Lindsey Buckingham spoke candidly about Stevie Nicks balking on joining the rest of Fleetwood Mac for the band's last recordings. Although 2017's Lindsey Buckingham / Christine McVie album also featured the Mac's John McVie and Mick Fleetwood — the sessions were to be the groundwork for a full-band album that never quite happened. With Stevie Nicks adamantly passing on joining in, the result was a billed as duo album with Christine McVie — and although essentially a Fleetwood Mac album — without the “brand name” attached to the group, the set stalled at a disappointing Number 17 on the charts.
Buckingham told Classic Rock magazine that plans for a full Mac album started way before then: “We did want to make an album around 2012. I had a bunch of songs, and Mick and John and I went in with the producer Mitchell Froom and cut a bunch of stuff. This was before Christine returned to the band in 2014. We very much wanted to draw Stevie in, and for some reason she refused to participate.”
He went on to say, “She has sort of gotten a little bit disoriented in her wanting to pursue Stevie Nicks in capital letters, if you will. In defending the brand, as opposed to defending the creativity, I think she kind of lost track of her writing a little bit, and maybe didn’t think she had anything she felt she could offer, and so did not want to be a part of it. That effort to engage her was revamped again when Christine returned, because it was like, well, Christine’s back, maybe now Stevie will want to do this.”
Buckingham explained, “Christine had a bunch of song ideas and I helped her with those, and we eventually went in the studio and cut those. And we were still hoping to make that a Fleetwood Mac album, and Stevie wouldn’t do it. That became the duet album that Christine and I did. So it wasn’t for lack of trying (laughs).”
Buckingham spelled out how after devoting so much time to the group dynamic, when he needed the same freedom for his solo work as other members enjoyed, it led to him being booted from the band: “When Christine and I got off the road after touring the duet album, I had wanted to put out this current album almost immediately. There had been a Fleetwood Mac tour that had been scheduled for 2019, and I asked the band to kick that tour down the road a bit so I’d have an extra three months to do some dates behind my solo album. But certain members of the band were not willing to do that, one in particular. That led to a sort of tension between us that we took into a MusicCares event that we did in New York, which was the actual evening that became the catalyst for us parting ways.”
He spoke about how and why his exit from the band came about: “That was again Stevie taking issue with some things that I said or did, apparently. Certainly no one else in the band is on the same page in terms as that. She gave the band an ultimatum. The irony of all that is for all of the things that we went through for those 43 years, I mean, c’mon, this was nothing, really (laughs).”
A while back, Mick Fleetwood, who along with John McVie played on the Lindsey Buckingham / Christine McVie album, explained Stevie Nicks' absence during the album's sessions: “The crafting of this became so specifically about Chris and Lindsey really some time ago, that this has happened so many times before, and stuff. And I say, 'never say never' in terms of Fleetwood Mac is alive and well. And, y'know, she's been in and out of Fleetwood Mac and doing her thing, and she, more than anyone has a profoundly different level of a career outside of Fleetwood Mac — including Lindsey and including Chris and certainly John and myself — and that's nothing new.”