The exes and Fleetwood Mac members announced they’re reissuing “Buckingham Nicks” for the first time, which is the only album they created as a duo.
“You’ll never get away from the sound of the woman that loves you.”
Any Fleetwood Mac fan recognizes this lyric from “Silver Springs,” a song Stevie Nicks wrote about her breakup with bandmate Lindsey Buckingham. It also appears to actually be the case for Buckingham.
Over 50 years after they first started making music, music’s most notable exes are still releasing albums. In coordinated Instagram posts, the longtime collaborators announced that they’re reissuing “Buckingham Nicks,” the only album the two recorded as a duo under that name.
“Buckingham Nicks” was released in 1973 to minimal fanfare; the couple’s label, Polydor Records, dropped it within months of their release. The following year, the couple joined Fleetwood Mac, making them the notable figures they are today.
But while you can easily find copies of or stream all of the duo’s other work — both in Fleetwood Mac and as solo artists — “Buckingham Nicks” was never reissued.
Why reissue “Buckingham Nicks” now, after decades that were filled with breakups, makeups, reunion tours, and lawsuits for the pair? Andrew Mall, an associate professor of music at Northeastern University, thinks it could be a sign that things are thawing between the two exes.
“They (probably) own the copyrights jointly for pretty much most of the songs that were written,” Mall said. “If the label wants to go back and reissue it, especially if they want to remaster the material or produce more marketing material, they have to go back to the artist.”
That’s especially true in the digital age, Mall said, because recording contracts written in the 1970s didn’t account for streaming or digital downloads. But negotiating to allow for a reissue isn’t always easy.
“A band or a group where the primary members are at odds with each other, sometimes it’s really, really difficult to get them on the same page,” he said. “You’d have their attorneys or lawyers or management kind of negotiate on their behalf, but if there’s like a lot of animosity, which is what we understand is true between Stevie and Lindsey … there might have been like no appetite for that.”
Buckingham and Nicks met in high school in California in the 1960s and quickly became a couple and musical collaborators. In 1974, they joined Fleetwood Mac together. They split as a couple several years later, leading to the 1977 release of “Rumors,” an album about the romantic entanglements and breakups of the band, including Buckingham and Nicks. It remains one of the best-selling albums of all time.
The pair went on to release more albums with Fleetwood Mac as well as on their own as solo artists, feuding all the while. Buckingham refused to go on tour with the band after releasing “Tango in the Night” in 1987 and left the band for 10 years.
When Fleetwood Mac reunited in 1997 to record their live album, “The Dance,” they included a performance of “Silver Springs,” which was cut from “Rumours.” The video of this performance, with the two exes “shooting daggers at each other” as they sang, has since found a new life on the Internet over the last few years.
Even though Buckingham got kicked out/left the band (depending on who you ask) for good in 2018 and subsequently sued his former bandmates, interest in the former couple remains high thanks to the new audience they’ve found over time.
Mall said this continued interest could also be why the album is being reissued now instead of during the 1990s, which is when a lot of record labels remastered and reissued albums in hopes of getting people to switch from vinyls and cassettes to CDs.
“If we look back at the statistics for the recording industry, that is the height of revenue earned from selling music to consumers,” Mall said. “That’s when ‘Buckingham Nicks’ should have been reissued. There was a big Fleetwood Mac box set at the time, and it seems incredibly likely for (record labels) to realize, ‘Oh, actually also there’s this album that didn’t do so great, but we should dig it out.’”
This trend of reissuing, especially music from the 1960s and ’70s, has continued as doing so often brings in a lot of revenue.
But again, it could’ve been the feud between Buckingham and Nicks that kept “Buckingham Nicks” on the shelf. Instead, the 10-track album remained a rare find for record collectors, with vinyl copies selling online for hundreds of dollars.
It’s this same animosity though that has made it possible for it to be reissued. Even though it’s been nearly 50 years since “Rumors” catapulted Fleetwood Mac to fame, the fandom lives on as new generations discover their music and become intrigued by the band’s dynamics. Their songs have reached audiences through TikTok, TV shows and even inspired Taylor Jenkins Reid’s popular novel, “Daisy Jones and the Six.”
“They still, both individually and as a duo, command a lot of attention,” Mall said. “This seems like it should have been a no-brainer 30 years ago, 15 years ago, 10 years ago.
But you know, for it to finally come together now, I think it ‘s really great because it gives fans and people who are maybe only casual listeners alike an opportunity to hear the genesis of this really, really, really famous duo.”