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Buckingham Nicks — a long-unavailable blueprint for the Fleetwood Mac sound
The only album Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks recorded as a duo is more than just a rock curio
⭐⭐⭐⭐/5
by: Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
The Financial Times
They stare from the album cover, clothes-free, radiating a 1970s ethos pitched somewhere between Playboy and a Californian hippy commune. Lindsey Buckingham has a coiffure so magnificently profuse that it appears to mock the ultra-conditioned lifestyle of the top athlete that he might have become had music not claimed him. Meanwhile, Stevie Nicks struggles to alchemise a frown of disapproval into something more alluring. She went along with the nude photoshoot with deep reluctance.
The album is Buckingham Nicks, a crucial yet long missing piece of Fleetwood Mac’s lore. Out of print and unavailable on streaming platforms until its reissue earlier this year, it was Buckingham and Nicks’s debut as a duo; at the time, they were also romantic partners. The record flopped when it came out in 1973 but caught the ear of Mick Fleetwood, who recruited Buckingham to his band as guitarist. Nicks came too, at Buckingham’s insistence. The first outing with the new line-up was 1975’s Fleetwood Mac, a turning point for the Mac’s transformation into titans of soft rock.
In retrospect, Buckingham Nicks resembles an audition for what came next. It has an unfledged feel, with a pair of inconsequential instrumentals padding out the brief run-time, but the album is more than a curio.
The songwriting and vocals are shared. “Long Distance Winner” is Nicks’s account of living with the intensely ambitious Buckingham, who grew up in a family of competitive swimmers (an older brother won silver at the 1968 Olympics). The use of doubling runs through the song, from layered jangling riffs to the pair’s voices in the chorus. The effect conveys the dual sense of two forces vying yet also attracting each other.
“Don’t Let Me Down Again”, penned by Buckingham, is an exuberantly driven rocker in which he struts, rather than mopes, in the bluesy role of the man treated badly by a woman. “Crystal”, later to become a Mac song in a rearranged version on Fleetwood Mac, is a Buckingham-sung number about finding the truth about oneself in a lover, set to a delicate latticework of acoustic guitars.
The album’s standout, “Frozen Love”, is the track that captured Mick Fleetwood’s attention. Co-written by Nicks and Buckingham, with each taking turns on lead vocals and harmonising together, it is an involving number about a complicatedly codependent relationship. Here is the blueprint for the sophisticated sound and emotions that made Fleetwood Mac into one of rock’s most storied bands.
Out now on Rhino
BUCKINGHAM NICKS
Buckingham Nicks (reissue, 1973) - RHINO
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ (7/10 stars)
By Piers Martin (Uncut Magazine)
Take it with a pinch of salt, but it’s a tough time to be a Fleetwood Mac fan. Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks are still at loggerheads after the guitarist was turfed out of the band in 2018 – Nicks declared she was “no longer willing to work with him”; he suffered a heart attack soon after being fired – and the window has all but shut on a Fleetwood Mac classic lineup reunion now that each member is pushing 80 and Christine McVie has gone. Holograms could be the answer.
But before the credits roll on this most enduring rock’n’roll saga, a key chapter in the band’s origin story from a more harmonious time 52 years ago is finally being reissued. Buckingham Nicks, the mythologised 1973 folk-rock debut by Buckingham Nicks, as Lindsey and Stevie were known back then, has been cleaned up and remastered from the original tapes and is in print for the first time since 1982, and on streaming services and CD for the first time (there’s also a limited vinyl edition with two reissued 7” singles). In some ways, this offers a sense of closure: let’s put it out properly before it’s too late.
Why such a pivotal record in Fleetwood Mac’s history has been ignored for so long does lead you to question the pair’s affection for the material. Surely any scheduling or legal issues preventing the release could have been resolved at any point over the past 40 years if they’d wanted it out, especially given the band’s multi-generational appeal this century. Indeed, it’s such fandom that has kept Buckingham Nicks alive all this time, when it pretty much sank without trace upon release and fared little better when reissued in 1977 and ’81 in attempts to capitalise on the Mac’s global domination.
