Lindsey Buckingham & Stevie Nicks Are Talking Again: The Full Story

August 7, 2026

The 2026 News: "Stevie and I Are Talking All the Time Now"

In August 2026, Lindsey Buckingham made headlines when he revealed at Variety's Power of Young Hollywood event that he and Stevie Nicks — his former bandmate, creative partner, and ex-lover — are now talking regularly. "Stevie and I are talking all the time now," he said — a statement that would have seemed unthinkable just a few years ago.

The catalyst, Buckingham explained, has been an upcoming Fleetwood Mac documentary for Apple TV+, due in 2027. "The process of making that has been a very circular healing process for all of us," he said. He acknowledged that the band's 2019 world tour — which excluded him following a very public falling out — had left things "not in a very good place for all the wrong reasons. No one was happy about it, and all of that has been healed and worked out."

And on the prospect of future collaborations with Nicks? "Anything is possible," he told E! News. "Next year should be a pretty interesting year, because I think quite a few things will reveal themselves."

To understand why this reconciliation matters so much, you have to go back to the beginning.

How It All Started: High School Sweethearts in California

Long before Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham became one of rock's most celebrated — and complicated — partnerships, they were high school classmates in northern California.

"When I was a junior in high school up in northern California, she transferred into my high school as a senior," Buckingham once told Dan Rather. "She did play guitar, and she and I interacted slightly on a musical level at a couple of social events."

Nicks enrolled at San José State in the mid-1960s while Buckingham finished his senior year — and once he graduated, he began attending the same university. By this point, Buckingham was already in a band called Fritz, which Nicks joined. The romantic spark, though, took time to ignite.

"I think there was always something between me and Lindsey, but nobody in that band really wanted me as their girlfriend because I was just too ambitious for them," Nicks told Rolling Stone in 1977. "But they didn't want anybody else to have me either."

After Fritz broke up in the early 1970s, Nicks and Buckingham formed Buckingham Nicks — a musical duo that quickly became a romantic one too. "We started spending a lot of time together working out songs," Nicks recalled. "Pretty soon we started spending all our time together and… it just happened."

How Buckingham Nicks Became Fleetwood Mac

Their 1973 self-titled debut album Buckingham Nicks — remastered and re-released in September 2025 — showcased two young artists already fully formed: Buckingham's intricate fingerpicking guitar style and Nicks' distinctive, witchy soprano. The album didn't sell, but it caught the right ears.

As told in the 2009 BBC documentary Fleetwood Mac: Don't Stop, drummer Mick Fleetwood had stopped by Sound City in LA in 1974 to check out the recording space and was played a track from Buckingham Nicks to hear the room's acoustics. He was immediately struck by Buckingham's guitar playing.

"Didn't think about Stevie one way or the other because I was looking for a guitar player," Fleetwood admitted. "Stevie's 'never forgiven me.' It was like, 'Oh, you didn't want me. You just wanted Lindsey,' which was right at the beginning. It was true. And very quickly we realized that they were totally joined at the hip."

Buckingham agreed to join — on one condition. "I said, 'Well, I'll have to talk to my girlfriend about that. But if we do, you're going to have to take my girlfriend, too.'" It was a package deal that would transform both the band and popular music.

Fleetwood Mac, Rumours, and the Breakup That Fuelled a Classic

The band's 1975 eponymous album landed at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, featuring hits like Landslide, Rhiannon, Over My Head, and Say You Love Me. But as their star was rising, the relationships within the band were crumbling.

"When we joined Fleetwood Mac, everything was really rocky between me and Lindsey," Nicks said in the Don't Stop documentary. "I think we kind of all made a little silent vow: Let's fix these relationships for right now, because we cannot break up. We just can't. If we do, there will be no Fleetwood Mac."

The relationships ended anyway. In 1976, the McVies divorced. Nicks and Buckingham split. And the band went into the studio to record what would become one of the best-selling albums in history.

Rumours (1977) — over 40 million copies sold worldwide, winner of Album of the Year at the Grammys — was recorded while its creators were living through the heartbreak it documents. Nicks wrote Dreams (the band's only US number one) and Gold Dust Woman. Buckingham wrote Go Your Own Way, a barely disguised attack on Nicks that she reportedly hated having to sing backing vocals on every night.

"My songs were all about Lindsey, and Lindsey's songs were all about me," Nicks said. "And you just had to blow it off and play the song."

Solo Careers, Addiction, and the First Departure

The band continued releasing albums — Tusk (1979), Mirage (1982) — while Nicks simultaneously built a formidable solo career, releasing Bella Donna (1981), The Wild Heart (1983), and Rock a Little (1985).

