Stevie Nicks

Before Fleetwood Mac, there were two broke kids from California trying to make it. Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham recorded their only album together at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys with producer Keith Olsen. The 10-track record featured five Nicks compositions, including "Frozen Love" and "Crystal" — a song Fleetwood Mac would later re-record for their 1975 album.

The cover photo story is legendary. Nicks spent $111 on a white blouse for the shoot, but photographer Jimmy Wachtel and Buckingham pressured her to go topless. She later said she was crying during the photo. Buckingham told her she was "being a child" and that it was "art." Nicks disagreed.

Polydor Records felt the album "lacked imagination" and barely promoted it. Nicks said she couldn't even find it in record shops. The album was deleted from the catalog within months. But in one of rock's greatest lucky accidents, Mick Fleetwood visited Sound City to check out the studio, and engineer Keith Olsen played him "Frozen Love" through the monitors. Fleetwood loved the guitar work and invited Buckingham to join Fleetwood Mac. Buckingham agreed — on one condition: Stevie had to come too.

They met the band at the Mexican restaurant El Carmen in L.A. Nicks arrived still wearing her flapper costume from her waitress shift at Clementine's. They officially joined on New Year's Eve 1974. The album stayed out of print for over 50 years until Rhino Records reissued it in September 2025, when it debuted at #11 on the Billboard 200.

The self-titled album — sometimes called "The White Album" by fans — was the first Fleetwood Mac record featuring Buckingham and Nicks, and it transformed a fading British blues band into an American pop-rock powerhouse. Recorded at Sound City, the album produced three Top 20 singles: "Over My Head," "Rhiannon," and "Say You Love Me."

"Rhiannon" changed everything. Inspired by a Welsh witch from mythology, the song turned Stevie into a rock icon. Her live performances — spinning, shawl-draped, seemingly possessed — became the template for her stage persona forever. Demos of "Rhiannon," "Monday Morning," and "I'm So Afraid" were originally intended for a second Buckingham Nicks album that never happened.

Christine McVie initially had reservations about another woman joining the band but agreed to make the final call on whether Nicks would fit. After the El Carmen dinner, she was convinced. The album took 58 weeks to reach #1 on the Billboard 200 — a slow-burn triumph driven by relentless touring.

The album that turned personal devastation into 40 million sales. By the time Fleetwood Mac entered the studio, every romantic relationship in the band was collapsing simultaneously. Stevie and Lindsey had broken up. Christine and John McVie were divorcing. Mick Fleetwood discovered his wife was having an affair. And somehow, these five people channeled all of it into the seventh-greatest album of all time according to Rolling Stone.

Every song is about someone in the room. Nicks wrote "Dreams" — the band's only #1 single — about Buckingham. He wrote "Go Your Own Way" about her, with lyrics she found so cruel she begged him not to release it. Christine's "You Make Loving Fun" was about her new relationship with the band's lighting director. "Gold Dust Woman" was Nicks writing openly about cocaine. The band famously spent nearly $1 million on the production — much of it going to drugs and alcohol.

The album won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 1978 and spent 31 weeks at #1. "Dreams" went viral again in 2020 when Nathan Apodaca posted a TikTok skateboarding to it while drinking cranberry juice, introducing the song to an entirely new generation.

After Rumours broke every sales record imaginable, Lindsey Buckingham decided to blow everything up. Tusk was a sprawling, experimental double album that cost over $1 million to produce and featured the USC Marching Band on the title track. The label was horrified. Fans were confused. Critics were split.

For Nicks, the album was deeply personal. "Sara" is one of the most debated songs in rock history — was it about a miscarried or aborted child? Her relationship with Mick Fleetwood? Nicks has given contradictory answers over the decades, deliberately preserving the ambiguity. "Storms" and "Angel" were inspired by her brief affair with Mick Fleetwood, which happened while she was simultaneously seeing Eagles guitarist Don Henley.

The album "only" sold four million copies — a commercial disappointment by Rumours standards, but a number most bands would kill for. Time has been kind to Tusk; many fans now consider it the band's most artistically ambitious work.

Stevie's solo debut was born from frustration. Fleetwood Mac kept rejecting her songs — she had a stockpile of material the band wouldn't use. She refused to give them the title track, saving it for herself. Producer Jimmy Iovine, fresh off working with Tom Petty, kept her grounded.

The Tom Petty connection is a wild story. Nicks jokingly asked Petty to write her a song. He didn't take it seriously until she asked again a year later. He offered her "Insider," but after they recorded it together, Petty liked it so much he kept it for himself. Out of what he called "terrible guilt," he gave her "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around" instead — and it became her biggest solo hit, reaching #3. Nicks herself admitted the album might not have been a hit without that song.

"Leather and Lace," a gorgeous duet with Don Henley, was originally written for country legends Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter. "Edge of Seventeen" — Nicks' signature solo song — was inspired by the deaths of her uncle and John Lennon. The title came from a misunderstanding: Tom Petty's first wife told Nicks she met Tom "at the age of seventeen," and Stevie misheard it as "edge of seventeen." Destiny's Child later sampled the guitar riff for "Bootylicious."