The trouble is, once you’ve heard Fleetwood Mac or Rumours, Buckingham Nicks feels a little threadbare, like sketches for the main event – and that’s fine, because before fate or destiny intervened in the form of Mick Fleetwood in November 1974, this album captured the duo at their best. Taken on its own, Buckingham Nicks is a nifty collection of floral folk cuts and quicksilver instrumentals with one foot in Laurel Canyon, the other in Nashville, that show the duo’s songwriting promise. Aged 25, Stevie’s all-seeing mysticism is taking shape on “Crystal” and “Long Distance Winner”; her partner, a year younger, volleys between traditional composition (“Stephanie”, “Don’t Let Me Down Again”), bluesy rockabilly (“Without A Leg To Stand On”) and finger-picked flamboyance (“Frozen Love”). They’d already written “Landslide”, “Monday Morning” and “Rhiannon” before they formally joined Fleetwood Mac in January 1975, and would rework “Crystal” from this album for July’s Fleetwood Mac.
The pair had met as high-school students in the Bay Area in the late 1960s. Buckingham, a guitarist since childhood, played bass in a psychedelic outfit called Fritz, and soon enough Nicks became their vocalist. Fritz shared bills with the likes of Janis Joplin, the Steve Miller Band and even a festival show with The Jimi Hendrix Experience, and were attracting industry attention. Keith Olsen, who’d recently set up Sound City studios in Los Angeles, saw Fritz in San Francisco and invited them to LA for a showcase. This spelled disaster for Fritz, because Olsen saw the potential of Buckingham and Nicks as a duo and proposed they record with him.
At the time, the couple had taken over a room in Buckingham’s father’s coffee roasting plant in the Bay Area, where they were figuring themselves out musically and romantically. They worked on songs and recorded four-track demos for a year before Nicks suggested they move to LA. There, in 1972, they stayed rent-free at Olsen’s house in Coldwater Canyon; he believed in them to the extent that he effectively supported them for a year, letting them use Sound City where he could produce them and shop them to labels. Still, they needed money, so Nicks worked three jobs – cleaning Olsen’s house, waitressing and hostessing – while Buckingham toked at home and zoned in on the music.
Olsen assembled classy players for the sessions: Waddy Wachtel, later a fixture in Nicks’ band, plays slide guitar on the album’s worst song, “Lola (My Love)”, a hokey Buckingham stomp; and Elvis’ rhythm section, drummer Ron Tutt and bassist Jerry Scheff, anchor Buckingham’s ecstatic riffing on “Don’t Let Me Down Again”. Throughout, you hear songs before their Mac upgrades: “Stephanie”, Buckingham’s sprightly ballad for Nicks, would muscle up into “Never Going Back Again”; “Without A Leg To Stand On” is the basis for “What Makes You Think You’re The One”. The seven-minute “Frozen Love” – the album’s sole co-write – pits duelling vocals and spectral folk against a looser second section and would be revamped as “The Chain”.
Olsen played “Frozen Love” and other Buckingham Nicks songs to Mick Fleetwood when he came by Sound City to suss out studios for the next Mac record, impressing the drummer not just with the room’s audio spec, but also the track’s spot-on production and freewheeling arrangement. When Bob Welch quit Fleetwood Mac a month later, in December ’74, Fleetwood needed a new guitarist and recalled Buckingham’s playing on “Frozen Love”. Having been dropped by Polydor after Buckingham Nicks’ poor sales, the guitarist agreed to join Fleetwood Mac on condition that Nicks came with him. Now, at least, we can hear what Fleetwood saw in Buckingham and Nicks all those years ago, and appreciate the wild ride they’ve taken us on.
Sleeve Notes:
Crying In The Night; Stephanie; Without A Leg To Stand On; Crystal; Long Distance Winner; Don’t Let Me Down Again; Django; Races Are Run; Lola (My Love); Frozen Love.
7” Singles:
Crying In The Night (Single Version); Stephanie (Single Version); Don’t Let Me Down Again (Single Version); Races Are Run (Single Version).
