The first song Stevie Nicks was pissed at Lindsey Buckingham for writing: “I remember getting very upset”

Posted On August 16, 2025August 16, 2025

While Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham are known as one of music’s most famous duo, and one of it’s most infamous couples, their actual creative connection was more complex.

In a question of the first song that Buckingham wrote that annoyed his collaborator, instantly, the mind goes to some cruel Rumours track. But the reality is less emotional and more logical. 

Buckingham and Nicks go way back. They go all the way back to high school, meeting as teenagers and playing in bands together. At each step of Nicks’ early musical life, Buckingham was there, and as they grew up together, and fell in love, they decided to take a leap of faith, quitting college to move to Los Angeles and pursue music full-time. 

Making it work was a joint project as they moved in together and were caught in a mutual struggle to balance making music and making money. Rent needed to be paid, and the stress and even sometimes outright poverty of that drew the couple even closer. It was a united mission to not only survive, but to be creative too. Initially, that came in the form of Buckingham Nicks, their early duo, which commercially failed but did gain the attention of another band: Fleetwood Mac. The rest was history. 

The story of Fleetwood Mac from then on became a story of their love souring and eventually splitting. The tale is told through songs fired back and forth, especially during the Rumours era when the heartbreak was happening in real time as the record was being made. It led to some harsh words, making it only the album, and Nicks has never been shy about how it hurt her or even made her storm out on occasion, with ‘Go Your Own Way’ being the one that she’s always taken offence with.

But the Rumours era wasn’t the first time a song from Buckingham had hurt Nicks. At first, she noted little veiled moments where Buckingham’s lyrics began to feel bitter or pointed towards her, but as the world had so swiftly become obsessed with her position in the band, she sort of understood it. “My success was not easy for Lindsey, not easy for any of them. And I knew that, and I felt terrible about it”.

Nicks felt like she overshadowed the group through no fault or action of her own, adding, “There’s a part of me that would have said, Let’s tell everybody to stop talking about Steve. Stop giving Stevie all this attention, because, guess what, it’s making Stevie miserable. Because I have to live with these other four people who know it’s not my fault, but they can’t help but blame me a little, and it’s killing me.”

The first real and clear track that hurt her heart, though, came on the first-ever album she and Buckingham were part of with the band. It didn’t come down to lyrics, it didn’t come down to feeling, it just came down to the making of it, as she said, “But I also remember getting very upset with Lindsey one night when I realised that he and Christine [McVie] had written ‘World Turning.’”

Given Buckingham and Nicks’ long history, it might be assumed that they were writing together constantly, but they weren’t. “I had been with Lindsey all those years, and we had never written a song together,” Nicks revealed, reminding the world that up until then, they’d sung together but written separately. So to see her long-term partner fall so easily into a new collaborative role with someone new, it stung purely from a place of jealousy.

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