with lovers providing the material for the world’s greatest love as well as heartbreak songs, but in the case of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, their situation was unique.
It was unique because when it came to their songs of love and loss, they were playing them to each other, from inside the same band.
Arguably, without the dramatic split of Buckingham and Nicks, Fleetwood Mac may never have become as successful as they did in the mid-1970s. The story of their love, and the tension of their split, is all over the band’s music. On Rumours, it fuelled the biggest and best-loved tracks, and so naturally, the public wanted to know more, and it still does.
When decades of fights, fall-outs, make-ups and tension followed, the interest in what happened between this rock and roll couple remains high. So many music fans would still pay millions in order to get the full gossip from the musicians themselves, or to see them sit down and hash it out, reality show style. But in the absence of that, or while we wait for whatever the next chapter might be, there is a lot of history to revisit.
Going through step by step, here is a definitive breakdown of the relationship between Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham.
Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham’s complex relationship:
1966: High school sweethearts
“I loved him before he was a millionaire,” Stevie Nicks once said, “We were two kids out of Menlo-Atherton High School, I loved him for all the right reasons”.
In the drama that was to follow, it’s easy to forget the simplicity and innocence of the start of Buckingham and Nicks’ connection. “I was a senior in high school, and Lindsey was a junior,” she recalled. It was as easy as that: they went to the same school, and after seeing him play guitar, she said she thought he was “darling”. After Buckingham heard her sing, playing a cover of ‘California Dreamin’ together in 1966, the feeling was mutual.
Soon after that, they were together in both live and music. They were a couple, but they were also already collaborators as they played together in Buckingham’s earlier band, Fritz, opening for the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin as the pair experienced some of the most formative musical moments of their lives back then as mere kids in love.
Their connection was already so established that when Nicks went to her family and told them she wanted to drop out of her freshman year of college to instead go all in on music with Buckingham, she actually got their blessing. The couple were already family, and everyone around them knew it.
1970: The duo years
“One day I just said, ‘Lindsey’… Because I was kind of the planner, I was the planner person in that relationship, and I said, ‘Lindsey, we need to move to LA, because the music is here’,” Nicks recalled in 2020, and so they did. In 1970, they packed up a car and moved to the big city from San Francisco, and, obviously, they were dirt broke.
As another example of how ride-or-die the duo were back then, they spent years working on what was then Buckingham Nicks, which saw them living through poverty. “Rich and famous or starving and poor, we went through the same problems,” Nicks remembered, talking about how in this period they’d barely have food to eat but were still totally in love, adding, “I mean, my mom and dad considered Lindsey and I married. So did I. So did he”, and during that period they practically were as they lived and worked together in their own bubble.
The result of that was their album Buckingham Nicks. They thought that might be the breakthrough, but instead, their label dropped them. The real breakthrough came in 1974, when Mick Fleetwood rang and asked Buckingham to join his band, to which he said yes, but only if Stevie joined too.
1976: The break-up
For the first few years, Fleetwood Mac was a bubble of bliss for the couple, but then as fame, pressure and addictions began to mount, it all cracked.
Still today, it’s unclear what actually fully caused Buckingham and Nicks to split up in 1976; however, some clues found their way into the lyrics of Rumours. Buckingham delivered a savage take-down on ‘Go Your Own Way’, prompting some serious hostility that led to them being physically kept apart except for the moments they were recording. In response, Nicks wrote the more tender, emotional ballads ‘Dreams’ and ‘Silver Springs’, with the latter being a true exorcism of heartache.
Despite splitting, they couldn’t split, and Rumours had the world obsessed with their relationship and the end of it, only mounting the fame and turning the spotlight to their personal life. As they then had to keep working together, the emotional challenge was tough, as Nicks said, “We did not break up friends, and we have never been friends since. He is not really able to have any kind of a relationship with me. I just bug him to death.”
1977: The affair
Nicks would then do one main thing that would especially bug him: have an affair with their bandmate. In 1977, during the band’s Rumours tour, Nicks and Fleetwood, both in the absolute throws of cocaine addiction and the general chaotic hedonism the band had fallen into, started an affair.