Buckingham Nicks
Buckingham Nicks RHINO
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ (8/10 stars)
Pat Carty (Classic Rock Magazine)
The Mac in all but name. In retrospect it seems preposterous that this album flopped in 1973, but then fate had other plans for Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. Recorded while Nicks was still working day jobs to support them both, it looked like disappearing altogether, until Mick Fleetwood, shopping around for recording studios, heard glorious album closer Frozen Love – and his future opening up before him – at Sound City in Van Nuys. He swiftly brought the couple into Fleetwood Mac, and all worries were soon over.
Pretty much everything here could have slotted onto the more famous records that followed – Buckingham’s guitar solo emerging out of Nicks’ Long Distance Winner, his country/blues picking on Lola (My Love) – but it’s Frozen Love that’s the real prize. A distant precursor to Mac’s The Chain, it has the voices dancing around each other, and Buckingham’s acoustic break gives way to an orchestral swell and stinging electrics.
A superb album rescued from the dustbin of history at last.
THE ORIGIN STORY OF STEVIE AND LINDSEY
A long-awaited reissue of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham's 1973 debut, Buckingham Nicks, takes us back to the beginning of rock & roll’s ultimate dysfunctional romance
By ROB SHEFFIELD
Rollingstone - September 17, 2025
⭐⭐⭐⭐ (4/5 stars)
When Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham released Buckingham Nicks in 1973, they were just a couple of nobodies. Two hippie kids lost in L.A., doing an unfashionable folk-rock flower-child record. Nobody bought it. Nobody cared. Some might have heard it as a promising debut, others as a flop. But it’s safe to say that nobody heard it and said, “Not only are these two of the planet’s greatest songwriters, this is an album they’ll keep arguing about for the next 50 years!”
After the couple joined Fleetwood Mac for classics like Rumours, Buckingham Nicks became a footnote in their story. It’s been a rare collector’s item for decades, a lost gem never released on CD. Most of their fans never even heard it. But it’s finally back in this long-awaited reissue. No hits, no bonus tracks — just a charming little American beauty of a record. You can hear these two lovebirds learn their craft, alone in the tall grass, doing their stuff, with nobody to impress except each other.
For years, it seemed crazy to hope this Buckingham Nicks reissue would ever happen. They’ve spent years promising it, un-promising it, denying it, battling over it in public. But the exes’ long-running love/hate story finally exploded in 2019, when the band kicked out Lindsey. (What other band could manage to break up onstage in the middle of accepting a MusiCares award as humanitarians of the year? Only these guys.) It looked final, especially after the tragic death of Christine McVie.
But it was a shock this summer to see matching social-media messages from Stevie and Lindsey, teasing this project. They posted lyrics from “Frozen Love” — the first move they’d made together in years. On one hand, we’re all grown-ups here, and we know rock vets don’t necessarily do their own social media, right? But on the other hand, we also know that nobody speaks for Stevie unless Stevie says so. Hell, she’d show up in public wearing sweatpants before she’d ever let any of her team go rogue about Lindsey, a.k.a. Mr. Rulers Make Bad Lovers. So it looks like these two have sucked us all right back into their music, their madness, their whole glorious saga — just as they always do.
That musical chemistry is loud and clear on Buckingham Nicks. “We write about each other, we have continually written about each other, and we’ll probably keep writing about each other until we’re dead,” Nicks told me in 2014. “That’s what we have always been to each other. Together, we have been through great success, great misunderstandings, a great musical connection.” Listening now, you can tell they already knew what they’re doing. Lindsey is one California guitar boy who learned his tricks from Brian Wilson — he’s into verse-chorus-verse tunecraft, not sloppy jams. Stevie flexes her cowgirl side — they dedicated the album to her wild-ass grandfather A.J. Nicks, who played her country records when she was a little girl.
They wrote the songs in L.A., after moving together from San Francisco — she worked nights as a waitress, while he sat on the couch, smoked hash, and played guitar. They met in 1965, at a teenage party where he sat in the corner strumming the Mamas and the Papas’ classic “California Dreamin’.” She walked over and sang along. “I just threw in my Michelle Phillips harmony,” she recalled. “He was so beautiful.” Considering all the sexual/chemical disasters in the Mamas and the Papas, this song might seem like an ominous way to meet — except Lindsey and Stevie went on to make Michelle and John Phillips look like total amateurs in the California-nightmare department.
