In 1976, Fleetwood Mac bassist John McVie described the atmosphere inside the band with a blunt, memorable prediction: the group would either self-destruct or make one of the greatest albums of all time. They made *Rumours*. But the album that defined an era was forged directly from the collapsing personal lives of its five members, and no relationship inside the band was more combustible than that of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. Stevie Nicks was born Stephanie Lynn Nicks in Phoenix, Arizona on May 26, 1948.
Music reached her early through her grandfather, A. J. Nicks, a country singer who played guitar, fiddle, and harmonica. Stevie was singing duets with him by age four, performing songs like “Are You Mine?
” She later credited her mother, Barbara, for encouraging her imagination and keeping music in the house, while her father’s work meant the family moved frequently between Phoenix, Los Angeles, Albuquerque, El Paso, and Salt Lake City. At 16, her parents bought her a small Goya guitar and allowed her to take lessons. Almost immediately, she wrote her first song, titled “I’ve Loved and I’ve Lost and I’m Sad but Not Blue,” after a boy she liked ended up with her best friend. She said she finished the song crying, but that moment confirmed her path: she knew from then on she wanted to be a songwriter.
She met Lindsey Buckingham during her senior year at Menlo Atherton High School in California. She saw him playing “California Dreamin'” and joined in with the harmony, later recalling that she thought he was darling. When members of Lindsey’s psychedelic rock band Fritz left for college, he asked Stevie to join as lead singer in 1967. Fritz opened for Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, two performers Stevie said influenced the intensity of her stage presence.
Stevie and Lindsey studied at San Jose State University, and she planned to become an English teacher before choosing music. In 1972, when Fritz ended, the two became closer. Stevie later said she was not sure they would have become a couple if the band had stayed together. They moved to Los Angeles as Buckingham Nicks, both musical and romantic partners.
Their self-titled 1973 album failed commercially, and they were dropped by their label. Lindsey fell ill with mononucleosis while Stevie worked waiting tables and cleaning producer Keith Olsen’s house to support them. During this difficult period, Stevie wrote “Rhiannon” and “Landslide,” the latter reflecting both the scenery of Aspen and her growing doubts about the relationship. Even then, she believed deeply in Lindsey’s talent, writing a letter to her family predicting he might go down in history as one of the great guitar players.
On December 31, 1974, Mick Fleetwood called Lindsey Buckingham to ask him to join Fleetwood Mac. Mick had heard Lindsey’s guitar work on the Buckingham Nicks song “Frozen Love. ” Lindsey did not say yes immediately. He told Mick that Stevie had to come too, recalling, “Well, you’ve got to take my girlfriend, too.
” Fleetwood Mac agreed, and the pair joined in 1975. The move changed everything. Stevie brought a new voice, a striking image, and songs like “Rhiannon” and “Landslide” to the 1975 album *Fleetwood Mac*. Her live performances of “Rhiannon” were so intense that Mick later compared them to an exorcism.
She developed the flowing skirts, shawls, platform boots, and black clothes that became her stage identity. But while the band rose, Stevie and Lindsey were already struggling. Stevie later said they were breaking down even when they joined. She told *The New Yorker* she was smart enough to know that breaking up in the second month could have blown everything apart, so she held things together until the band felt secure.
She finally ended it once she felt Fleetwood Mac was strong enough to survive. The breakup did not stay private. By 1976, the couple was finished, but they still had to enter the studio together. They were not alone in their pain: Christine and John McVie were separating after years of marriage, and Mick Fleetwood’s marriage was also breaking down.
Those feelings poured into *Rumours*. Lindsey wrote “Go Your Own Way” from his side of the breakup, and Stevie hated the line suggesting that “packing up, shacking up” was all she wanted. She later told *Rolling Stone* she resented him telling the world something she believed was not true. Stevie answered heartbreak differently.
She wrote “Dreams,” which became Fleetwood Mac’s only number one single on the Billboard Hot 100. She also wrote “Silver Springs,” another deeply personal song about Lindsey. Though it was left off *Rumours* over concerns about length, it became the B-side to “Go Your Own Way,” placing their two sides of the breakup on the same single. Arguments followed them on tour.
