Believe the rumours: why Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham can’t leave each other alone

It is, of course, Fleetwood Mac, performing Silver Springs: Stevie Nicks’s simultaneously wistful and lacerating parting shot at ex-partner, and bandmate, Lindsey Buckingham.

The song’s exclusion from the 1977 album Rumours – and the ongoing tensions with Buckingham – had hastened Nicks’s eventual departure from the band. Reunited at Warner Bros Studios in 1997, their famously turbulent history floods the space between Nicks and Buckingham on stage for Silver Springs.

The full-length video has 50m views on YouTube; and even on the nth watch, it’s an electrifying performance that transcends the decades, building from Nicks’s resentful, sidelong glance at Buckingham to her addressing him directly: “Was I just a fool? ... You’ll never get away.”

Nicks delivers the line like a prophecy, or a vow – and this week, nearly 30 years since that performance, and 50 since Rumours, it proved true once again.

On Instagram, Nicks posted an image of a handwritten scrawl: “And if you go forward…”

Buckingham, on his own profile, completed the thought: “I’ll meet you there.”

Setting aside the discrepancy in follower count (Buckingham’s 377,000 followers v Nicks’s 2.3m: by that metric, at least, it’s clear who won the break-up), the call-and-response sent fans into a frenzy of speculation.

Fleetwood Mac last played live in 2019, though without Buckingham, and the death of keyboardist, vocalist and songwriter Christine McVie in 2022 seemed to conclude hopes for a reunion.

In an interview with Rolling Stone last year, Nicks was defiant about her break from Buckingham – stating that she’d already given him “more than 300 million chances” – and adamant Fleetwood Mac was over.

That Instagram post was noteworthy as Nicks’s first public interaction – of sorts – with Buckingham in years.

“What in the silver springs is going on around here!!!!” a fan commented beneath Nicks’s post – to 23,500 likes. New York magazine’s The Cut was more declarative: “Looks like the world’s greatest situationship is back on.”

The timing, just ahead of her North American tour, and quoting lyrics from Frozen Love, one of her early songs with Buckingham, sparked hopes of another onstage reunion.

Days later, the truth was revealed, via a billboard in Los Angeles: a reissue of Buckingham Nicks, the duo’s only studio album, released in 1973 just before they joined Fleetwood Mac. It’s less explosive than the public rapprochement many were hoping for but the response – and the fact of the reissue after 50 years – is proof of what’s been dubbed the “Macaissance”.

At time of writing, Dreams, The Chain and Everywhere are in the UK’s official singles chart, while Rumours has spent 1,106 weeks – more than 21 years – in the top 100 albums in the UK.

As Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding, co-hosts of the podcast Switched On Pop, put it during an episode on Fleetwood Mac last year, the band’s enduring, multigenerational appeal is a testament to their timeless songwriting, modern-sounding production – and dense, decade-spanning interpersonal drama.

Their cultural significance goes beyond commercial success. The making of Rumours – and Nicks and Buckingham’s relationship in particular – was the inspiration for Taylor Jenkins Reid’s 2019 novel Daisy Jones & The Six, later adapted into a successful miniseries for Amazon Prime, as well as the Broadway play Stereophonic, which was nominated for a record 13 Tony awards.

But the real turning point in the “Macaissance” was in 2020, when Nathan Apodaca – then known only as @420doggface208 – used Dreams as the soundtrack on a TikTok video of himself skateboarding while taking beatific swigs of cranberry juice.

One of the platform’s first viral hits, the oddly uplifting clip was viewed nearly 90m times and made a star of Apodaca, who went on to be cast in Taika Waititi’s series Reservation Dogs.

With any other song, the TikTok may not have been so hypnotically watchable. Dreams is restless, roaming, repetitive; the lyrics are atmospheric (quite literally) but ambiguous – it’s no wonder that it resonates with gen Z, said to be more moved by “vibes” than meaning or intent. And then there’s the band’s long-running narrative of emotional angst and messily-intertwined characters – or, as it’s termed today, “lore”.

There is a reason that Jenkins Reid didn’t base her novel on Steely Dan or Led Zeppelin. Perhaps it was always the case, but especially now, catchy tunes are not enough to cement a musician’s status: they need a compelling, and ideally truthful, personal story behind them. For a generation who grew up decoding Taylor Swift’s liner notes, cross-referencing different lyrical accounts of the same drama, and investigating stars’ socials – tracing Buckingham and Nicks’s on-off, decades-long arc is light work.

Even Buckingham has conceded that it was key to the success of Rumours, saying in March this year: “It was ultra-autobiographical in a way. Just more focused on the trauma.”

For her part, Nicks has become an accessible elder in modern pop, even a wise woman. She penned an original poem for Swift’s most recent album, The Tortured Poets Department – widely interpreted as a takedown of The 1975 singer Matty Healy following a brief fling. More recently, she has collaborated with Haim, the LA trio positioning themselves as the poster girls for singledom, who declared Nicks “the greatest human being on this planet”.

Last year, in Rolling Stone, Nicks likened herself to a lighthouse, preventing younger women from dashing themselves on the same treacherous rocks as she did, “because I am the wisdom and I have the stories… We save lives every day”.

Those stories are also why it makes personal and financial sense for their long-lost first album – a commercial failure – to be digitised, finally, for streaming.

Gen-Z knows situationships, on-and-off ties, connections that are over before they start. A relationship that not only endures for decades, but results in great art? That may seem like the height of romance.

Photographs by David S. Holloway/Getty, Silver Screen Collection/Getty