Stevie Nicks has spent more than five decades turning heartbreak into music. Behind the shawls, smoky voice, and songs that millions still sing lay relationships that blurred the line between passion, loyalty, betrayal, and survival. Fleetwood Mac brought her fame, but it also pulled her into a world where love and work were almost impossible to separate. At 78, she looks back on those connections with clarity about what they cost her and what they gave her.
Born Stephanie Lynn Nicks in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1948, she grew up surrounded by music. Her grandfather, A. J. Nicks, was a country singer, and she was singing duets with him by age four.
The family moved often because of her father’s work, which she later said taught her to make friends quickly. At 16, her parents bought her a small Goya guitar, and she wrote her first song after a teenage heartbreak, realizing in that moment that she wanted to be a songwriter. During her senior year at Menlo Atherton High School, she met Lindsey Buckingham. She joined him in harmony while he played “California Dreamin’,” and that small moment grew into one of the most consequential relationships of her life.
Lindsey asked her to join his band Fritz, which later opened for Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. When Fritz ended, they became a couple, moved to Los Angeles, and recorded one album as Buckingham Nicks. It failed commercially, money ran tight, and Lindsey fell ill, while Stevie cleaned houses and waited tables. During this difficult time, she wrote “Rhiannon” and”Landslide,” the latter reflecting her doubts about their relationship.
Still, she believed deeply in his talent, predicting in a letter to her family that he might go down in history as one of the great guitar players. At the end of 1974, Mick Fleetwood called Lindsey and asked him to join Fleetwood Mac. Lindsey agreed only on one condition: Stevie had to come, too. They joined in 1975, and Stevie quickly reshaped the band’s sound and image with her voice, her songs, and her flowing stage look.
But even as Fleetwood Mac was rising, Stevie and Lindsey were already falling apart. She later said she deliberately held their relationship together until the band was secure, believing a breakup too early could have destroyed everything they had spent years chasing. By 1976, the relationship was over, but they still had to make another album together. The personal turmoil poured directly into “Rumours.
” Lindsey wrote”Go Your Own Way” from his side, a line Stevie resented for suggesting she only wanted to pack up and shack up. She answered with”Dreams,” which became the band’s only number one single, and”Silver Springs,” another deeply personal song about him, placed on the B-side of his song, putting their two versions of their breakup on the same single. The album stayed at number one for 31 weeks, won the Grammy for album of the year, and became one of the biggest-selling records in history. Their private breakup had become rock history, but the emotional chaos inside the band was only growing 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, making the situation painful, and Stevie later said she was horrified by what she had done. The affair ended quickly because both knew the 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, and Stevie would later describe life in the band as a soap opera that was “pretty scandalous,” “pretty incestuous,” and”pretty wonderful. ” Around this period, she also dated Eagles singer Don Henley, whose world of private planes and presidential suites she later joked taught her to spend like a rock star. But the relationship had a far more serious dimension: Stevie became pregnant in 1979 and had an abortion. Decades later, she told The Guardian that 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. By the end of the 1970s, Stevie had more songs than the band could use, so she launched a solo career. Bella Donna arrived in July 1981, reached number one, and established her as an artist independent of Fleetwood Mac. Behind the album was another relationship, with producer Jimmy Iovine, whom she later said she was living with within ten days of entering the studio.
Through him, she grew close to Tom Petty, a friendship she called one of the longest of her life. She joked that if Petty had asked her to leave Fleetwood Mac and join his band, she probably would have done it. Petty remembered her entrance differently but just as clearly, saying she came into his life “like a rocket, just refusing to go away. ” Their bond lasted four decades, with Petty later pushing her back toward songwriting when she had lost confidence in it.
Just as her solo career was taking off, Stevie faced a devastating personal loss. The day Bella Donna reached number one, she learned her best friend Robin Anderson had leukemia. Robin was pregnant and given only a short time to live. She gave birth to a son, Matthew, and Stevie became his godmother.
When Robin died in 1982, grief overwhelmed her. Convinced the best way to protect Robin’s baby was to marry Robin’s widower, she married Kim Anderson in early 1983. She later admitted, “We didn’t get married because we were in love. We got married because we were grieving.
” She called it a terrible mistake. The marriage lasted only three months. The bond with Robin’s family did not disappear though. 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, and Stevie once described a Christmas when the little girl grabbed her hand and called her”Grandma Stevie. ” Stevie wrote in her journal that she would be Grandma Stevie “until death do us part. ” She later said of Robin’s death,”Something went out that day. Something left,” explaining why one of the biggest career wins of her life never felt like a celebration at all.