But the triumph was shadowed by tragedy. The day Bella Donna hit #1, Nicks learned that her best friend since childhood, Robin Anderson, had leukemia. Robin was pregnant and given three months to live. "I never got to enjoy Bella Donna at all because my friend was dying," Nicks later said. The album has been certified 5× platinum.

After the experimental sprawl of Tusk, the label wanted a return to polished pop. Mirage delivered, producing the hits "Hold Me" and "Gypsy." The latter was Nicks writing about her pre-fame days living in a tiny apartment with Buckingham, spinning around in the rooms of their San Francisco flat. The album hit #1 and has been certified 3× platinum.

Stevie's second solo album carried some of the heaviest emotional weight of her career. Her best friend Robin Anderson had died of leukemia in 1982, just two days after giving birth. Overwhelmed by grief, Nicks married Robin's widower, Kim Anderson, three months later. "We didn't get married because we were in love, we got married because we were grieving." They divorced within months.

The Prince story is unforgettable. On her wedding day, driving to Santa Barbara for the honeymoon, Nicks heard Prince's "Little Red Corvette" on the radio and couldn't stop humming along. She wrote "Stand Back" that night in the honeymoon suite. When she went to record it, she called Prince and honestly told him what she'd done. Against everyone's expectations, Prince showed up at the studio, played 25 minutes of brilliant synthesizer — uncredited — and they agreed to split the publishing 50/50. Then, as Nicks tells it, "he just got up and left as if the whole thing happened in a dream."

Prince also sent her the demo for what became "Purple Rain" and asked her to write lyrics. Nicks was so overwhelmed she turned it down. She later said she's glad she didn't, because he wrote it himself and created a masterpiece. The album reached #5 and went double platinum.

By the mid-'80s, Stevie's cocaine use had burned a hole in her nasal cartilage. The album went platinum but didn't match her previous heights. "Talk to Me" reached #4 on the Hot 100.

In 1986, a doctor warned her she risked a brain hemorrhage. Nicks checked herself into Betty Ford. She got clean from cocaine, but a psychiatrist — whom she's described as a "groupie" who just wanted rock and roll stories — prescribed Klonopin to prevent relapse. She stayed on it for eight years, calling it the worst mistake of her life.

Fleetwood Mac's second-biggest selling album was recorded largely without Nicks present. "Welcome to the Room...Sara" was directly inspired by her time at Betty Ford. The album produced "Big Love," "Little Lies," "Everywhere," and "Seven Wonders." But just before the world tour, Buckingham quit after a confrontation with Nicks turned — in her words — "physically ugly."

Produced by Rupert Hine, the album was commercially successful, but the Klonopin was taking its toll. Nicks later said she has "no memory" of the supporting tour. The prescribing doctor kept upping her dose for years. "Klonopin was worse than the cocaine," she has said. "I lost those eight years."

The first Mac album without Buckingham. It reached #1 in the UK and went platinum in the U.S. On the tour's final night, Buckingham and Nicks reunited on stage for "Landslide."

Then Nicks quit. A bitter dispute erupted with Mick Fleetwood over "Silver Springs," a devastating B-side from the Rumours era. Nicks wanted it on her solo compilation; Fleetwood refused, saving it for a Mac box set. She was furious and left the band.

The Klonopin album — the lowest point. Still heavily medicated, she gained weight, stopped writing, and assembled the album from older demos. In late 1993, she tripped over a box at a baby shower, passed out, and gashed her forehead. "I knew it was the Klonopin."

Shortly after, she finally detoxed — 47 days she has described as far more horrific than kicking cocaine. "The word 'tranquilizer' should scare people to death," she has warned ever since.

The classic Rumours lineup reunited for a live album and MTV concert special. It debuted at #1 and has been certified 5× platinum.

"Silver Springs" finally got its moment. The song she quit the band over was performed live, and the performance is legendary. Nicks stares Buckingham down during the final verse with an intensity that has launched a thousand fan analyses. It's one of the most emotionally raw live performances ever captured on film.

The comeback. After years lost to Klonopin, Nicks returned to form, produced by Sheryl Crow. It debuted at #5 on the Billboard 200. "Planets of the Universe," remixed for clubs, reached #1 on Billboard's Dance chart.

The first Mac studio album in 16 years, and the only one without Christine McVie. It debuted at #3 on the Billboard 200 and was followed by a lengthy world tour.

After a 10-year solo hiatus, Nicks returned with what many fans consider her best work since Bella Donna. Produced by Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics and recorded at Nicks' home, the album captured something intimate and unguarded. It debuted at #6.

The concept: go back to the vault, find the demos that never made it, and re-record them properly. Some dated back to the early '70s. The album debuted at #7. The 24 Karat Gold Tour ran from 2016 to 2017 with The Pretenders opening.

In December 2020, Primary Wave purchased an 80% stake in Nicks' catalog for a reported $100 million. In April 2019, she became the first woman inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame twice — first with Fleetwood Mac in 1998, then as a solo artist.