“Crystal” is the closest thing to a famous tune on Buckingham Nicks — they redid it on Fleetwood Mac’s self-titled 1975 album, slightly overshadowed by Nicks’ other two contributions. (Those would be “Rhiannon” and “Landslide.”) There’s the finger-picking instrumental valentine “Stephanie,” the jazz standard “Django,” and the seven-minute showstopper “Frozen Love,” one of the only official collaborations these tortured poets ever wrote together. Their friend Waddy Wachtel played guitar, alongside session pros like Jim Keltner and Jerry Scheff. Waddy’s big brother Jimmy did the artists a favor and took the cover photo, presenting them as a wide-eyed hippie couple in the Garden of Eden, before shirts were invented. (He later did classic covers like Bruce Springsteen’s The River.)
The result was a total commercial flop that nobody noticed — except for Mick Fleetwood, who recognized greatness when he heard it. In 1973, Fleetwood Mac was just another washed-up band of English blues hounds, scrounging for gigs, years past their Sixties heyday with their original guitar genius Peter Green. When Mick heard the album, from producer Keith Olsen, he figured maybe he could hire this Lindsey Buckingham guy to give the band a little taste of California sunshine.
But Lindsey had to make things difficult — which turned out to be his specialty. He refused to join unless they also brought in his girlfriend, even though the band already had another female singer-songwriter. No matter how much trash people talk about Lindsey, you have to applaud this heroic gesture of loyalty — he was willing to throw away his entire career rather than sell out Stevie. Mick could have laughed in his face — who did this punk kid think he was, playing hardball with the rock stars? But he decided to give in and hire them both. It’s one of the only rational decisions Mick Fleetwood ever made.
As everybody knows, the pair took the Mac to megastar level with classic songs about breaking up, making up, packing up, shacking up, and wreaking endless misery upon each other, along with the rest of us. Rumours just gets more famous all the time, as chronicled in Alan Light’s excellent new book Don’t Stop. Meanwhile, Buckingham Nicks got forgotten by history. In their iconic 2012 he-said-she-said interview with Rolling Stone’s Andy Greene, they totally contradicted each other about reissuing it. “Next year is the 40th anniversary of Buckingham Nicks,” Stevie said. “And we’re hoping next year to get the record out.” She suggested doing a live Buckingham Nicks tour, calling it “a sparkly, special, extra present.”
But for these two, sparkles only happen when the house is burning down, and they couldn’t get their heads together in time to make it happen for the 40th or even 50th anniversary. As Lindsey lamented, it “makes us the anti-Eagles, in terms of never, ever being on the same page.” Yet there’s something so beautifully poetic about finally reviving it for its 52nd birthday — a round number would be the pragmatic adult business move, and what fun would that be? Having these songs out there in the world again is a historic occasion to celebrate. If you listen to Buckingham Nicks in 2025, you can hear all their combustible chemistry, even in their young and innocent days. And you can hear why these two have spent the past five decades making the lives of music fans — not to mention their own — so much messier. No doubt we would all lead more peaceful, civilized, emotionally stable lives if this album never existed. But that’s all the more reason to be thankful that it does.
Music Review: ‘Buckingham Nicks’ is an engaging blueprint for the classics to come
By: Hillel Italie, The Associated Press
“Buckingham Nicks” by Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks
⭐⭐⭐ (3/5 stars)
- On repeat: “Races Are Run”
- Skip it: “Django”
- For fans of: You know who you are.
NEW YORK (AP) — There are two ways to review “Buckingham Nicks,” the long-awaited digital reissue of the 1973, pre-Fleetwood Mac album by Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, their only recording project as a duo.
