Lindsey Buckingham speaks at 2026 Variety Power Of Young Hollywood
Lindsey Buckingham on new album, Fleetwood Mac and modern technology in music | AP interview
Lindsey Buckingham Reveals He and Ex Stevie Nicks Talk "All the Time" After Years-Long Rift
Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham told E! News at Variety’s Power of Young Hollywood event how a special project healed the band’s rifts, including bringing him and Stevie Nicks to a better spot.
By HAYLEY SANTAFLORENTINA, CHRISTINA CAVALERI
Time casts a spell, helping heal past rifts.
And 50 years after Fleetwood Mac released its iconic Rumours album, Lindsey Buckingham detailed how the band—including members Stevie Nicks, Mick Fleetwood and John McVie—has been able to bury the many hatchets that have been raised over the years thanks to a special project.
“Fleetwood Mac has been working on a documentary,” he told E! News at Variety’s Power of Young Hollywood event Aug. 6, referring to Apple TV’s upcoming 2027 documentary. “I think the process of making that has been a very circular healing process for all of us.”
And while Buckingham was reticent to speculate as to whether the group’s newfound harmony might lead to more touring together in the future, he said “the most important thing” is the peace they’ve achieved.
“Because we had left things in 2019, maybe as far as I was concerned, not in a very good place for all the wrong reasons,” he admitted of the group’s world tour before the pandemic. “No one was happy about it, and all of that has been healed and worked out.”
That healing journey also involved himself and Nicks, whose romantic relationship came to a tumultuous end while recording Rumors, leading to years-long fractures in the decades since.
As Buckingham noted, “Stevie and I are talking all the time now.”
In fact, he and Nicks released a remastered version of their 1973 studio album Buckingham Nicks—which they released before joining the iconic group—in 2025. However, much like the prospect of touring, Buckingham remained coy over rumors of future collaborations—lest he incandescently tell any sweet little lies.
“Next year should be a pretty interesting year,” he teased, “because I think quite a few things will reveal themselves.”
Although he hasn’t stopped thinking about tomorrow, he is more than happy to also take a look back, including to reflect on is the enduring legacy of Fleetwood Mac, which also featured late band member Christina McVie, and his gratitude for it.
“There are groups that are quite popular in the moment, and maybe 10 years later, everyone's kind of going, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’” he admitted. “Fleetwood Mac was not one of those groups, luckily.”
For proof, he has to look no further than seeing how current artists, such as Sombr, are still engaging with their material.
“About three or four months ago, I got a reach out from Sombr wanting me to know how much of an influence I'd been on him,” Buckingham said of the 21-year-old, who was one of Variety’s honorees. “So, of course I was very happy to be involved in this tonight for that reason, and also because that's what music is all about. It's about passing the torch.”
Because as children get older, so, too, do the members of Fleetwood Mac.
“I don't think you really ever know whether you have done your job properly as a band member of Fleetwood Mac and as a solo artist, without the equation of time,” Buckingham added. “Because you've got to wait for time to intervene and to find out whether younger people are going to take to what you've done, and at that point you can say you've done your job properly.”
And while Buckingham, Nicks and the other band members have climbed a mountain and turned their drama around, there’s a lot of history there.
The pair has apparently smoothed things over through working on the band's upcoming documentary.
By Hannah Dailey
Lindsey Buckingham says that looking back on the past has helped him move forward with his Fleetwood Mac bandmates — particularly Stevie Nicks.
In an interview with E! News published Thursday (Aug. 6), the guitarist explained that he and the other members of the iconic rock group have found that their collective work on executing an upcoming Fleetwood Mac documentary has been “a very circular healing process for all of us.”
“Because we had left things in 2019, maybe as far as I was concerned, not in a very good place for all the wrong reasons,” he continued, referencing the band’s rift a few years ago that led to him being temporarily fired from the lineup. “No one was happy about it, and all of that has been healed and worked out.”
Buckingham’s relationship with Nicks especially has been famously fraught over the decades, but according to him, “Stevie and I are talking all the time now.”
The interview — which took place at Variety‘s Power of Young Hollywood event in Los Angeles — comes nearly two years after Apple announced production on a definitive Fleetwood Mac documentary directed by Frank Marshall, featuring rare insights from the surviving band members themselves. A release date has not yet been announced, but the project is expected to arrive in 2027.
Last year, Buckingham and Nicks teamed up to re-release their 1973 album, Buckingham Nicks, which reached No. 3 on the Top Album Sales chart in September. The collaboration between the pair showed fans that they’ve come a long way since 2018, when Fleetwood Mac announced that it had parted ways with Buckingham ahead of the band’s tour that year. Nicks was reportedly the main decision-maker on that front after Buckingham supposedly sought to delay the trek so that he could promote his solo work first, with tensions reaching a boiling point that January as the two musicians butted heads over their appearance at the MusiCares Person of the Year gala honoring them — less than a week after which Buckingham was fired.
He later sued Fleetwood Mac for allegedly booting him from the tour without just cause and costing him millions in earnings, but the group settled in December 2018 — and now, it appears to be water under the bridge.
“Next year should be a pretty interesting year,” Buckingham added to E!, teasing future projects with his bandmates. “I think quite a few things will reveal themselves.”
