The Thin Line Between Love and Hate: Lindsey and Stevie in Their Own Words

Buckingham and Nicks joined Fleetwood Mac in December 1974. The new lineup gave a brief interview to Rolling Stone not long after that, detailing the departure of guitarist Bob Welch, and spoke with us again after they released 1975’s self-titled Fleetwood Mac album. But with the release of 1977’s Rumours, they all became superstars and landed on the cover of Rolling Stone. Only one problem: Stevie and Lindsey had just broken up after six years together (as had John and Christine McVie).

Speaking with Cameron Crowe, Stevie detailed their relationship while in Fritz (“I think there was always something between me and Lindsey”) but said that ultimately, she couldn’t be both the “old lady” and bandmate. “The best explanation is: try working with your secretary . . . in a raucous office . . . and then come home with her at night,” she said. “See how long you could stand her. I could be no comfort to Lindsey when he needed comfort.”

Stevie also told Crowe she didn’t want to hold anything back. “I don’t care that everybody knows me and Chris and John and Lindsey and Mick all broke up,” she said. “Because we did. So that’s fact. I just don’t want people to pick up a magazine and go, ‘Oh, another interview from Fleetwood Mac.’ If it’s interesting, I’m not opposed to giving out information.”

In case it wasn’t clear, she added that Rumours was very much about that whole situation. “On this album, all the songs that I wrote except maybe ‘Gold Dust Woman’ — and even that comes into it — are definitely about the people in the band,” she said. “Chris’ relationships, John’s relationship, Mick’s relationship, Lindsey’s and mine. They’re all there and they’re very honest and people will know exactly what I’m talking about . . . people will really enjoy listening to what happened since the last album.”

Like Stevie, Lindsey shared a similar stance on being open about their personal lives. “Just ’cause you’re in the public eye  doesn’t mean you don’t go through the same bullshit,” he told Crowe in the RS cover story. “It was a little lonely there for a while. The thought of being on my own really terrified me. But then I realized being alone is really a cleansing thing …as I began to feel myself becoming more myself again. I’m surprised we lasted as long as we did.”

He continued: “I feel really lucky that I’ve had the opportunity to go through some of the heartaches and shit we’ve been through the past year. It’s had a profound effect on me. I feel a lot older, I feel like I’ve learned a whole lot by taking on a large responsibility slightly unaided. Being in this band really fucks up relationships with chicks. Since Stevie, I have found that to be true. I could meet someone that I really like, have maybe a few days to get it together and that’s about it. The rest of the time I’m too into Fleetwood Mac.”

In the band’s next Rolling Stone cover story, Stevie spoke highly of Lindsey’s contributions to her songs. “I write my songs, but Lindsey puts the magic in, and there’s no way … well, I could pay him ten percent. I could walk up to him and thank him. If I were to play you a song the way I wrote it and gave it to them, and then play you the way it is on the album, you would see what Lindsey did.”

But when it came to “Go Your Own Way,” she made it clear who broke up with whom. “Now, I want you to know — that line about ‘shacking up’? I never shacked up with anybody when I was with him! People will hear the song and think that! I was the one who broke up with him …All he wanted to do was fall asleep with that guitar.”

Speaking to Mademoiselle in August 1982, Stevie spoke about her storied relationship with Lindsey. “We tangle a lot, but we love each other — we’ll always love each other,” she said. She then went on to basically quote the now-legendary Rumours B side “Silver Springs”: “He and I will never get away from the fact that we were as one for so many years.”

Following Lindsey’s departure from Fleetwood Mac in 1987, Stevie spoke to Woman’s Own magazine in 1990, upon the release of the band’s new album Behind the Mask. “He and I were about as compatible as a boa constrictor and a rat,” she said. “But we’ve had our final words. We will never be able to work together again [or] even speak again, which is very sad. In any relationship you come down to a point where you say things that you can never take back, and we’ve said them. It breaks my heart.”

