The famously frosty relationship between Fleetwood Mac pair Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham appears to be warming up.
The pair, whose 1973 debut album Buckingham Nicks was recently reissued after being unavailable for several decades, both appear on the latest episode of the popular Song Exploder podcast to discuss the album and the creation of its most famous track, Frozen Love.
"The song is about sort of love interrupted, so to speak," says Buckingham. "This love that we had, which somehow got intruded upon by other things. Some of those were my fault, and some of those were her fault."
"This was a pretty, like, not really hateful song, but it's a little bit mean," responds Nicks. "That's what I said about great tragedies. They're not always nice. Our relationship was up and down and up and down and up and down and difficult. But at the same time fantastic. 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."
"But I think she just saw herself in that role that even then, even though I was sort of the producer and I was sort of the musical leader," Buckingham adds. "I think she felt like she was the one who was ahead of the game in some ways, and she was probably right."
Buckingham also discusses the song's musical inspiration, revealing how the song came together from separate parts.
"It isn't strictly a collaboration, you know, like two writers who are co-captaining the entire process. With Frozen Love, the verse and chorus parts where the singing is, that was Stevie's basic song. But we wanted to do this one song that would have this epic quality to it in order to create sort of a mini-movie in the middle, still allowing you to get back into the song at the end.
"Because I was a huge Jimmy Page fan, not just of Led Zeppelin as a whole, but just of him as a producer and how he approached what he did. If you think of Stairway to Heaven or something, they would start off with a basic song and it would go through all sorts of angular changes and work its way back to the beginning. So all of that, I think, helped get me to where I needed to be for Frozen Love.
"It really evolved into an opus of sorts because those middle sections that it goes through were not part of the original plan in her mind."
"The orchestrated part, that's my favourite part," adds Nicks. "Pretty much of the whole record, it's my favourite part. Because I started to look at it as a dark ballet. You know, with one of us standing on each side of the stage and having like, I don't know, the Bolshoi Ballet or something dancing to this recording and how like Swan Lake-esque it was, you know, total tragedy."
Nicks and Buckingham were romantically involved between 1972 and 1978, but their relationship frayed during the recording of Rumours, a dynamic that famously fed directly into the songwriting.
"Our relationship has always been volatile,” Nicks told Rolling Stone in 2018. "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."
Rumours will be 50 years old in February 2027, leading some to predict that Fleetwood Mac may mark the anniversary with some activity.
