Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham

#1In 1997, Stevie Nicks was singing "Silver Springs" when she turned toward Lindsey Buckingham.

#2He was right there, playing guitar and looking back at her.

#3To the audience, it was a charged moment in a Fleetwood Mac reunion. But the song had been sitting between Nicks and Buckingham for almost twenty years.

#4She'd written "Silver Springs" about him while their relationship was falling apart. It was meant for "Rumours," then got cut from the album.

#5A lot had happened since. They'd broken up, fought, built separate careers, and spent years apart. Buckingham had even left Fleetwood Mac.

#6And still, here they were.

#7She was singing a song about losing him. He was helping her perform it.

#8So why did these two keep ending up inside each other's music long after the relationship itself was over?

#9You have to go back to before they were a couple.

#10It was 1966 in San Francisco.

#11Teenage Lindsey Buckingham was at a gathering, playing guitar and singing "California Dreamin'."

#12Stevie Nicks heard him, walked over, and joined in harmony.

#13That was it. No grand introduction. They didn't walk away knowing they'd just met someone who would shape the next half-century of their lives.

#14A few years later, they crossed paths again in a band called Fritz. This time they stayed in the same room. They sang together, played shows together, and eventually became a couple.

#15When Fritz ended, they decided to keep going as a duo.

#16Buckingham Nicks.

#17That order matters. They didn't start making music because they'd fallen in love.

#18They were making music together first.

#19The romance came later.

#20In 1973, Buckingham Nicks released an album.

#21They had a label behind them. A producer. Serious musicians on the sessions. For a young couple who'd been trying to make it, this looked like the moment when the struggle was finally supposed to end.

#22It didn't.

#23The album didn't sell widely enough, and the label dropped them.

#24There were places, especially in parts of the American South, where listeners knew their music. But nationally, the breakthrough just wasn't happening.

#25So Stevie Nicks went back to earning money however she could. She waited tables. She cleaned producer Keith Olsen's house.

#26Buckingham kept writing and recording, and took other music work when he needed the money.

#27The strange part is that the songs kept coming even when the career seemed to be going nowhere.

#28Nicks was writing "Rhiannon" and "Landslide" around this period. Today those are obvious landmarks in her career. Back then, they were songs being written by someone who wasn't even sure the career would last.

#29She considered giving it up.

#30Still, she and Buckingham started preparing material for another Buckingham Nicks record.

#31That second album never came out.

#32Instead, their failed first album found one very useful listener.

#33Late in 1974, Mick Fleetwood walked into Sound City in Los Angeles.

#34He wasn't there to find a guitarist.

#35Fleetwood Mac already had one: Bob Welch. Fleetwood was checking out a studio.

#36Keith Olsen wanted to show him what the room could sound like, so he played a record he'd made there.

#37"Buckingham Nicks."

#38One of the tracks was "Frozen Love."

#39Fleetwood noticed Lindsey Buckingham's guitar.

#40Then he left.

#41Nothing happened, because there was no job to offer.

#42Not long after that, Bob Welch left Fleetwood Mac.

#43Now there was a job.

#44And Fleetwood remembered the guitarist he'd heard at Sound City.

#45The Buckingham Nicks album hadn't reached enough people to become a hit.

#46But it had reached one person who suddenly needed exactly what he'd heard.

#47The first call was for Lindsey Buckingham.

#48Fleetwood Mac needed a guitarist. They weren't out looking for Stevie Nicks.

#49Buckingham didn't treat the offer as a solo move, though.

#50If he joined, Nicks came too.

#51And Nicks was ready to take the opportunity seriously. She listened to Fleetwood Mac's records and thought about what the two of them could bring to the band.

#52She was tired of being broke as well. Waiting tables and cleaning houses had kept them afloat, but neither of them wanted that to be the permanent arrangement.

#53When Buckingham hesitated, Nicks pushed him to really consider the offer.

#54There was one more person to meet.

#55Fleetwood Mac already had Christine McVie, a singer and songwriter who was central to the band. If McVie and Nicks couldn't stand each other, this new lineup wasn't going to work for long.

