Buckingham Nicks by Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham.Supplied
They’re not going their own way anymore. After much speculation, Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham announced Wednesday the reissue of “Buckingham Nicks,” more than 50 years after the release of their only full-length album as a duo.
Originally released in 1973, “Buckingham Nicks” is not currently available on streaming platforms. According to Discogs, the album was last issued on vinyl on the Polydor label in the U.S. in 1981. The remastered version arrives Sept. 19 via Rhino Records’ high-fidelity series and was sourced from the original analog master tapes. The album will also receive a CD and digital release for the first time, and the opening track, “Crying in the Night,” was available to stream Wednesday.
Buckingham and Nicks were in their early to mid-20s during the making of their album. “It was a very natural thing, from the beginning,” Nicks says in the re-release’s liner notes, written by music journalist David Fricke.
Despite their relative inexperience, “it stands up in a way you would hope it would, by these two kids who were pretty young to be doing that work,” Buckingham says, according to the announcement release.
The reissue announcement was foreshadowed by cryptic Instagram posts last week. Both Nicks and Buckingham shared handwritten lyrics to their official social media accounts.
“And if you go forward…” Nicks posted, a line from their song “Frozen Love,” which appears on “Buckingham Nicks.”
“I’ll meet you there,” Buckingham shared, completing the lyric.
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In 2011, Buckingham told Uncut that he and Nicks had “every intention of putting that album back out and possibly even doing something along with it, but I can’t put any specifics on that.” In 2013, on the album’s 40th anniversary, Fleetwood Mac released “Extended Play,” their first new studio material since 2003’s “Say You Will.” The four-track collection featured a song titled “Without You,” which had been originally slated for “Buckingham Nicks.”
The reissued version of “Buckingham Nicks” features the same album cover as the original, despite Nicks’ public dissatisfaction with the photograph, telling classic rock magazine MOJO that she “felt like a rat in a trap” during the shoot.
“I’m actually quite prudish. So when they suggested they shoot Lindsey and I nude I could not have been more terrified if you’d asked me to jump off a speeding train,” Nicks told MOJO in 2013. “Lindsey was like, ‘Oh, come on – this is art. Don’t be a child!’ I thought, ‘Who are you? Don’t you know me?’”
“Buckingham Nicks” was released one year before they joined Fleetwood Mac, and was met with little commercial success. But it did attract the attention of Mick Fleetwood, who invited Buckingham to join Fleetwood Mac. Buckingham in turn insisted Nicks come, too. The two, then a couple, became the central faces, voices and songwriters of the group for the four decades that followed.
The pair’s tumultuous relationship appeared across the band’s discography: She wrote “Dreams” about him. He wrote “Go Your Own Way” about her. Infamously, they broke up while writing the 1977 hit album “Rumours.” Footage of Nicks staring down Buckingham 20 years later during a performance of “Silver Springs” routinely goes viral (“You’ll never get away from the sound of the woman that loves you,” Nicks and Buckingham sing in unison, at one point, holding each other’s gaze.)
Buckingham left the band in 1987, returning in 1996. The last time the band reunited, however, for a 2018-2019 tour, the rest of the members kicked Buckingham out, and as a result, he sued them. He claimed he was told five days after the group appeared at Radio City Music Hall that the band would tour without him. He says he would have been paid at least US$12-million for his share of the proceeds. Later that year, Buckingham said they had settled the lawsuit.
Both Buckingham and Nicks have also released reams of solo music. Some fans had theorized that Nicks and Buckingham were teasing a Fleetwood Mac reunion, which would have been the first since the death of vocalist, songwriter and keyboard player Christine McVie in 2022.
Last year, Nicks told MOJO that without McVie, “there is no chance of putting Fleetwood Mac back together in any way.”
