Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks have been contemporary Los Angeles transplants once they created their first and solely collaborative album as a duo, 1973’s Buckingham Nicks. Launched in September of that yr, the album flopped and went principally ignored by the general public. Sooner or later, Mick Fleetwood stumbled upon certainly one of Buckingham and Nicks’ recordings — “Frozen Love” — as his band wrestled with one other lineup change, and he was rapidly received over. The songwriting duo formally joined at the beginning of 1975, instantly contributed new songs to the band’s self-titled rebirth, and the remainder is historical past.
However the course of of creating Buckingham Nicks, when the 2 have been simply starting to comprehend their songwriting partnership, was much less miraculous. In accordance with the pair, Nicks took on the breadwinner position on the time, working waitressing and cleansing jobs whereas Buckingham stayed at house with guitar in hand, smoking weed and making music. They did this, apparently, as a result of they each felt it might be finest for Buckingham to not work and as a substitute give attention to his guitar approach and songwriting efforts.
That’s fairly the association. Clearly, in 2025, gender roles are extra nuanced than they have been within the early ’70s, however with each Buckingham and Nicks demonstrating severe ambition as songwriters, vocalists, lyricists, and instrumentalists, that they had each purpose for the survival workload to be equitable. The album they made is not only Lindsay Buckingham and never simply Stevie Nicks. It’s each of them, shoulder-to-shoulder, pores and skin on pores and skin, just like the album cowl suggests.
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However when listening to Buckingham Nicks, which is able to now be launched into the world formally for the primary time since its preliminary urgent within the early ’70s, you may also hear why the association labored. Each Buckingham and Nicks have been obsessing over craft, simply in several methods. Buckingham’s virtuosic nature is extra apparent, evident in spellbinding, fingerpicked passages and intelligent harmonic turns. Nicks, however, was growing one thing simply as refined: a vocal method impressed by her late ’60s heroes in Grace Slick and Janis Joplin, with uncooked command and a capability to depict a mess of feelings inside her lyrics.
These studied approaches meet on Buckingham Nicks, which has held a form of mythological standing amongst Fleetwood Mac devotees, however has been largely unavailable to informal listeners. Often, debut albums from legacy acts like Buckingham and Nicks show a scrappier dynamic; even taking a look at Nick’s charged gaze and Buckingham’s untamed (and untrimmed) options on the album cowl suggests a uncooked, adventurous work, imbued with the recklessness of youth and ambition.
However Buckingham Nicks is rather more measured and unblemished than you would possibly count on, a facet additional emphasised by the discharge’s newly-remastered audio. The remastering reveals simply how polished these recordings have been; Buckingham’s clear guitar tones on tracks like “With out a Leg to Stand On” shimmer with readability, whereas the rhythm part (that includes top-shelf session gamers like Jim Keltner) gives a rock-solid basis that sounds something however amateurish.
That is particularly obvious on the seven-minute nearer “Frozen Love,” an imposing minimize that options an transferring string part and an prolonged bridge that burns with fiery emotion. The chords dissolve into each other as Buckingham plucks his guitar with bewildering pace, the urgency mirrored by rising dynamics and an expansive association. Recorded on the legendary Sound Metropolis Studios with future Fleetwood Mac producer Keith Olsen on the helm, the album benefited from state-of-the-art gear (together with the studio’s new Neve console) and world-class musicianship again then; it sounds much more crisp and immersive now.
