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Lindsey Buckingham touched upon his dysfunctional relationship with longtime ex and former Fleetwood Mac bandmate Stevie Nicks. Back in December 2018, Buckingham revealed that his lawsuit against the members of Fleetwood Mac had been settled after being fired from the band. Buckingham's exit was due to Stevie Nicks refusing to ever perform with guitarist again. The pair, which had gone to high school together, became romantically linked in 1971, joined Fleetwood Mac together in late-1974, and split romantically in 1976.
While appearing on Apple Music's Deep Hidden Meaning Radio With Nile Rodger, Buckingham explained, “The deal with Stevie and me was that we had to spend an awful lot of time together without ever having gotten closure from each other. Most people, when they break up, they don’t see each other for a long time or maybe ever again. But you’re not constantly having to not only see someone but, in my case, make the choice to do right for someone when I didn’t always feel that I wanted to, y'know?”
Buckingham went on to describe how ensconced he and Nicks remained in one another's life and careers after the split: “In order to take a song of hers, like 'Dreams,' which needed so much construction around it to take those same two chords and make them evolve from section A to section B to section C. And the love and the choice to do the right thing and to have the integrity to do that; it comes at a price sometimes, y'know? It comes at the price of having your defenses come up, and sometimes over a period of time, it’s hard to get those down.”
Over the years, Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie have written most of the blockbusters for the group. Lindsey Buckingham recently shed light on exactly what he brought to the table for the band's songwriters and Fleetwood Mac in general: “Right away it was clear to me that what the people in the band needed — the other three people, y'know, that we were joining, y'know, that Stevie and I were joining — they needed someone who had a vision for how to process the music, how to produce the music. Y'know, a mind to filter everything and organize it and interpret it. And that's something they hadn't really had in full force since the Peter Green days — the very early days.”
Lindsey Buckingham told us that fans tend to over-romanticize what a horrendous period the recording of 1977's Rumours was for the members of Fleetwood Mac: “If there was one worst thing it was probably just it was difficult for all four of us as two couples to have broken up to be alienated — probably not to have gotten anything close to closure — and to still have to kind of move forward. And to do that you kind of had to compartmentalize your emotions a little bit. You had to seal one thing off here and get on with it there. It was kind of an exercise in denial.”
