The breakup of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham fueled many of Fleetwood Mac‘s most famous songs. But Stevie now says that if they’d split when they really wanted to, Fleetwood Mac wouldn’t have been around for them to record those songs.
In a new interview in The New Yorker, Stevie explains, “I broke up with Lindsey in 1976. We’d only been in Fleetwood Mac for a year and a half, and we were breaking up when we joined Fleetwood Mac. So we just put our relationship kind of back together, because I was smart enough to know that, if we had broken up the second month of being in Fleetwood Mac, it would have blown the whole thing.”
“I just bided my time, and tried to make everything as easy as possible, tried to be as sweet and as nice to Lindsey as I could be,” Stevie continues. “He wasn’t happy, either. Then something happened that was, y’know, ‘We’re done’…it was time.”
“The band was solid, by that time, so I could walk away knowing that he was safe. And that the band was safe. And that we could work it out,” she concludes.
Speaking about two classic songs inspired by the breakup, Stevie says, “I always laugh because Lindsey’s ‘Go Your Own Way’ and my [song] ‘Dreams’ are, like, counter songs to each other. I’m, like, ‘When the rain washes you clean, you’ll know,’ and he’s, like, ‘Packing up, shacking up’s all you want to do.’”
She notes, “He’s looking at it from a very unpleasant, angry way, and I’m saying, in my more airy-fairy way, we’re gonna be all right. We’ll get through this.”
Stevie has several festival performances booked for this year, while Buckingham has a slew of tour dates lined up for the month of April.
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