#56They met.

#57They liked each other.

#58So in 1975, Buckingham and Nicks joined Fleetwood Mac together.

#59At the biggest opportunity of their lives, neither one walked through the door alone.

#60Then the success on the other side made their relationship even harder to escape.

#61The new Fleetwood Mac took off.

#62As "Rhiannon" spread, Nicks became a star in her own right. She wasn't just the girlfriend who'd arrived with the guitarist anymore.

#63But bigger success meant more time together, not less.

#64Recording. Rehearsing. Touring. Traveling. Then doing it all again.

#65Their relationship was already unstable. Now there was barely any room to get away from each other.

#66Most people can break up and stop showing up at the same place every morning.

#67Nicks and Buckingham couldn't.

#68They could end the romance, then go straight back into the same studio.

#69And then things got even more complicated.

#70They started writing songs about the breakup.

#71Buckingham wrote "Go Your Own Way."

#72It came straight out of his breakup with Nicks.

#73Nicks hated part of the lyric. She felt it made her sound like she'd left because she wanted to run around with other people.

#74She asked him to change it.

#75He didn't.

#76In a normal breakup, that could be the end of the conversation. She could walk away from the song.

#77But this wasn't just Lindsey Buckingham's song. It was becoming a Fleetwood Mac record, and Stevie Nicks was in Fleetwood Mac.

#78So she sang backing vocals on it.

#79Her own voice ended up inside a breakup song about her, including a line she didn't want there.

#80Then she wrote "Dreams."

#81Same breakup. Different view.

#82The two songs weren't private letters sent from opposite sides of town. They were being made by the same band, in the same rooms.

#83Buckingham was also one of the people shaping the sound of Nicks's songs through arrangement and production.

#84They'd managed to break up as a couple.

#85They hadn't managed to stop being musical partners.

#86That tension ended up all over "Rumours."

#87Nicks had another song about Buckingham.

#88"Silver Springs."

#89She expected it to be on "Rumours."

#90But vinyl had physical limits. If a side ran too long, the sound could suffer, so the band had to make choices.

#91"Silver Springs" was cut.

#92When Mick Fleetwood and Buckingham told Nicks, she was furious. To her, this wasn't just one more song that could be swapped out.

#93It carried the breakup.

#94A shorter Nicks song, "I Don't Want to Know," made the album instead.

#95"Silver Springs" ended up as a B-side.

#96And the A-side?

#97"Go Your Own Way."

#98So one side of the single had Buckingham's breakup song about Nicks.

#99Flip it over, and there was Nicks's breakup song about Buckingham.

#100They'd separated.

#101The record put their two versions of the breakup back-to-back on the same piece of vinyl.

#102"Rumours" became enormous.

#103The obvious next move was simple: make another one.

#104Buckingham didn't want to.

#105On "Tusk," he pushed for stranger sounds and more experimentation. He didn't want the rest of his career to become an assignment to reproduce "Rumours" over and over.

#106Nicks had a different problem.

#107Fleetwood Mac had three major songwriters: Christine McVie, Buckingham, and Nicks. There were only so many slots on an album.

#108Nicks kept building up songs that had nowhere to go.

#109Which raised another question: what would happen if she made a record without Buckingham at the center of the process?

#110In 1981, she released "Bella Donna."

#111Different producer. Different musicians. A musical world outside Buckingham and outside Fleetwood Mac.

#112The album went to No. 1 in the United States.

#113Six years earlier, Fleetwood Mac had wanted Buckingham and accepted Nicks as part of the package.

#114Now Nicks had a No. 1 album without either Buckingham or Fleetwood Mac.

#115She didn't quit the band.

#116She built a second career next to it.

#117Buckingham would eventually choose a cleaner break.

#118In 1987, Fleetwood Mac released "Tango in the Night."

#119Once again, Buckingham had been central to shaping the record.

#120It was a success.

#121Then came the tour.

#122Buckingham didn't want to do it.

