NEED TO KNOW
When Stevie Nicks goes forward, Lindsey Buckingham meets her there.
Nicks, 77, and Buckingham, 76, appeared via separate interviews on the Song Exploder podcast on Tuesday, Oct. 28, to discuss the making of their song “Frozen Love.” The haunting song appeared on the duo’s only album, Buckingham Nicks, released in 1973.
The album, which led to the pair joining Fleetwood Mac, was reissued in September after being out of print for almost 50 years. In her portion of the interview, Nicks revealed that she had spoken with Buckingham one day before recording the podcast.
“Lindsey and I started talking about it last night. This whole thing seems really like yesterday to us,” Nicks said after discussing the night she met Buckingham, when both were students at Menlo-Atherton High School in California in 1966.
After they opened for Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin as members of the band Fritz, Nicks says that producer Keith Olsen told the pair that they would be better off as a duo than as members of the band.
“Keith was extremely supportive, but Fritz was never able to secure a record deal,” Buckingham said in his podcast interview.
“We loved these guys,” Nicks said. “So we were not at all happy about that, but there was nothing we could do … It was our first super disappointment in the music business.” While hesitant, Nicks says that she knew it was the start of an important new chapter.
“It was an invitation to greatness, and we both knew it,” Nicks shared.
After making the difficult choice to leave Fritz, Nicks recalled the beginnings of her famously fiery romance with Buckingham. “It drove us together, because we just couldn’t figure it out,” Nicks said. “And then we fell in love with each other, and that was it.”
Each musician then took time to reflect on “Frozen Love,” one of the most notable songs on the album. “The song is about two people that were in love, that had a lot of differences and saw the world slightly differently, but had this like relationship that seemed to be, like a gift,” Nicks said. “I like to think of it as Wuthering Heights or Great Expectations — a modern-day love affair, tragedies. Because nobody really loves happy songs. Certainly, I didn’t, and neither really did Lindsey.”
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Buckingham then reflected on working on his part of the song, in particular, his guitar playing. “I don’t think she craved my input on that level, and nor did I crave hers on production or instrumental level, either,” Buckingham said. “She understood that I was transforming things for her, and I understood that I wouldn’t have had anything to transform without the beautiful center that she’d given me.”
“Our relationship was up and down and up and down and up and down and difficult, but at the same time, fantastic,” Nicks said. “And what we were doing was so fantastic, that it was worth putting up with the trials and tribulations of a relationship that’s difficult.”
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Nicks and Buckingham would go on to have a tumultuous partnership following the release of Buckingham Nicks. After meeting in high school, the pair began dating in 1972 and split four years later. On New Year’s Eve in 1974, the former couple officially joined Fleetwood Mac, with their later split coinciding with the band’s rise to fame amid the release of their album Rumours.
In the years to come, the pair continued to make music and perform together as exes, alongside bandmates Mick Fleetwood, John McVie and the late Christine McVie.