Imagine you had never heard of them, that they were an obscure 1970s act who made one album, broke up and left the business. You might think of “Buckingham Nicks” as a kind of period curiosity, a taste of vintage Los Angeles singer-songwriter pop, with its folkish stylings, well-crafted melodies and earnest sensibilities (“Do you always trust your first, initial feeling?/Special knowledge holds true, bears believing,” Nicks sings on “Crystal”). The scale is modest and nothing is likely to strike you as a lost classic, but you’ll probably take to at least a handful of the 10 songs — the strumming riffs on “Crying in the Night” and “Stephanie,” the catchy chorus of “Races Are Run,” the way Buckingham’s sensitive tenor is filled out by Nicks’ husky vibrato. You might end up wondering what happened to the two hippie-artists, who look out from the album cover naked, long-haired and unsmiling, as if the photographer had barged in without warning.
But if you’re in the great universe of Buckingham-Nicks obsessives, encyclopedic on their breakups and reunions and musical sparring matches, you’ll find (or rediscover) a trove of clues and portents in Friday’s release. The skillful acoustic picking that opens the instrumental “Stephanie” will remind you of Buckingham’s work on Fleetwood Mac’s “Never Going Back Again.” The opening gallop and heavy bass of “Don’t Let Me Down Again” looks ahead to “Second Hand News” and the slow buildup of “Lola My Lola” feels like a test run for “The Chain.”
Buckingham and Nicks were in their mid-20s during the album’s production and if they ever enjoyed a phase of easy, blissful love, they already seem past it. “Crystal,” the only song also to appear on the breakthrough “Fleetwood Mac” album of 1975, is a rare expression of devotion, or gratitude. Other tracks seem closer to the hard lessons of Nicks’ future chart-topper, “Dreams.” There’s the wary refrain of “Long Distance Winner” — “Yeah, you’re the winner/Long distance winner,” echoed on “Races Are Run” and its reminder: “Races are run, some people win/Some people always have to lose.” Buckingham’s “Don’t Let Me Down Again,” in which the singer fears his lover’s departure, feels like a prequel to the breakup narrative of “Go Your Own Way.”
The reissue adds clarity to the sound of “Buckingham Nicks” that you don’t get from the muddled, unauthorized downloads which turn up online. And the album has a solid cast of session musicians, including Elvis Presley veterans Ronnie Tutt on drums and Jerry Scheff on bass and LA fixture Waddy Wachtel on guitar. But the arrangements never quite anchor or amplify the songs the way drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie would after Fleetwood’s fateful invitation to Buckingham to join his band, and Buckingham’s fateful insistence that his girlfriend come along.
Give “Fleetwood Mac” a listen if you haven’t lately and the difference will grab you from the opening track, Buckingham’s “Monday Morning” — an instant leap into a future that Buckingham and Nicks had only begun to imagine.
Debut LP by the Mac’s golden couple – pre tantrems and tiaras – gets reissued.
By James McNair.
Mojo Magazine November, 2025
Buckingham Nicks
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Buckingham Nicks
RHINO CD/DL/LP
“IT WAS just a one-off moment,” Stevie Nicks recalled of her and Lindsey Buckingham’s duet on The Mamas & The Papas’ California Dreamin’ at a San Francisco Christian youth party in 1966. Two years later she’d joined the Fritz Rabyne Memorial Band, Buckingham’s psychedelic rock act. The pair weren’t yet an item, but support slots with Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin seeded their romance with rock’s mythos. “I would stroll through San José State University with my guitar, thinking, Does everybody know who I am? Because I’m a rock star,” Nicks told this writer in 2013. “I felt it and really believed it.”
Despite the best efforts of Fritz’s manager David Forrester, no record deal was forthcoming. It was Keith Olsen, already a producer for The Millennium and Joe Walsh’s pre- Eagles band The James Gang, who helped secure Buckingham and Nicks’s contract with Polydor – but only after he’d persuaded them to ditch the rest of Fritz and make some demos as a duo. Recorded sporadically through much of 1973 at Sound City, Los Angeles, Buckingham Nicks proved to be one hell of a debut. Given that Nicks was working hamburger joints and as Olsen’s cleaner to support herself and Buckingham while making it, Long Distance Winner, a brilliant Nicks song about “living with a valid inclusion.
Though best known as their serendipitous conduit to tenure in Fleetwood Mac after Olsen played Frozen Love on a whim, it seems astonishing that Buckingham Nicks is only now gaining re-release after languishing online in bootleg form for decades.