But it wasn't all forward momentum. In 1985, Nicks sought treatment for cocaine addiction. She later admitted she was largely absent during the recording of Fleetwood Mac's 1987 album Tango in the Night, battling addiction to Klonopin.

That same year, Buckingham left Fleetwood Mac right before the band was due to tour. The departure was explosive. "When Lindsey said 'I'm not going,' I think I got up and ran across the room and tried to strangle him," Nicks recalled in the documentary. "And then he chased me out of the house through Christine's driveway and we had a huge fight. That was that. He was done."

Nicks continued with the band through Behind the Mask (1990), but left in 1991 after a dispute over her song Silver Springs — which she wanted for her own album and Fleetwood Mac wanted for theirs. "It didn't occur to me that they wouldn't let me have it back," she told the BBC. "I said to his manager, 'You find Mick, and you tell him that if I don't have those tapes by Monday, I am no longer a member of Fleetwood Mac.'"

The 1997 Reunion: The Dance

In 1997, the classic lineup — Nicks, Buckingham, the McVies, and Fleetwood — reunited for an MTV concert and released the live album The Dance. It became one of the most successful reunion tours in rock history.

But the peace between Nicks and Buckingham was carefully managed. "Lindsey and I don't talk," Nicks told the Arizona Republic that year. "We don't sit down and have long discussions. We don't do that much offstage. We're both being careful. We don't want to [anger one another]. When we get onstage, because it's a performance, we let go of things. When we get up there onstage, we have to relate to each other. A lot of stuff comes out."

The 2018 Firing and Its Aftermath

The band released Say You Will in 2003 and continued touring through 2009 and 2013. But in 2018, before another major tour, Buckingham was dropped from the band.

"Words like 'fired' are ugly references as far as I'm concerned," Mick Fleetwood told Rolling Stone. "We arrived at the impasse of hitting a brick wall… we made a decision that we could not go on with him. Majority rules in terms of what we need to do as a band and go forward."

Buckingham addressed his departure at a live show: "Probably some of you know that for the last three months I have sadly taken leave of my band of 43 years, Fleetwood Mac. This was not something that was really my doing or my choice. I think what you would say is that there were factions within the band that had lost their perspective."

He subsequently sued the band over lost earnings from the tour. The lawsuit was settled out of court. It was, by any measure, the lowest point in the band's long and turbulent history.

The Reconciliation: Buckingham Nicks Remastered and the Apple TV+ Documentary

The thaw began quietly. In August 2025, Buckingham and Nicks announced that their elusive 1973 debut album would be remastered and released on CD and digital for the first time — arriving 19th September 2025. As a teaser, they re-released the single Don't Let Me Down Again. It was a significant olive branch: a shared creative act after years of silence.

Then came the Apple TV+ documentary — a project that has apparently done more to heal the band's wounds than anything else. "The process of making that has been a very circular healing process for all of us," Buckingham said in August 2026. The tensions of 2018 have "been healed and worked out." And "Stevie and I are talking all the time now."

As for what comes next — new music, a reunion tour, further collaborations — Buckingham is keeping his cards close. But "anything is possible" is a long way from where things stood in 2018.

Why Fleetwood Mac Endures

Buckingham made a telling observation at the Variety event: "There are groups that are quite popular in the moment, and maybe 10 years later, everyone's going, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah.' Fleetwood Mac was not one of those groups, luckily."

Dreams went viral on TikTok in 2020 — 43 years after its release — when a video of a man skateboarding while drinking cranberry juice accumulated hundreds of millions of views. A new generation discovered Rumours. Streaming numbers surged. The band's catalogue has shown a remarkable ability to find new audiences across generations, speaking to the emotional universality of the themes — heartbreak, betrayal, resilience, desire — and the sheer sonic pleasure of the recordings.

With Christine McVie's death in 2022 and Peter Green's in 2020, whatever Fleetwood Mac does next carries an elegiac quality — a reckoning with what they were, what they lost, and what endures. The Apple TV+ documentary, due in 2027, may be the definitive account of that story. And with Rumours turning 50 in February 2027, the timing couldn't be more significant.

Shop Official Fleetwood Mac Merch UK

Whether you've been a fan since Rumours dropped in 1977 or you've just fallen down the rabbit hole, we stock a full range of official Fleetwood Mac merchandise at Wonderhaul — all officially licensed, fast UK delivery. Visit our Fleetwood Mac Merch Hub for the complete range.