She went on about how hard it was for them to be in the same band. “Rich and famous or starving and poor, we went through the same problems,” she added. “He always wanted me to himself, but somebody had to go out and earn some money. All he wanted to do was play his music. When I came home I’d always get a slight cold shoulder. He wouldn’t quite trust me about where I’d been or what I’d been doing. When we broke up, two years after joining Fleetwood Mac, it was like a living nightmare…. Everything about me seemed to bug him. My laughter, the way I could deal with a lot of difficult things, all made him want to cringe. So I changed when I was around him. I became mouse-like and would never dare offer a suggestion.”

In June 1992, Lindsey released Out of the Cradle, his first solo release following his departure from Fleetwood Mac. Speaking with Rolling Stone, he looked back on his time with the band — and the tension he often felt. “Fleetwood Mac was one big lesson in adaptation for me,” he said. “There were five very different personalities, and I suppose that made it great for a while. Obviously, having two couples — and soon enough, ex-couples — added a lot more tension and some great subject matter to the mix. But the problems really kicked in when you started adding five managers and five lawyers to the equation. Once Stevie was singled out and selected as the star of the band, the machinery of the rock business clicked in, and things really got stupid. By the time of Tango, you could hardly fit all these people in one room for a band meeting. It was a heartbreaking thing to watch, until it became almost comical.”

Three years away from reuniting with the full Rumours lineup, Stevie told The Island Ear that she and Lindsey’s relationship was nonexistent. “Basically, I think Lindsey and I had sung our last song,” she said. “We had taken that relationship as far as it could go without one of us killing the other. Plus, he had treated me so badly for so long. I’d walk into a room and he’d become the most sarcastic, unpleasant man on the face of the earth. I have total respect for him [as an artist]. I don’t know if he has any for me. He feels I broke up our team. So, for that, in his mind, I should be tortured for days and then killed.”

While on tour for her 1994 solo album Street Angel, Stevie phoned up Rolling Stone for a Q&A, and admitted she hadn’t spoken to Lindsey since the previous year, when they reunited for President Bill Clinton’s inauguration. “We’re really not friends,” she said. “We’re really not anything. We did not break up friends, and we have never been friends since. He is not really able to have any kind of relationship with me. I just bug him to death. Everything I do is abrasive to him. He’s scary when he gets mad.”

Upon reuniting in 1997, Fleetwood Mac appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone that fall. Lindsey spoke about the enduring magic of “Silver Springs” (“There is no way you can’t get drawn into the end of that song”) and said that while the band was back together, he and Stevie certainly weren’t — but you never know. “I think some people are probably getting the impression that we are back together or something along those lines,” he said. “Which is certainly not true. Not yet, anyway. You never know. I don’t foresee that at all. But, you know, things …”

Not so fast, Lindsey. In that same RS cover story, Stevie was asked about her ex’s apparent optimism about one day romantically reuniting. “Over my dead body,” she said. “See, I don’t want to be part of that darkness. He knows that. When we’re up there singing songs to each other, we probably say more to each other than we ever would in real life. If you offered me a passionate love affair and you offered me a high-priestess role in a fabulous castle above a cliff where I can just, like, live a very spiritual kind of religious-library-communing-with-the-stars, learning kind of existence, I’m going to go for the high priestess.”

She also reflected to RS about their relationship in the Seventies: “From ’71 through ’75, I lived with Lindsey all those years,” she said. “We were absolutely married. In every way [but for the ring]. I cooked, I cleaned, I worked. I took care of him.”

She also expressed her ongoing frustration about “Go Your Own Way” and the “shacking up” line, 20 years after the song’s release. “Every time those words would come out onstage, I wanted to go over and kill him. He knew it, so he really pushed my buttons through that. It was like, ‘I’ll make you suffer for leaving me.’ And I did. For years.”

Following Fleetwood Mac’s reunion album The Dance and supporting tour, Stevie told RS that things were actually pretty great between her and Lindsey. “He and I are probably better friends than we’ve been in a long, long time,” she said. “We had some really nice talks and some nice moments that were sweet.”