Quoted in David Fricke’s new sleevenotes and mindful, perhaps, that it was he and experience of ‘proper’ studio recording, Buckingham understates that Buckingham Nicks “stands up in a way you hope it would.”
Buoyed by their precocious gifts and aided by such stalwarts as drummer Jim Keltner, Elvis’s TCB band bassist Jerry Scheff and sometime Everly Brothers session guitarist Waddy Wachtel, they clearly relished jumping in at the deep end.
Throughout the record, there are audible seeds of the sublime AOR sound that Nicks and Buckingham-era Stephanie, a pretty instrumental love-gift Buckingham reportedly wrote for Nicks while laid-up with glandular fever, is one of several songs deploying technique he would later bring to Never Going Back Again, while Lola (My Love) has shades of The Chain (and a sexist lyric Buckingham would likely blush about today).
Buckingham Nicks often juggles familiar, sometimes slightly competing interests. Buckingham seems torn between facilitating pretty, drivetime- friendly Nicks doozies such as Crying In The Night and more ‘musicianly’ indulgences such as his cover of US jazz pianist John Lewis’s nod to the king of gypsy jazz, Django. That said, some of these Nicks songs also pack more quirk than was later usual. Her vocal melody on Races Are Run has gorgeous, slightly unusual modula- tions, as does that on the aforemen- tioned Long Distance Winner, a fabulous thing with prominent, itch-scratching guiro. There, as elsewhere, Keith Olsen and engineer/ future Rumours overseer Richard Dashut’s rich, vivid sonics give a mighty leg-up. It’s also easy to hear why Frozen Love – the proggy, shape-shifting holy grail of Fleetwood Mac’s most combustible couple – so impressed Mick Fleetwood.
Buckingham Nicks wouldn’t make the big splash they’d hoped for, but prior to its September 5, 1973 release, Nicks had one last hurdle to jump, namely the album’s nude cover-shot of herself and Lindsey, as conceived and photographed by Waddy Wachtel’s brother Jimmy.
“Everybody will tell you I’m modest,” Nicks told this writer in 2013. “I could not have been more to jump off a speeding train.’ Meanwhile, Lindsey was like, ‘Come on. Don’t be a child – this is art.’ My dad didn’t like the photograph of course, and when he asked why I did it and I told him I was under pressure, he said, ‘Stevie, you always have a choice.’ That was a big lesson for me – a very useful one for my time in Fleetwood Mac.”
Forgotten 70s gem fuels rumours of a Fleetwood Mac reunion
BUCKINGHAM NICKS:
Buckingham Nicks (Rhino)Verdict: Forgotten gem revived ★★★★✩
By Adrian Thrills - The Daily Mail September 19, 2025
THE rumour mill went into overdrive back in July when Stevie Nicks and her estranged Fleetwood Mac bandmate Lindsey Buckingham posted two cryptic messages on Instagram.
They contained lyrics from a song, Frozen Love, by their early 1970s band, Buckingham Nicks, but that didn’t stop fans from speculating that another reunion of the famously combustible Fleetwood Mac could be on the cards.
Alas, that reunion — which would have been the first since the death of keyboardist Christine McVie in 2022 — has yet to materialise. But the apparent thaw in relations between Nicks and Buckingham suggests it isn’t wholly out of the question, especially as the pair are jointly overseeing today’s re-release of an album they made as a duo in 1973... a reissue that turned out to be the real reason behind those enigmatic posts.
Their tempestuous relationship is the stuff of legend. Having met at high school in California, they became lovers and musical partners in Buckingham Nicks before joining Fleetwood Mac in 1974, rejuvenating the British blues band by adding their Californian harmonies to the mix.
They went on to chronicle their crumbling romance on 1977’s classic Rumours, with Buckingham writing Go Your Own Way about Nicks; and Nicks responding by penning Dreams and Silver Springs about him.
