Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham’s Relationship Timeline: Inside Their Half-Century Saga

Fleetwood Mac as a whole has always been a band known for drama — and a good portion of their mess originates with the addition of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham.

The duo joined the group in 1974, nearly a decade after Peter Green founded the band with its original lineup. By the time Nicks and Buckingham came on board, Green was gone, but the remaining members were fully capable of causing chaos on their own.

Buckingham and Nicks entered Fleetwood Mac as a couple, making them the second romantic pairing in the group alongside Christine McVie and her then-husband, John McVie. (Mick Fleetwood rounded out the lineup at that point.)

It wasn’t long before the drama started. Within a few years, both couples had split, and Nicks had an affair with Fleetwood, who was then married to Jenny Boyd. The group somehow managed to stay together, but the turmoil never really stopped — in part because of Nicks and Buckingham’s tumultuous post-breakup relationship.

“I met her when I was about 16,” Buckingham recalled in a 2009 BBC documentary about Fleetwood Mac. “It’s been most of my life. Sadly, for the lion’s share of those years, there has been distance and animosity of some kind, mixed in with everything else too. It’s never been just one thing.”

While the former couple made it work for decades, things came to a screeching halt in 2018 when Buckingham was fired from Fleetwood Mac. The duo announced a reissue of their Buckingham Nicks album in 2025, but it remains to be seen whether they’ll do any promo together after years of keeping each other at arm’s length.

Keep scrolling for a complete timeline of Nicks and Buckingham’s relationship and its aftermath:

1966

Buckingham and Nicks met while attending high school in Atherton, California. According to Nicks, their first encounter was at an after-school gathering where they started harmonizing on the song “California Dreamin’” by the Mamas & the Papas. They began officially collaborating on music after Buckingham asked Nicks to join his band Fritz.

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1972

After Fritz disbanded, Nicks and Buckingham’s relationship turned romantic. “I’m not sure we would have even become a couple if it wasn’t for us leaving that band,” Nicks later said. “It kind of pushed us together.”

1973

The pair released their one and only collaborative album, Buckingham Nicks, which was considered a commercial failure at the time. For more than 50 years, the album was unavailable on digital formats.

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1974

Nicks and Buckingham, who were then still a couple, joined Fleetwood Mac on New Year’s Eve. “If we hadn’t joined Fleetwood Mac, would Lindsey and I have carried on and made it?” Nicks later wondered in an interview with Uncut. “I was really tired of having no money and being a waitress. It’s very possible that I would have gone back to school and Lindsey would have gone back to San Francisco.”

1975

The twosome’s first album with the band, titled Fleetwood Mac (known to fans as The White Album), dropped on July 11. The album included “Landslide,” which Nicks said she wrote while deciding whether to go back to school or continue pursuing music with Buckingham.

1976

Buckingham and Nicks broke up after about four years together. Nicks later said their relationship was already rocky when they joined Fleetwood Mac, but they felt they should stay together for the band.

“We’d only been in Fleetwood Mac for a year and a half, and we were breaking up when we joined Fleetwood Mac,” she told The New Yorker in 2022. “So we just put our relationship kind of back together, because I was smart enough to know that, if we had broken up the second month of being in Fleetwood Mac, it would have blown the whole thing. I just bided my time, and tried to make everything as easy as possible, tried to be as sweet and as nice to Lindsey as I could be. He wasn’t happy either. Then something happened that was, you know, ‘We’re done.’ And he knew it. It was time. And the band was solid, by that time, so I could walk away knowing that he was safe. And that the band was safe. And that we could work it out.”

1977

Fleetwood Mac released Rumours, which became their most famous album and remains one of the bestselling albums of all time. Several of the LP’s songs were quite clearly about Nicks and Buckingham’s breakup, including “Dreams” and “Go Your Own Way.”

In a 2009 documentary about the band, Nicks said she felt Buckingham’s “Go Your Own Way” lyrics about “shacking up” were “extremely disrespectful.” Buckingham, meanwhile, claimed he was simply calling things like he saw them, saying, “It may be a rather truthful and blunt observation. But that’s the way you write songs.”

1987

After both Nicks and Buckingham each released solo albums, they reunited with the rest of Fleetwood Mac to record the band’s 14th LP, Tango in the Night, which dropped April 13. When it came time to discuss the tour, however, things fell apart, with Buckingham refusing to go.

“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 2009 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.”

Buckingham did not rejoin the band until 1997.

