Stevie Nicks said Fleetwood Mac’s split with Lindsey Buckingham in 2017 was a “long time coming” and that it happened after an incident she said was “the straw that broke the camel’s back.” Even so, she also revealed she wrote to him after he suffered a heart attack in 2019.

Buckingham was fired from the band following an awards event at which Nicks believed he disrespected her by smirking while she spoke. She reportedly gave her colleagues an ultimatum: Either he leaves the band or she will. Buckingham's dismissal led to a legal dispute, but after its resolution he had a severe heart attack, which left the future of his career in doubt. He was later able to return to work.

“I never planned for that to happen,” Nicks told the Los Angeles Times of the lineup change. “Any time we re-formed to do a tour or a record, I always walked in with hope in my heart. And I just was so disappointed. I felt like all the wind had gone out of my sails.”

She noted that she "just felt like a dying flower all the time. I stayed with him from 1968 until that night. It’s a long time. And I really could hear my parents — I could hear my mom saying, ‘Are you really gonna do this for the rest of your life?’ And I could hear my dad saying in his very pragmatic way – because my dad really liked Lindsey – ‘I think it’s time for you and Lindsey to get a divorce.’ It’s a very unfortunate thing. It makes me very, very sad.”

Nicks said that, although she hadn’t spoken directly to Buckingham in a “couple of years,” she wrote him a letter as he recovered from his health alert. She said it read: “You better take care of yourself. 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.”

Nicks will release a new single, “Show Them the Way,” on Oct. 9; a concert movie will hit theaters for two nights later in the month. Meanwhile, she’s been working on a new solo album based on her poetry. “I can sit down at the piano and take out a poem that I wrote right in the middle of a really great relationship and make it into a song,” she said. “Right now, at 72 years old. So when people say, ‘Can you still write romantic songs?’ I absolutely can.”

 

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