Though Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham split in the mid-1970s, the drama between the former couple has stretched decades.
Buckingham spoke about Nicks and her changing behavior. He explained that he never thought she was happy.
In 1982, Fleetwood Mac released their fourth album with Nicks and Buckingham as members of the group. Nicks was also working on her successful solo career. Because of this, she wasn’t spending as much time with her
“That may have something to do with why Stevie is the way she is now,” he said, per the book Fleetwood Mac on Fleetwood Mac: Interviews and Encounters. “Because she is not a musician, she doesn’t share in that thing with us. She can feel totally out of her depth — which she is, on some levels — and you can understand why she doesn’t want to come down to the studio or be involved in certain things.”
Buckingham wondered if Nicks’ rising success was making her unhappy.
“Stevie has never been very happy, and I don’t think the success of her album has made her any happier,” he said. “In fact, it may have made her less happy.”
He shared that she was more demanding when working with the band and wondered if she was expressing discontent.
(Below -Say Goodbye, the song Lindsey Buckingham wrote as the final word on his romance with Stevie Nicks)
“She’s flexing some kind of emotional muscles that she feels she can flex now that she’s in a more powerful position,” he said. “There’s a certain amount of leeway in how you can interpret Stevie’s behavior, I’d say, but at the same time there’s no denying that her success is making her feel that she can pull things that she wouldn’t have felt comfortable pulling before. And most of them aren’t particularly worthwhile, but she’s venting something — loneliness, unhappiness or something.”
According to Nicks, her bandmates did not take the success of her solo album well.
“No one in the band ever said a word to me about my solo career,” she said, per the book Gold Dust Woman: The Biography of Stevie Nicks by Stephen Davis. “They were keeping quiet, out of their own interests. No one even said they’d listened to my record. They knew that if they ripped Bella Donna apart, I wouldn’t give them any more songs. No more ‘Dreams’ — the only #1 single that Fleetwood Mac ever had. That was me.”
She said that Buckingham was particularly cold in his reaction. After gifting him an album and handwritten dedication, she noticed that he left both on the studio floor when he went home.
“I never forgave him for that one,” she later said.
Related: New Lindsey Buckingham Box Set, ‘20th Century Lindsey,’ out on June 14. ‘20th Century Lindsey,’ Focuses on Ex-Fleetwood Mac Member’s Pre-2000 Solo Work.
A new box set gathering together remastered versions of ex-Fleetwood Mac singer/guitarist Lindsey Buckingham’s first three solo albums will be released as a four-LP vinyl package and digitally on June 14.
20th Century Lindsey features the studio albums Law and Order (1981), Go Insane (1984), and Out of the Cradle (1992), with audio remastered in 2017 from the original master tapes. The collection also comes with a new compilation titled 20th Century Rarities, features eight songs, including rare mixes and tunes that Buckingham contributed to movie soundtracks.
The four-LP box set is available exclusively at Rhino.com and LindseyBuckingham.com, and can be pre-ordered now. A four-CD version of 20th Century Lindsey will be released in August 2024.