Many of the building blocks of Rumours (and the self-titled Fleetwood Mac album that preceded it) are present on this reissue, a sought-after collector’s item that is now available on vinyl (€35), CD (€14) and streaming services for the first time in decades. Vocalist Stevie and guitarist Lindsey pool their talents superbly, with their contrasting writing styles (hers poetic, his more matter-of-fact) offering a glimpse of what was to come.
‘She’s a tarnished pearl, she’ll take your money, she’ll wreck your world,’ sings Nicks on Crying In The Night, the cautionary tale of a femme fatale that displays the melodic flair that would later make her a superstar.
Crystal, a pastoral ballad written by Stevie and sung by Lindsey, is another indication of the pair’s natural chemistry.
It’s not all hippie hearts and flowers. Nicks sings of the challenges of living with Buckingham on Long Distance Winner (‘you burn brightly, in spite of yourself’). The guitarist, foreshadowing the soap opera that lay ahead, gives his side of the story on Don’t Let Me Down Again: ‘Baby, baby, don’t treat me so bad / I’m the best boy that you ever had.’
Not everything stands the test of time. Buckingham’s Lola (My Love) is throwaway, and the album’s two guitar instrumentals are superfluous, despite one, Stephanie, being a love letter from Lindsey to Stevie, who was born Stephanie Lynn Nicks. But, with drummer Jim Keltner and guitarist Waddy Wachtel adding muscle, there’s plenty to admire on an album that made so little impact in the 1970s that it was soon deleted, with the band subsequently being dropped by their record label and Nicks going back to her old job as a waitress.
It’s heartening that the pair seem to be back on speaking terms. Buckingham left Fleetwood Mac for a second time in 2018 after a fallout with Nicks (he’d previously quit in 1987), but that now appears to be forgotten.
What happens next is anyone’s guess, but this neglected gem is a timely reminder of the opening steps on the road to Rumours.
Time cast a spell on ‘Buckingham Nicks’: record gets second life in reissue
September 21, 2025
“She’s back in town.” Before Fleetwood Mac, there was Buckingham Nicks — the only studio album recorded solely by Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. The record, initially released in 1973, was reissued on Friday after being out of print for almost 50 years. Largely considered a commercial failure, the original release came a little over a year before their introduction into the decades-defining band.
“We’re so happy this album is getting a second life,” Buckingham and Nicks wrote in a collaborative Instagram post Friday.
The release marked the album’s streaming and CD debut, mint for next-generation fans. It features original singles “Crying in the Night,” “Don’t Let Me Down Again,” and a third single chosen for the reissue, “Frozen Love” — the song which Buckingham and Nicks both cryptically posted the lyrics of on their social media in July.
The naked imagery of the album cover parallels the honest dialogue present throughout the tracks, two lovers struggling to reconcile their differences. It’s clear that the emotional appeal of Fleetwood Mac started with the toxic romantic tension in Buckingham Nicks. Through heartfelt harmonies, the pair previews the best of Fleetwood Mac — the inescapable “sound of the woman that loves you.”
Nicks said in a 1989 interview that the opening track, “Crying in the Night,” depicts a TV character played by Lesley Ann Warren. At face value, the song appears to be disconnected from the rest of Buckingham Nicks, but when looked at closer, the “wrong kind of girl” that Nicks sings about seems to represent the girl that she fears she cannot be for her then-partner, Lindsey Buckingham.
After a full listen of the album, the connection between the songs and Buckingham and Nicks’ relationship cannot be denied — with the sexy blues-rock track “Lola (My Love)” depicting a fantasy woman for Buckingham, who “knows how to treat her man” and “does everything a woman can.”
Fleetwood Mac recorded the most widely known version of “Crystal” as a band, but the ballad debuted on Buckingham Nicks. Fleetwood Mac’s version refines the instrumentals, but the Buckingham Nicks original feels raw and exposed. Paired with “Stephanie,” an A-side instrumental from the original release composed by Buckingham as a love song for Nicks, whose full name is Stephanie, the narrative still stains the pages without words.
One universal theme exists in the work: running away from love, heartbreak and loss. Nicks tries to keep up with her lover, “running down the hill,” but he runs too fast, coming out as the “Long Distance Winner.” After the sprint, they find that “Races are Run,” where “some people win,” and “some people always have to lose.”
