Stevie Nicks Explains Firing Lindsey Buckingham From Fleetwood Mac
Stevie Nicks is making the rounds. She released a new song, her first in four years, and returned to SNL for the first time in 41. Today the music legend has a new interview in Rolling Stone.
In the story, she talks about a prolific creative streak she’s been on since Christine McVie’s death marked the end of Fleetwood Mac in 2022, including lots of poems and a batch of new songs intended for an album. One is called “The Vampire’s Wife,” “which, I think, is one of my best songs I’ve ever written. Because it’s like ‘Rhiannon,’ a story of a character. Who knows, I might call this next album The Vampire’s Wife.”
In one section, Nicks explains an incident at Fleetwood Mac’s MusiCares concert in 2018 that convinced her Lindsey Buckingham needed to be removed from the band:
I think that all just happened the way it should have. It happened one night, not planned, at a MusiCares [benefit concert]. I didn’t even tell anybody it had happened in my head until the whole ceremony was over. I took with me that night a song that I had done with LeAnn Rimes called “Borrowed.” I took it with me to play for him because I thought we could do this song beautifully.
That’s when he wasn’t very nice to anybody; he wasn’t very nice to Harry Styles. I could hear my mom saying, “Are you really going to spend the next 15 years of your life with this man?” I could hear my very pragmatic father — and by the way, my mom and dad liked Lindsey a lot — saying, “It’s time for you guys to get a divorce.” Between those two, I said, “I’m done.”
Nicks revealed that in recent years she’s only spoken to Buckingham “for about three minutes” at a celebration of life for McVie held at Nobu after her death. “I dealt with Lindsey for as long as I could,” she said. “You could not say that I did not give him more than 300 million chances.” When asked if Fleetwood Mac would ever consider a farewell tour, she simply replied, “No.”
There’s also this bit about how Nicks doesn’t have internet on her phone:
I hate it. About 10 years ago, Katy Perry was talking to me about the internet armies of all the girl singers, and how cruel and rancid they were. I said, “Well, I wouldn’t know because I’m not on the internet.” She said, “So, who are your rivals?” I just looked at her. It was my steely look. I said, “Katy, I don’t have rivals. I have friends. All the other women singers that I know are friends. Nobody’s competing. Get off the internet and you won’t have rivals either.”
Read the full interview here.