Stevie Nicks has left Fleetwood Mac three times over the course of her career. Each departure had its own shape, its own set of reasons — creative exhaustion, personal conflict, the impossible weight of being both essential to a band and suffocated by it — but each time, something pulled her back. She has said in interviews that the pull was never simple. It wasn’t loyalty, exactly, or money, or even friendship, though all of those played a role. It was one song.
“The Chain” — the only Fleetwood Mac song credited to all five classic members — has functioned, Nicks has explained, as something like a binding contract. Not a legal one, but an emotional one. She helped create something with those four other people that none of them could have made alone, and “The Chain” is where that truth is most audible. The interlocking bass line that comes in during the final third. The layered harmonies that require all three vocalists to be exactly right. The barely-controlled feeling that the whole thing might come apart at any moment, which is exactly what makes it work.
The first time she left, in 1991, she was burned out and needed to be a solo artist in a way that Fleetwood Mac wasn’t allowing. The second time, in the early 1990s, the band had fractured so severely that coming back seemed impossible. The third and most recent departure, in 2018, came after a conflict with Lindsay Buckingham that had, in many ways, been building since before Rumours was recorded.
Each time, “The Chain” has been part of the conversation — not explicitly, but structurally. You cannot play that song right without everyone present. And Stevie Nicks, for all her departures, has never been willing to let someone else stand in her part of it.
Some songs are more than songs. They are agreements. And some agreements, it turns out, are harder to leave than the people you made them with.