“Never in a million years could you have told me that would happen,” Nicks said, still shocked at it to this day.
Both were flirting with complete and utter destruction. “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,” Nicks said, and luckily they saw sense, as she added, “It didn’t. I just couldn’t,” stopping the affair almost as quick as it started, but not before adding more pain to the situation with Buckingham.
1976 to 1987: Workplace tensions
For a good while, they all tried to continue on business as usual. Buckingham’s attempt to keep things going saw him throw himself completely into work, leading to the overbearing chaos that was his role in Tusk, their follow-up to Rumours. “He was a maniac,” producer Ken Caillat remembered as Buckingham became a complete and utter nightmare, descending into both perfectionism and obsessive experimentation.
That would be the start of a pattern: Fleetwood Mac would battle through making an album, trying to keep a lid on the fights between the exes, and then they’d go off on tour. There, the band’s hedonism would both risk them and save them as under the influence of booze and drugs, Buckingham and Nicks would have this infectious yet explosive chemistry, leading to incredible performances but also a tumultuous time that every knew wouldn’t last.
By 1982, after the making of Mirage, it couldn’t go on, and the band went on hiatus so Nicks could try and get clean, and the exes could get some space. Yet even that wasn’t enough, as when they came back together to make Tango in the Night, they only lasted one record before Buckingham quit the band, stating clearly, “I needed to get some separation from Stevie, especially because I don’t think I’d ever quite gotten closure on our relationship”.
A decade on from their initial split, it still stung as he said, “When you break up with someone and then for the next ten years you have to be around them and do for them and watch them move away from you, it’s not easy.”
1990s: A potential rekindling
The thing with Buckingham and Nicks, though, is that they never seem able to stay away. By the mid-1990s, the former was already collaborating with Fleetwood Mac members, appearing on the band’s album and then, finally, he was fully back in the fold.
All of this leads to perhaps the most famous piece of footage of the couple, the 1997 Warner Brothers performance of ‘Silver Springs’, when the camera person refuses to change shot as Stevie Nicks stares Lindsey Buckingham direct in the eyes for a good portion of the song, singing directly to him “you’ll never get away from the sound of the woman that loved you”.
At the time, and ever since, it’s prompted rumours. Around that time, the exes seemed far more tender and friendly than they had been in decades, touching on stage, laughing together in interviews, and sharing knowing glances. A lot of people wondered if, behind the scenes, there had been a rekindling. There were even suggestions that the emotion behind that ‘Silver Springs’ performance was due to the news that Lindsey Buckingham was having a baby with Kristen Messner, a moment that shattered the couple over again, seeming to be the ultimate nail in the coffin for any potential future.
2018: Trouble boils over
Whatever happened back then clearly stung. Though the band were back to performing together in the 2000s and 2010s, there were constant ups and downs, bringing the duo back around to the old tension that used to exist when they were working together, but very clearly not friends. “There are still parts of mine and Stevie’s relationship that are unresolved, and it will be interesting to visit that on this next tour,” Buckingham said straight out in 2013.
In 2018, when Lindsey Buckingham randomly and dramatically left the band, it was once again pegged to Nicks. The rumours, in fact, were that Nicks had up and fired him, marking the first time Buckingham exited the band with seemingly no chance at all of returning, no door left open as he filed a lawsuit against Fleetwood Mac and his departure, citing Nicks as a major factor.
2025: Healing hearts?
But once again, the duo proved that no matter what, some ties are too important to ever fully fray. In 2025, online teasers and billboards seemed to be hinting towards a collaboration between the exes, sharing the lyrics from their song ‘Frozen Love’: “If you go forward, I’ll meet you there”.
In the end, it turned out to be a reissue of their initial debut album as a duo. However, in interviews, both Nicks and Buckingham shared that they’d be open to more, whether it be a tour as a duo or a tour with the band. When asked in 2024 if he’d rejoin the group, Buckingham said, “In a heartbeat, absolutely”, while even Mick Fleetwood has chimed in recently to say that he’d like to see “healing” between the pair.
With them coming together to organise the re-release of their debut, perhaps that’s already underway. Either way, it seems the length, decades-long story continues.
