Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham appear to have ceased hostilities and are talking to each other once more, albeit via separate interviews on the same podcast.
They have appeared together on Song Exploder, talking about Frozen Love, a track off their first and only album together as a duo, Buckingham Nicks. After being unavailable for years, the 1973 album was finally reissued in September.
Frozen Love is the only song on the album where the pair are co-credited as writers and it was a pivotal one in both their lives – it’s the song that convinced Mick Fleetwood that Buckingham would be a good fit for his ailing band. Lindsey said yes on the proviso that Stevie joined too and the rest, as they say, is rock history.
On the podcast, both Buckingham and Nicks talk about how they first met at high school in Northern California and about their first band Fritz. The band supported Chicago and even Jimi Hendrix – “In our own minds, we were already famous,” says Stevie – but were unable to secure a record deal. However, labels were interested in Buckingham and Nicks as a duo.
Leaving the band, Stevie explains, was a wrench. “It was very sad and very hard. It hurt us. It was our first super disappointment in the music business. [But] it was an invitation to greatness.”
It also drove the pair closer together. “We probably never would have even had a relationship had it not been that we had to fire the rest of our band,” she says. “Then we fell in love and that was it.”
The duo then started working on their debut album. Frozen Love was started by Nicks. “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.”
She describes her lyrics in places as “flippant” before comparing it to literary classics like Great Expectations or Wuthering Heights. “A modern day love affair, tragedies. Because nobody really loves happy songs… For us, the more dramatic it was, the better.”
It was the first time the pair had written about their own relationship and set a template they would explore further in Fleetwood Mac. “That was where we found that strain of where it was ‘don’t be afraid to write a poem that’s a little about me, because what else are you going to write about?’”
Buckingham then developed the song instrumentally. “I don’t think she craved my input on that level [lyrics], and nor did I crave hers on production or instrumental level, either,” he 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 centre that she’d given me.”
Stevie also clarified one contentious line in the song: ‘hate gave you me for a lover” was unintended. It was originally ‘fate gave you me for a lover.’ “When I hear myself sing that line, it sounds like I’m saying ‘hate,'” Nicks said. “So, that’s not good. I’m sorry, Lindsey. I’m calling him later.”