#123There wasn't one neat reason. Years of personal tension were sitting next to his desire to make solo music, his need for more creative control, and his exhaustion with the endless album-tour-album cycle of a giant band.

#124A final meeting became intensely confrontational, including a serious clash with Nicks. Later accounts don't line up perfectly on every physical detail, so the exact scene is hard to reconstruct with certainty.

#125The outcome isn't.

#126Buckingham left Fleetwood Mac.

#127In 1975, he'd refused to join without Stevie Nicks.

#128Twelve years later, he was the one who walked away first.

#129Years passed.

#130Buckingham was working on solo material when Mick Fleetwood began playing with him.

#131That connection widened. Old bandmates started coming back into one another's orbit.

#132This wasn't simply a big emotional plan to forgive the past and reunite the classic lineup.

#133The music came first.

#134Then the band started forming around it.

#135Nicks wanted to know whether Buckingham was really committing. She contacted him directly.

#136If he was doing it, she'd put aside her own plans and do it too.

#137He was.

#138In 1997, the five members associated with "Rumours" were back together for "The Dance."

#139And so was "Silver Springs."

#140Nicks sang toward Buckingham.

#141Buckingham played while looking back at her.

#142The song that hadn't been allowed onto "Rumours" became one of the defining moments of the reunion.

#143It can look like reconciliation if you stop the story there.

#144Their actual relationship didn't.

#145They weren't back together. There was no reason to believe every old wound had vanished.

#146What the performance showed was something else: once they started making music together again, the old emotional material could become present again too.

#147A song written during a breakup in the 1970s still felt immediate in 1997 because the two people inside the song were standing there performing it.

#148And 1997 wasn't the final resolution.

#149In 2018, Buckingham was out of Fleetwood Mac again. He and Nicks gave different accounts of what led to the split and who was responsible. A lawsuit followed and was later settled.

#150So "Silver Springs" wasn't the moment everything got fixed.

#151It was the moment you could see how easily the music could bring the old relationship back into the room.

#152In July 2025, Stevie Nicks posted a handwritten lyric:

#153"And if you go forward…"

#154No explanation.

#155Then Lindsey Buckingham posted another:

#156"I'll meet you there."

#157Put them together, and you get a line from "Frozen Love."

#158The song from the failed 1973 Buckingham Nicks album.

#159The same song Mick Fleetwood had happened to hear at Sound City before he even needed a new guitarist.

#160Naturally, people wondered whether Nicks and Buckingham were about to work together again.

#161That wasn't the announcement.

#162Instead, "Buckingham Nicks" was getting its first official reissue.

#163The album that had failed 52 years earlier was coming back.

#164It was the record that had sent them back to scraping together money. It was also the record containing the song that helped put Buckingham in Mick Fleetwood's memory at exactly the right time.

#165And after everything that came later, the record returning wasn't "Rumours."

#166It wasn't a new Fleetwood Mac album.

#167It was the music they'd made before the fame, before the breakup, before anyone knew what the two of them would become.

#168The Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham story doesn't end with them falling in love again.

#169It doesn't end with every grievance forgiven either.

#170They came together, pulled apart, made great music, and sometimes found being around each other almost impossible.

#171But the same pattern kept coming back.

#172In 1966, Lindsey was already singing.

#173Stevie heard him and joined in.

#174When they were broke, they kept making songs together. When Fleetwood Mac opened a door, they didn't initially walk through it separately.

#175When the romance ended, they helped finish songs about each other.

#176After years apart, music put them in the same place again.

#177And 52 years after "Buckingham Nicks" failed, Stevie Nicks posted the first half of a line from "Frozen Love."

#178Lindsey Buckingham posted the rest.

#179Lindsey Buckingham's opening in Fleetwood Mac existed because Bob Welch had left. But Welch wasn't simply the guy who happened to vacate a chair before the band's most famous era. Before Buckingham and Nicks arrived, he'd already been part of Fleetwood Mac's shift away from its earlier British-blues identity and toward an American audience.

#180So how did someone who helped carry the band right up to the edge of its biggest transformation become so easy to miss once that transformation began?