(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Wed 21 January 2026 19:30, UK
Never has a traumatic relationship been as good for music as that of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks.
Joining Fleetwood Mac as a pair in 1975, their relationship was already on the ropes, but hanging on by a thread of creativity, buoyed by their songwriting partnership. But then, the heightened exposure of the decade’s biggest rock band thrust their relationship into unending toxicity that still festers today.
The songs both of them wrote about each other in the heady days of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours were well documented, but once that album was released, neither Buckingham nor Nicks was freed from the pain of their creative and romantic entanglement. No, they would continue touring for years, sharing the tight space of a tour bus before getting back in the studio to record another string of albums that kept them together right up until the 2000s.
On their 2003 record Say You Will, there is a particular song that highlights just how chronic their emotional troubles are, with Nicks penning a song that boasted the sort of ferocity of her Rumours counterparts. Nicks admitted that ‘Thrown Down’ was “in a strange way written about my relationship with Lindsay and how the barricades of time have always gotten in our way.”
On the song, she sings, “Thrown down, like a barricade / Maybe now he could prove to her / That he could be good for her / And they should be together”, pondering over the wounds that may have healed over time and whether, through it all, her and Buckingham could make a go at a normal, romantic life.
But in a clip from the studio sessions, the harsh answer to Nicks’ questions seemed to be proven. As the pair deliberate into the creative decisions of the song, there is a clear sense of emotional tension that pollutes even the most rudimentary conversations.
As Buckingham questions Nicks’ choice to fluctuate between tenses in her lyrics, asking “When you say now you’re going home, who are you talking about?” she simply responds, “I’m talking to you.”
Buckingham’s confusion lies in Nicks’ ever-changing tense in the lyrics, which she justifies by saying, “Sometimes I write, and I’m in first person, then all of a sudden I’m in second person, you know, and I don’t care because I have no rules.” When Buckingham responds with a pedantic reminder of the songwriting rules, Nicks snaps back and brings Bob Dylan into the equation, justifying his role as an inspiration.
Buckingham says, “Just saying that, you know, it’s sort of a rule of thumb in writing that you don’t shift your tense and your person.”
Nicks responds, “Well, I don’t think that you could say that to Bob Dylan, because he would say to you, I write what I want to,” adding, “Would you say that to Bob Dylan? It’s the way I write, it’s the poet that I am.”
In the clip below, the murky relationship that exists between Buckingham and Nicks is quite plain to see. The love that fuelled their most emotional break-up songs is plain to see, but so is the toxicity that laces their communication, almost proving that despite the song’s lyrical intent, the pair will never be able to make a fist of a normal life together.
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