Ahead of Fleetwood Mac’s 2013 world tour, Stevie and Lindsey gave a fascinating, revealing joint Q&A with Rolling Stone (conducted separately). During her portion, Stevie said she and her ex were getting along just fine. “It was great spending time with Linds,” she said. “We’re old enough now that we’ve laid down our weapons. We started this whole thing in 1968 and we’re proud of what we’ve done. We look each other in a slightly different light now. It’s a good light.”

But, she said, the fragile situation will never be without a little drama. “Lindsey and I will always be dramatic,” she said. “When you were almost married for seven years, and then you’ve been in a band for 30 years, it’s never not going to be dramatic. We are who are are and we were dramatic kids going together. That never really goes away.”

During that same joint Q&A (“Now that you’ve talked to the two of us, are you starting to feel like a shrink?” asked Lindsey), there was much discussion about the Buckingham Nicks album, which was about to turn 40 at the time. During Stevie’s interview — which took place about a week before Lindsey’s — she revealed that they’d been talking about commemorating the anniversary by performing the album on tour, in between legs of Fleetwood Mac’s massive world trek. 

Lindsey said he was game, but felt that doing so in 2013 would be a logistical nightmare. “Stevie, if you’re serious about touring behind Buckingham Nicks, let’s wait,” he said. “I’ve been saying to Stevie for years that we should revisit Buckingham Nicks. I know there’s a market for it … I think something elevated happens with the two of us and there’s an interest in that … It’s a bit of an intangible. But I’ve been saying that for years. To me, if you’re going to do it, do it properly.”

Ahead of that Fleetwood Mac world tour in 2013, Lindsey gave Rolling Stone an update on his relationship with Stevie. “It’s still evolving, and that’s the beauty of it too,” he said. “I’ve known Stevie since high school. We were a couple for many, many years, and we’ve been a musical couple forever. After all this time you would think there was nothing left to discover, nothing left to work out, no new chapters to be written. But that is not the case — there are new chapters to be written. It’s quite extraordinary.”

Amid the tour and the release of the four-song EP Extended Play, Lindsey admitted to Rolling Stone it was challenging to get “complete closure” after his breakup with Stevie. “There was never any time to not be together,” he said. “It was kind of like picking the scab off an open wound again and again. That’s part of the legacy of the band. But ‘Say Goodbye’ is a very sweet song, and it’s about her: ‘Once you said goodbye to me/Now I say goodbye to you.’ It took a long time. All those illusions have fallen away, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t resolve and hope and belief in the future in a different context. That’s really what the song is about, and we end the set with just the two of us singing that song.”

“Relations with Lindsey are exactly as they have been since we broke up,” Stevie told RS in her 2015 cover story. “He and I will always be antagonizing to each other, and we will always do things that will irritate each other, and we really know how to push each other’s buttons. We know exactly what to say when we really want to throw a dagger in. And I think that that’s not different now than it was when we were 20. And I don’t think it will be different when we’re 80.”

But she also revealed that for years, they joked about being each other’s backups. “Because we started out so young together, both Lindsey and I would always laughingly say — which we both knew was never going to happen — that, like, when we were 90, and everybody else was dead, maybe we would end up together in an old folks’ home, because of what we had gone through, just him and me, for a long, long, long time. So when his first child was coming, I think we were walking in an airport, and I said, ‘Well, I guess we’re never going to get to that old folks’ home.’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, I guess we never are.’ It was something that we said in kind of a poignant way.”

Following Lindsey’s 2018 firing from Fleetwood Mac — and the band’s addition of Crowded House’s Neil Finn and Mike Campbell of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers to replace him — Stevie spoke to Rolling Stone about what she wanted her future to look like. “Our relationship has always been volatile,” she said. “We were never married, but we might as well have been. Some couples get divorced after 40 years. They break their kids’ hearts and destroy everyone around them because it’s just hard. This is sad for me, but I want the next 10 years of my life to be really fun and happy. I want to get up every day and dance around my apartment and smile and say, ‘Thank God for this amazing life.’”