“Frozen Love” feels like the aquifer seeping into the “Silver Springs.” Buckingham and Nicks cry out for a love shivering in the “cold freezing air” in this 7-minute track. At the chorus, they agree, “If you go forward, I’ll meet you there.”
Buckingham Nicks feels like a direct pipeline to Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. The record sparked the catalyst for Fleetwood Mac’s success, shown through the emotion that flows through their crystalline harmonies.
“Buckingham Nicks:” the prequel to Fleetwood Mac reissued
ByMaleena Muzio
The Daily Campus
Rating: 4.75/5
“Buckingham Nicks,” the once forgotten album produced by rock icons and ex-lovers, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, was remastered and re-released on Friday, Sept. 19.
“Buckingham Nicks” was originally released in September of 1973, in the pre-Fleetwood Mac era, when Nicks was just 25 and Buckingham was 24. The album was not a commercial success and was pulled from the shelves by Polydoor Records months after its release. The record has been a rare find since then, only existing on vinyl and bootleg digital sources.
Despite “Buckingham Nicks” being initially unsuccessful on the market, it is one of the major reasons as to why drummer Mick Fleetwood recruited Buckingham and Nicks into his band at the end of 1974, setting them up for a lifetime of fame and acknowledgement.
The album also served as a source of inspiration for Fleetwood Mac. “Crystal,” on “Buckingham Nicks” was originally written by Nicks and sung by Buckingham, and appears on the 1975 self-titled album, “Fleetwood Mac.” The song “Don’t Let Me Down Again” has extremely similar instrumentals as the hit “Second Hand News,” which opens Fleetwood Mac’s most popular album, “Rumors.”
“Lola (My Love),” a duet between Buckingham and Nicks, features the same guitar riffs in the intro as “The Chain,” which may be Fleetwood Mac’s most successful song.
Ten songs make up the entirety of “Buckingham Nicks,” only allowing it to play for 35 minutes total. The album is a short but energetic work of art. The album quite literally ends on a bang with the best and most intense song, “Frozen Love.”
“Frozen Love” is a duet cowritten by both artists and encapsulates the same energy that many live performances of “The Chain” hold, introducing the passion between Buckingham and Nicks that we all know and love. It is also the longest song on the record, playing for seven minutes, including a climatic guitar solo.
The opening song of the album, “Crying in the Night,” is another highlight of the work, this time written and sung exclusively by Nicks (with Buckingham only on backing vocals). “Crying in the Night” contains hints of Nicks’ later solo career, reminding me of songs on her popular album, “Bella Donna.”
Other great songs on the album are “Long Distance Winner” and “Without a Leg to Stand On.”
“Long Distance Winner,” a song primarily sung by Nicks, is an honest confession about her relationship with Buckingham. With intense lyrics, like “Love somebody, save their soul // Tie them to your heaven, erase their hell” and truthful ones like, “ Love their lifestyle if you feel it // Don’t try to change them, you never will” we get some poetic insight to the pair’s powerful relationship even before the Fleetwood Mac days.
“Without a Leg to Stand On” is a gentler duet between the two artists, showing a softer side of Buckingham and Nicks’ relationship. The song expresses the two depending on each other, which is ironic today, considering their very public breakup.
It is no wonder that this brief album snagged the interest of Mick Fleetwood, who was initially drawn to Buckingham’s guitar playing. The instrumentals are intricate and generally upbeat. However, the album nor Fleetwood Mac would have ever been complete without Nicks’ unique voice and songwriting. Together, Buckingham and Nicks proved themselves to be one of the greatest romantic and musical duos in rock.
THE 1973 DEBUT ALBUM BY THE STAR-CROSSED ARCHITECTS OF FLEETWOOD MAC'S RUMOURS, BUCKINGHAM NICKS SELF-TITLED, IS BACK IN PRINT FOR THE FIRST TIME I N 47 YEARS:
CAMILLA AISA FOLLOWS LINDSEY AND STEVIE'S TRAIL FROM TEENAGE HIPPIES TO THE DAWN OF MEGA-STARDOM
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