When Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks finally stopped taking shots at each other over social media and through lawyers’ offices, it was because they had to make a documentary together. And sometimes, that’s exactly what broken relationships need—a reason to sit in the same room and remember why they mattered in the first place.
This week, Buckingham, now 75, revealed at Variety’s Power of Young Hollywood event that he and Nicks are “talking all the time now.” Not cordial texts. Not crisis management. Actual talking. The guitarist credited the upcoming Fleetwood Mac Apple TV doc (dropping 2027) with being the catalyst for what he called a “very circular healing process for all of us.” In other words: they’ve buried it.
For anyone not paying attention for the last five decades, here’s what they buried: Buckingham and Nicks dated from 1972 to 1976 and channeled the end of that relationship into one of rock’s most legendary breakup albums—Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. Songs like “Dreams,” “Go Your Own Way,” and “The Chain” weren’t just chart-toppers; they’re immortal. But immortality came at a cost. After they split in ’76, the band became rock’s ultimate soap opera, with barely-concealed hostility fueling decades of reunions, solo projects, and strategic distance.
Then came 2018. Buckingham got fired from Fleetwood Mac during a tour scheduling dispute, and he blamed Nicks directly. She’d reportedly given the band an ultimatum: him or her. Buckingham went scorched-earth legal, suing for breach of contract and alleging he lost millions in earnings. The lawsuit settled later that year, but the damage was structural. For years, the two operated like exes who accidentally saw each other at the grocery store—polite, performative, strained.
The reissue of their 1973 Buckingham Nicks album last year was the first public signal that things might shift. They posted a joint statement. It felt like a truce flag. But working on the documentary has apparently done what decades of Grammy Awards and nostalgia couldn’t: actually fix things. Buckingham was blunt about how bad it got. “We had left things in 2019, maybe as far as I was concerned, not in a very good place for all the wrong reasons,” he said. “No one was happy about it.”
The bigger picture here matters. Buckingham and Nicks built one of the most successful bands in history by translating real pain into perfect songs—the Rumours album moved over 40 million copies worldwide. Their breakup made them famous. Their feuds made them legendary. But legendary doesn’t pay the therapy bills, and it sure doesn’t make for good documentaries. The Apple TV project required them to sit down and actually tell the story. And in telling it, they healed something.
He even teased future collaborations. “I don’t know if it will lead to something else down the line,” Buckingham said, which in ex-girlfriend language means: don’t rule anything out.
The 16BARS take: Rock’s most expensive breakup finally has a epilogue, and it turns out the cure was honestly confronting the past instead of monetizing it. The Fleetwood Mac documentary won’t just be fans reliving the 1970s—it’ll be watching two people actually grow up.