That fall, Buckingham opened up to Rolling Stone about his departure from the band. “Am I heartbroken about not doing another tour with Fleetwood Mac? No,” he said. “Because I can see that there are many other areas to look into. [But] the one thing that does bother me and breaks my heart is we spent 43 years always finding a way to rise above our personal differences and our difficulties to pursue and articulate a higher truth. That is our legacy. That is what the songs are about. This is not the way you end something like this.”

In 2021, Lindsey released a self-titled solo album and revealed more about his firing from Fleetwood Mac. “We’ve all had our ups and down, but we always put the band’s legacy first,” he told Rolling Stone. “But what this did was dishonor the legacy that we built.” Unsurprisingly, he took aim at Stevie: “I think others in the band just felt that they were not empowered enough, individually, for whatever their own reasons, to stand up for what was right,” he said. “And so, it became a little bit like Trump and the Republicans.” 

Before publishing that 2021 interview with Lindsey, Rolling Stone reached out to Stevie for comment. His remarks about his decision to have kids later in life — “It certainly wasn’t lost on her that, even though I waited till I was 48 to have my first child, I did get in under the wire” — drew a response from Stevie, who said that while she’s “thrilled” he had children, she “wasn’t interested” in following that path. “Those are my decisions that I get to make for myself,” she said. “I’m proud of the life choices I’ve made, and it seems a shame for him to pass judgment on anyone who makes a choice to live their life on their own terms, even if it looks differently from what his life choices have been.”

She also gave her own rather different side of the story on Lindsey’s firing from the band. “It’s unfortunate that Lindsey has chosen to tell a revisionist history of what transpired in 2018 with Fleetwood Mac,” she wrote. “His version of events is factually inaccurate, and while I’ve never spoken publicly on the matter, preferring to not air dirty laundry, certainly it feels the time has come to shine a light on the truth. Following an exceedingly difficult time with Lindsey at MusiCares in New York, in 2018, I decided for myself that I was no longer willing to work with him. I could publicly reflect on the many reasons why, and perhaps I will do that someday in a memoir, but suffice it to say we could start in 1968 and work up to 2018 with a litany of very precise reasons why I will not work with him. To be exceedingly clear, I did not have him fired, I did not ask for him to be fired, I did not demand he be fired. 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.”

In a conversation with Omar Apollo for Rolling Stone’s Musicians on Musicians series, Lindsey said it wasn’t too long ago that he was writing songs about his famous ex and former bandmate. “I was still writing songs occasionally about Stevie, not that long ago, but most of the songs in the last 20 years have been about my wife,” he said.

In that same conversation with Apollo, Lindsey said he was ready to return to his band, even without the late keyboardist and singer Christine McVie, who died in November 2022. “I always have been ready to come back if the opportunity presented itself,” he said. “We could still do it now, even without Christine. But the only way that would happen is if Stevie said she wanted to do it. She’d have to have some kind of an epiphany, and I don’t necessarily see that happening. I think that ending on the proper note would be a better way to do it than the way it has been left.”

In a wide-ranging Rolling Stone Interview with Stevie in October 2024, she reflected further on that ill-fated MusiCares benefit concert that resulted in Lindsey’s firing. “That’s when he wasn’t very nice to anybody; he wasn’t very nice to Harry Styles,” she said. “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.’” 

Stevie also said she wouldn’t consider a proper farewell tour, and detailed the last time she saw Lindsey, saying it happened at a celebration of life for Christine McVie held at Nobu in L.A. “The only time I’ve spoken to Lindsey was there, for about three minutes. 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 … I wish him the best. I hope he lives a long life and continues to go into a studio and work with other people. He’s also an icon, and he can teach people. He’s not stopped in his tracks. He can still make music and have fun.”