Christine McVie said she once slapped Lindsey and may have thrown a glass of wine because she felt he was treating Stevie badly on stage. *Rumours* was released in 1977, stayed at number one in America for 31 weeks, won the Grammy for Album of the Year, and became one of the biggest-selling albums of all time. Stevie had once said devastation could lead to good writing; with *Rumours*, that idea became painfully real. The emotional mess inside Fleetwood Mac only got more tangled.
In November 1977, during the *Rumours* tour, Stevie and Mick Fleetwood began a secret affair after a concert in New Zealand. Mick was married to Jenny Boyd, and Stevie later said, “Never in a million years could you have told me that would happen. ” She admitted everyone was angry and said she was horrified by what she had done. The affair ended quickly because both understood how much damage it could cause.
Stevie later believed that if it had continued, it would have been the end of Fleetwood Mac. By 1978, Mick had become involved with Stevie’s friend, Sara Recor. Stevie later described life in Fleetwood Mac as a soap opera that was “pretty scandalous, pretty incestuous, and pretty wonderful in a lot of ways. ”
Around this period, Stevie dated Eagles singer and drummer Don Henley in the late 1970s.
She later joked that Henley and the Eagles taught her how to spend like a rock star with private planes and presidential suites. More seriously, Stevie became pregnant in 1979 and had an abortion. Decades later, she told the *Guardian* she believed there would have been no Fleetwood Mac if she had continued the pregnancy because she could not imagine raising a child while working and using drugs the way she was then. She said that if the baby had been a girl, she would have named her Sara.
Stevie’s solo rise changed her love life too. By the end of the 1970s, she had more songs than Fleetwood Mac could use. She founded Modern Records with Danny Goldberg and Paul Fishkin and released *Bella Donna* in July 1981. The album reached number one on the Billboard 200.
Don Henley joined her on “Leather and Lace,” showing the romance had ended without completely removing him from her musical world. Behind *Bella Donna* was another relationship. Stevie became involved with producer Jimmy Iovine while he was shaping the album. She later recalled that about ten days after they entered the studio, they were living together.
Jimmy was also closely connected to Tom Petty, and Stevie’s meeting with Petty grew into one of the longest friendships of her life. She once said she had fallen in love with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers before she even met them, joking that if Petty had asked her to leave Fleetwood Mac and join his band, she probably would have done it. Petty remembered her differently, saying she came into his life “like a rocket, just refusing to go away. ” Because Jimmy worked with Petty, he sometimes hid Stevie in the basement when Tom visited, trying to keep the romance from complicating business.
Their bond lasted four decades. Just as Stevie seemed to have everything she had worked for, devastating personal news arrived. The day *Bella Donna* reached number one, Stevie learned her best friend Robin Anderson had leukemia. Robin was pregnant and given a short time to live.
She gave birth to a son, Matthew, and Stevie became his godmother. Stevie later said she never truly enjoyed the success of *Bella Donna* because her friend was dying. When Robin died in 1982, grief took over. Stevie became convinced the best way to protect Robin’s baby was to marry Robin’s widower, Kim Anderson.
They married in early 1983, but Stevie later admitted the decision came from pain, not romantic love. “We didn’t get married because we were in love,” she explained. “We got married because we were grieving. ” She called it a terrible, terrible mistake.
The marriage lasted only three months. Years later, she said everyone involved had been so deep in grief that they were not thinking clearly. The bond with Robin’s family did not disappear when the marriage ended. Stevie later reconnected with Matthew when he was a teenager, helped put him through college, and remained part of his life.
When Matthew had a daughter, he named her Robin after his mother. Stevie told the *Guardian* about a Christmas when the little girl grabbed her hand and called her “Grandma Stevie. ” The moment hit her hard. She wrote in her journal that she would be “Grandma Stevie until death do us part.
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In 1983, Stevie met Eagles guitarist Joe Walsh, and this relationship became different from the others. Years later, she called him her greatest love. She described meeting him at the Mansion’s Hotel in Dallas and feeling something immediate. “I looked at him and I walked across the room and I sat on the bar stool next to him,” she recalled.
“And two seconds later, I crawled into his lap. ” She said she would probably have changed her life around for him and would have married him. They toured together in 1984, but the romance was tied to a dangerous period for both. Drugs were part of their lives, and Stevie later said their mutual drug use made a lasting relationship impossible.