In 1983, Stevie met Eagles guitarist Joe Walsh, and she later called him her greatest love. She described walking across a hotel bar in Dallas and crawling into his lap within seconds. They toured together, and the relationship burned intensely, but drugs were part of their lives. Stevie later said their mutual drug use made a lasting relationship impossible, noting that Joe eventually went to Australia partly to get away from her because he feared one of them would die.
The breakup crushed her, and she said it took her a very long time to get over him, if she ever truly did. By the time Rock a Little arrived in 1985, cocaine was taking control of her health, and 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, saying,”I managed to save myself.
I survived my cocaine. ” She remembered Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and thought about the music they never got to make. That frightened her enough to choose survival. But getting free from cocaine led her into another addiction.
After leaving rehab, she was prescribed Klonopin to help keep her away from cocaine, and what was supposed to help slowly became another addiction. During the late 1980s, she kept working, but the experience changed her. In 1988, she became romantically involved with producer Rupert Hine, though she later said she had no memory of the ensuing tour because her Klonopin use had become so heavy. She later called those years”a non-time,” saying the medication 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, and she entered a painful 47-day detox. She later said Klonopin was worse for her than cocaine because it stole years of her life. Getting clean meant facing all of that lost time, but it also gave her a chance to rebuild. Recovery did not make everything easy right away.
She released Street Angel in 1994, but was unhappy with it and hurt by criticism about her weight, saying for a time she would not return to the stage unless she lost weight. Slowly, familiar people pulled her back. Tom Petty helped restart her songwriting, refusing to write a song for her and instead pushing her to write one herself. In 1997, the classic Fleetwood Mac lineup reunited for The Dance, bringing Silver Springs back into the spotlight and earning a Grammy nomination.
In 1998, Fleetwood Mac entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Her renewed solo writing led to Trouble in Shangri-La in 2001, which brought strong reviews and commercial success. Fleetwood Mac remained more complicated, with conflicts with Lindsey and Christine McVie’s absence shadowing later albums and tours. Still, she continued moving between Fleetwood Mac and her solo career, and former romances became stage partners: she toured with Don Henley in 2005 and performed with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers in 2006.
By then, her pattern was clear: people could change roles, disappear, or return, but music remained the constant shaping every part of her life. By the 2010s, Stevie was speaking more openly about why marriage and children had never become 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 had consciously chosen not to have children because her career demanded so much and because she wanted to follow her art wherever it led.
Her way of explaining it was simple:”My mission maybe wasn’t to be a mom and a wife. Maybe my particular mission was to write songs to make moms and wives feel better. ” She still had a large family around her, including godchildren, her niece, her former stepson Matthew, and later Matthew’s daughter. She joked that being the crazy auntie was more fun anyway.
Her mother had also given her a lasting lesson about independence: never depend on a man to support her. Stevie carried that message into an industry where she often felt men were uncomfortable with her confidence. After Bella Donna succeeded, she remembered people saying it would be hard to be Mr. Stevie Nicks.
She agreed that it probably would be unless the man was secure enough to enjoy her unusual life without jealousy. She did keep dating. Around age 50, she had a relationship with a man around 30 who was not famous, ending it after realizing she had already lived through the years he was just entering. By 2020, she said she had not been in love since the early 2000s, but she still called herself a romantic, believing love could appear unexpectedly because it had happened before.
The difference was that she no longer needed a relationship to make her life feel complete. Her later years kept proving how the people who shaped her life could return in unexpected ways. Her bond with Tom Petty lasted until his death in 2017, when she joined him in London for their final performance of”Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” together. In 2018, 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 described the split as deeply sad, given a history stretching back decades. After Lindsey suffered a heart attack in 2019, she sent him a note telling him to take care of himself and recover. That year, Stevie became the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice, this time for her solo career, with Don Henley joining her to perform Leather and Lace.
She continued recording, touring, and collaborating with younger artists like Lana Del Rey, Harry Styles, and others, releasing The Lighthouse in 2024. The Buckingham Nicks album was finally reissued decades later, and for it, Stevie shared an old letter praising Lindsey’s guitar playing and predicting he might become one of the greats, a reminder of how much belief existed before the bitterness between them. Then, in August 2026, Lindsey said the two were talking “all the time now” while working on a Fleetwood Mac documentary, describing the process as healing and suggesting that 2027 could bring more developments.
For two people who had spent years turning love, anger, distance, and memory into music, even simple conversation carried the weight of a very long history.