1997

The Rumours lineup reconvened to record the band’s live album The Dance, which was also released on video. Their performance of “Silver Springs” — a Nicks track cut from Rumours that later appeared on reissues — became famous for the intense way Nicks and Buckingham stared at each other as she sang lyrics like, “You’ll never get away from the sound of the woman that loved you.”

Nearly 20 years later, that rendition of the song has become so beloved that fans can buy unofficial T-shirts online that say, “Sorry, I can’t talk. I’m thinking about the 1997 performance of ‘Silver Springs’ where Stevie Nicks stares a hole through Lindsey Buckingham.” (Nicks herself has said they “shot eye daggers at each other” on stage after their breakup.)

2018

After a successful reunion tour with the Rumours lineup in 2014 and 2015, Fleetwood Mac imploded for the final time ahead of another planned tour. First, Buckingham was caught rolling his eyes on stage during Nicks’ speech at a MusiCares benefit concert, which she later said was a major hint to her that she couldn’t work with him anymore. Then, the group fired Buckingham for good after he requested a three-month tour delay so he could promote his solo work.

Buckingham later claimed that Nicks had given the band an ultimatum that she would only stay if he went, but she has denied his version of events. “I did not demand he be fired,” she told Rolling Stone in 2021. “Frankly, I fired myself. I proactively removed myself from the band and a situation I considered to be toxic to my well-being. I was done. If the band went on without me, so be it.”

Months after his firing, Buckingham sued the remaining members of the band for breach of fiduciary duty, breach of oral contract and intentional interference with prospective economic advantage. They settled by the end of the year.

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2019

Author Taylor Jenkins Reid published the novel Daisy Jones & the Six, which she admitted was partly inspired by Fleetwood Mac — specifically watching Nicks and Buckingham in The Dance as a kid.

“Years later, once I understood the full story of Fleetwood Mac, I came across The Dance again, this time on YouTube. I watched it in its entirety,” Reid wrote in 2019. “I saw that later on in the show, Stevie sung ‘Silver Springs,’ like a woman scorned, holding that microphone like a weapon, drilling holes into Lindsey’s head with her eyes as she sang that her voice would haunt him. I was savvier then, I understood that sometimes looking like you’re in love or in hate are things you ramp up a bit to make a good show. I also understood then what I could never have conceived of in 1997: Love makes no goddamn sense.”

Buckingham, meanwhile, underwent bypass surgery after a heart attack. Nicks told the Los Angeles Times in 2020 that she sent him a get-well letter. “You better take care of yourself,” she wrote. “You better take it easy and you better do everything they tell you and get your voice back and feel the grace that you have made it through this.”

2021

In a candid interview with the Los Angeles Times, Buckingham claimed Nicks was the one who wanted him fired from Fleetwood Mac (which Nicks went on to deny). He also confirmed she had contacted him after his bypass surgery but said she “usually” wouldn’t respond when he tried to text her. “She’s very guarded and protective of her own world, and I think she sees me as a potential upsetter of that,” he explained.

2022

Christine’s death at age 79 forever precludes any chance of the Rumours lineup getting back together. Two years later, Nicks confirmed as much, telling Mojo, “Without Christine, no can do. There is no chance of putting Fleetwood Mac back together in any way. Without her, it just couldn’t work.”

2024

In an interview with Rolling Stone, Nicks revealed that she spoke to Buckingham in person at the memorial service for Christine. “The only time I’ve spoken to Lindsey was there, for about three minutes,” she recalled. “I dealt with Lindsey for as long as I could. You could not say that I did not give him more than 300 million chances.”

She also said she had no regrets about ending Fleetwood Mac in 2018. “I think that all just happened the way it should have. It happened one night, not planned, at a MusiCares [benefit concert]. I didn’t even tell anybody it had happened in my head until the whole ceremony was over,” she explained. “That’s when he wasn’t very nice to anybody; he wasn’t very nice to Harry Styles. I could hear my mom saying, ‘Are you really going to spend the next 15 years of your life with this man?’ I could hear my very pragmatic father — and by the way, my mom and dad liked Lindsey a lot — saying, ‘It’s time for you guys to get a divorce.’ Between those two, I said, ‘I’m done.’”

2025

The duo followed each other on Instagram and teased fans by posting lyrics from their Buckingham Nicks album. Later, they confirmed that the album’s first-ever reissue will be released on September 19. Some fans remain hopeful they’ll reunite to promote the project, but 50 years of evidence hints they will not.