According to her, Joe eventually went to Australia partly to get away from her because he feared one of them would die. By the time *Rock a Little* arrived in 1985, cocaine was taking control of her health. A plastic surgeon warned her that another hit could kill her. After touring in Australia in 1986, Stevie checked herself into the Betty Ford Center for 30 days.
She later stressed that nobody forced her to do it. “I managed to save myself,” she said. “I survived my cocaine. ” She remembered Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and thought about the music they never got to make.
Getting free from cocaine led her into another problem. After leaving rehab, Stevie was prescribed Klonopin to help keep her away from cocaine. During the late 1980s, she kept working, but the experience changed her. Fleetwood Mac released *Tango in the Night* in 1987.
When Lindsey decided to leave Fleetwood Mac before the tour, John McVie later described an ugly physical confrontation between Lindsey and Stevie. The Shake the Cage tour was suspended while Stevie dealt with chronic fatigue. In 1988, she began working with producer Rupert Hine on *The Other Side of the Mirror* and became romantically involved with him. The album arrived in 1989.
Stevie later said she had no memory of the tour because her Klonopin use had become so heavy. She returned to Fleetwood Mac for *Behind the Mask*, released in 1990, and on the last night of that tour, she and Lindsey performed “Landslide” together again. But another fight brewed over music rather than romance. Stevie wanted to put “Silver Springs” on her solo collection *Timespace*, while Mick Fleetwood wanted to save it for a Fleetwood Mac box set.
After the tour, she left the band. Stevie later called the Klonopin years a “non-time. ” She said it was worse for her than cocaine because it took away years in which she might have written, loved, married, or even adopted a child. By 1993, a fall at home made the danger impossible to ignore.
She entered a painful 47-day detox. Recovery did not make everything easy right away. Stevie released *Street Angel* in 1994, but she was unhappy with the finished album and hurt by criticism about her weight. For a time, she said she would not return to the stage unless she lost weight.
Slowly, music and familiar people pulled her back. Tom Petty helped restart her solo writing. When she asked him to write a song for her, he refused and pushed her to write one herself. In 1996, she reunited with Lindsey for the duet “Twisted,” and the following year, the classic Fleetwood Mac lineup returned for *The Dance*.
The reunion brought “Silver Springs” back into the spotlight, and its live performance earned a Grammy nomination. In 1998, Fleetwood Mac entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Her renewed songwriting led to *Trouble in Shangri-La* in 2001. Fleetwood Mac remained complicated: *Say You Will* arrived in 2003 without Christine McVie, and Stevie later said she was unhappy with parts of the album and tour, especially because of conflicts with Lindsey.
By the 2010s, Stevie was speaking more openly about why marriage and children never became the center of her life. She often returned to something her father had told her years earlier: music would always consume her life. She said she consciously chose not to have children because her career demanded so much. “My mission maybe wasn’t to be a mom and a wife,” she explained.
“Maybe my particular mission was to write songs to make moms and wives feel better. ”
Stevie’s later years proved that people from her past kept finding their way back into her story. Her bond with Tom Petty lasted until his death in 2017. That year, she joined him in London for “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,” their final performance of the song together.
In 2018, another old relationship reached a breaking point when Lindsey Buckingham was fired from Fleetwood Mac. Lindsey said Stevie had forced the choice. Stevie denied demanding his firing and said she had removed herself from a situation she considered toxic, leaving the band to decide what came next. She later described the split as a long time coming and said it made her deeply sad.
In 2019, Stevie became the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice, this time for her solo career. Don Henley joined her to perform “Leather and Lace. ” She continued recording and collaborating with younger artists including Lana Del Rey, Gorillaz, Dolly Parton, and Harry Styles. In 2024, she released “The Lighthouse.
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The Buckingham Nicks album was finally reissued decades after its original release. For the reissue, Stevie shared an old letter she had written to her family when they were still struggling, in which she praised Lindsey’s guitar playing and predicted he might become one of the greats. Then, in August 2026, Lindsey said the two were talking all the time while working on a Fleetwood Mac documentary.
He described the process as healing and suggested that 2027 could bring more developments.
