Late last week, Lindsey Buckingham dropped a very tantalizing tidbit while speaking to his Instagram followers about his future plans. “I think on a more general level, just the energy in terms of what Buckingham Nicks did to sort of create a resurgence of connection between Stevie [Nicks] and myself, I think on a larger scale, that seems to be something that’s in the air,” he said, referring to the reissue of their 1973 collaborative LP last year. “And what that translates to specifically, I wouldn’t want to speculate yet. But I believe with all my heart, it will translate to something good, and something wonderful, and something needed and something extremely appropriate.”
For context, Nicks and Buckingham haven’t performed together since a January 2018 Fleetwood Mac MusiCares tribute show at New York’s Radio City Music Hall. Nicks was enraged by his behavior that night, and essentially told the band that she wouldn’t agree to their upcoming tour if he was involved. The group sided with Nicks, and brought in Mike Campbell and Neil Finn to replace Buckingham on the tour. He sued them for wrongful termination, they settled out of court, and any sort of reconciliation seemed very unlikely, even though Nicks and Buckingham briefly spoke at a private event honoring Christine McVie.
“The only time I’ve spoken to Lindsey was there, for about three minutes,” Nicks told Rolling Stone in October 2024, where she also ruled out any sort of future Fleetwood Mac activity. “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.”
That truly seemed like the end of the Stevie/Lindsey saga until July 2025 when they teamed up via social media to tease the Buckingham Nicks reissue. There was no evidence they actually spoke until October 2025 when Nicks went on the Song Exploder podcast, and discussed the night they met back in 1966. “Lindsey and I started talking about it last night,” Nicks said. “This whole thing seems really like yesterday to us.”
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It was proof that she’d given him her one more chance. And now Buckingham is talking in very vague terms about a “resurgence of connection” between them that will “translate to something good, and something wonderful.” He says he doesn’t want to speculate yet about what that may be, but that’s not going to stop us. Here are five scenarios.
A Fleetwood Mac Reunion Tour
The most lucrative and high-profile project that Nicks and Buckingham could launch would be a Fleetwood Mac reunion tour. Nicks has said that isn’t tenable without Christine McVie, but the band toured heavily without her between 2003 and 2014. That same lineup of Nicks, Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood, and John McVie could pack arenas and even stadiums all across the globe, and could charge upwards of $5,000 per ticket. If they bill it as a farewell tour, they could command even higher prices.
It’s unclear, however, if John McVie would be up for such an endeavor. He’s largely been MIA over the past few years, and Christine McVie said he’d been dealing with “health problems” when we spoke to her in June 2022. “John’s wife passing away [earlier this year] has been very, very hard on him,” Nicks told Rolling Stone in October 2024. “I actually have not talked to him since Julie passed away, because he made it very clear that he really didn’t want to talk to anybody until he was miles away from it.”
A Fleetwood Mac tour without Mac himself would be unfortunate, but it would have almost no impact on ticket sales. As long as Mick Fleetwood, Lindsey Buckingham, and Stevie Nicks are on the stage, fans will show up in droves.
A Buckingham/Nicks Tour
Back in 2012, Nicks told Rolling Stone about her dream of bringing Buckingham Nicks back on the road for the first time since 1975. “That is a situation where we would actually go onstage and do the complete Buckingham Nicks album,” she said. “It would be a trip to bring it back with Waddy Watchtel and some other people from San Francisco. It would be trippy for Lindsey and I to revisit those songs.”
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Fleetwood Mac were preparing their own tour at the time, and when we told Buckingham what she said, he was flabbergasted. “Oh, the old band with Waddy Watchtel,” he said. “Wow. Well, listen, I would love to do a tour with Stevie. I think that would be very appropriate. She was talking about doing it in between legs of a Fleetwood Mac tour, which is not going to happen. It’s logistically impossible. It’s economically suicidal because you can’t do enough touring to make it worthwhile.”
A lot has happened in the past 14 years. The original Buckingham Nicks album was finally re-released last year, introducing those incredible songs to an entirely new generation of fans. At the moment, Nicks has a mere three solo concerts on the books, and they all take place in April. That means there’s plenty of time to book a Buckingham Nicks tour with Wachtel and other veteran players.
It could be limited to a handful of theater shows in major markets where they play the old album straight through. They could also scale up into arenas by adding a bunch of Fleetwood Mac songs into the mix, creating their own version of Page and Plant. (In this scenario, Mick Fleetwood would be sidelined just like Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones was back in the 1990s.) They wouldn’t be able to charge Fleetwood Mac-level prices, but it would still be extremely lucrative for both of them. And it would bring their saga full circle in a deeply satisfying way.
A Rumours 50 Celebration
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Rumours, one of the biggest albums in rock history that somehow only seems to grow more popular with age. Director Frank Marshall has spent the past couple of years creating an official documentary about the band that will quite possibly come out around the time of the Rumours anniversary. The band will likely show up for the premiere, and possibly other promotional events. Could that include a one-off live event of some sort? It feels more possible today than it did just last year.
We can envision a giant Fleetwood Mac tribute concert at a place like the L.A. Forum that caps off with the surviving members playing a few songs. If Nicks and/or Buckingham don’t feel like committing to a tour, this is a nice compromise that wraps up their story better than the tour where Neil Finn sang “Second Hand News” every night.
A Second Buckingham/Nicks Album
For reasons that aren’t exactly clear, Lindsey Buckingham hasn’t gone on a solo tour in nearly four years. But back in 2019, he had triple bypass surgery following a heart attack. “There’s so much heart disease in his family that it’s really not a surprise,” Nicks told Rolling Stone in 2024. “So, 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.”
If he’s not up for a tour for any reason, health-related or otherwise, a second Buckingham/Nicks album would be a great gift to the fans. Despite all the bad blood over the years, the two of them have amazing chemistry whenever they make music together. There’s simply no doubt they bring out the best in each other, and always have. Why not head into the studio one last time and see what happens?
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Nothing That’s Ever Public
Odds are very high that Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel will never perform together again. But the old friends buried the hatchet after a decade of estrangement a couple of years ago, and sat down for lunch together at the Pierre hotel in New York City. The final chapter of their saga will likely play out far from public view.
It’s very possible that Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham will have a similar end to their story. She might continue to book arenas on her own, playing a solo set packed with Fleetwood Mac classics, essentially carrying the torch on her own now. But some nights she might call up her friend Lindsey and chat about the old days. Maybe every once in a while, they’ll even grab a meal together. It won’t be nearly as dramatic (or lucrative) as a string of Fleetwood Mac shows at Wembley Stadium, but maybe that’s not what they need at this point. Maybe all they have to do is forgive each other for the past, and find a way to just be friends again. For the true fans, that’ll be enough.
