The romantic history between Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham is the most extensively documented relationship in rock and roll — documented not through tabloid reporting or unauthorized biography but through the songs themselves, which constitute a running public account of two people who fell in love as teenagers in California, built one of the most successful bands in history around the specific energy of their connection, and spent the following fifty years in a state of creative partnership and personal estrangement that produced, repeatedly and reliably, extraordinary music.
Buckingham has been more direct than Nicks about identifying the personal content of specific songs — a habit that Nicks has found, across decades of interviews, alternately flattering and infuriating. He tends toward the declarative: that song is about me, that lyric describes this specific event, that imagery refers to this specific period. Nicks tends toward the oblique: the songs mean what they mean to the people who hear them, the personal content is real but does not require identification to function.
The songs that Buckingham has been most specific about identifying as his are also, by the assessment of people who know the history of their relationship in detail, the ones where he is most clearly right.
1. Gold Dust Woman (1977)
Buckingham has said this song is about the version of Stevie Nicks that emerged during the Rumours period — the cocaine use, the distance, the specific transformation of the woman he had known into someone he recognized and did not fully recognize simultaneously. Nicks has not confirmed this reading. The imagery — rock on, ancient queen, follow those who pale — is specific enough that the people who were around the band during the Rumours sessions have not disputed Buckingham’s account.
2. Sara (1979)
The most deliberately mysterious song in Nicks’s catalog — the one she has been least willing to decode in public, the one whose meaning she has given different partial accounts of in different interviews. Buckingham has said he knows what the song is about and has declined to say so publicly, which is itself a statement. The people who have been told by Nicks what the song contains have not spoken in public. What is visible in the lyric — the drowning, the great dark wing, the poetry in motion — is enough to establish that the song contains something Nicks has decided to protect.
3. Silver Springs (1977)
Written during the Rumours sessions and left off the album — a decision that Nicks has described as one of the most painful of her professional life and that Buckingham was involved in making. The song was released as a B-side and then performed in the The Dance concert film in 1997 in a version that is among the most emotionally charged performances in Fleetwood Mac’s catalog. Nicks sings directly to Buckingham during the performance. He plays the guitar solo without looking at her. The audience watches two people conducting a private conversation in public. Buckingham has said the song is about him. The performance makes this visible.
4. Dreams (1977)
The Rumours track that became Fleetwood Mac’s only American number one — a song that Nicks has said she wrote in about ten minutes in a studio booth, sitting on a drum riser with a keyboard, in the immediate aftermath of a particularly difficult interaction with Buckingham. The lyric is the clearest statement of her position in their relationship: she is going to be fine, the thunder only happens when it’s raining, players only love you when they’re playing. He is the player. She is the one who is going to be fine. Buckingham has said the song is about him in the specific sense that it was written at him rather than about him — a distinction he seems to appreciate.
5. Landslide (1975)
The song that predates the Rumours period — written in Colorado in 1974 when Nicks was 26 and standing at a decision point about whether to continue in music or accept that it was not going to work and find a different life. Buckingham has said Landslide is about both of them — about the specific vulnerability of two people who had bet everything on the music and were not yet certain the bet would pay. He has said it is the song that most clearly shows who they were before everything that followed made it difficult to see who they had been.
Buckingham was fired from Fleetwood Mac in 2018, following a confrontation with Nicks — forty-three years after Landslide, forty-one years after Rumours, twenty-one years after Silver Springs. The specific circumstances of the firing have been characterized differently by different people involved. The music they made together in those forty-three years is the most complete documentation of what they were to each other — more complete than any interview either has given, more complete than any biography, more complete than any account either of them has been willing to give in their own words.