Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks were fresh Los Angeles transplants when they created their first and only collaborative album as a duo, 1973’s Buckingham Nicks. Released in September of that year, the album flopped and went mostly ignored by the public. One day, Mick Fleetwood stumbled upon one of Buckingham and Nicks’ recordings — “Frozen Love” — as his band wrestled with another lineup change, and he was quickly won over. The songwriting duo officially joined at the start of 1975, immediately contributed new songs to the band’s self-titled rebirth, and the rest is history.
But the process of making Buckingham Nicks, when the two were just beginning to realize their songwriting partnership, was less miraculous. According to the pair, Nicks took on the breadwinner role at the time, working waitressing and cleaning jobs while Buckingham stayed at home with guitar in hand, smoking weed and making music. They did this, apparently, because they both felt it would be best for Buckingham to not work and instead focus on his guitar technique and songwriting efforts.
That’s quite the arrangement. Obviously, in 2025, gender roles are more nuanced than they were in the early ’70s, but with both Buckingham and Nicks demonstrating serious ambition as songwriters, vocalists, lyricists, and instrumentalists, they had every reason for the survival workload to be equitable. The album they made is not just Lindsay Buckingham and not just Stevie Nicks. It’s both of them, shoulder-to-shoulder, skin on skin, like the album cover suggests.
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But when listening to Buckingham Nicks, which will now be released into the world officially for the first time since its initial pressing in the early ’70s, you can also hear why the arrangement worked. Both Buckingham and Nicks were obsessing over craft, just in different ways. Buckingham’s virtuosic nature is more obvious, evident in spellbinding, fingerpicked passages and clever harmonic turns. Nicks, on the other hand, was developing something just as sophisticated: a vocal approach inspired by her late ’60s heroes in Grace Slick and Janis Joplin, with raw command and a capacity to depict a multitude of emotions within her lyrics.
These studied approaches meet on Buckingham Nicks, which has held a sort of mythological status among Fleetwood Mac devotees, but has been largely unavailable to casual listeners. Usually, debut albums from legacy acts like Buckingham and Nicks demonstrate a scrappier dynamic; even looking at Nick’s charged gaze and Buckingham’s untamed (and untrimmed) features on the album cover suggests a raw, adventurous work, imbued with the recklessness of youth and ambition.
But Buckingham Nicks is much more measured and unblemished than you might expect, an aspect further emphasized by the release’s newly-remastered audio. The remastering reveals just how polished these recordings were; Buckingham’s clean guitar tones on tracks like “Without a Leg to Stand On” shimmer with clarity, while the rhythm section (featuring top-shelf session players like Jim Keltner) provides a rock-solid foundation that sounds anything but amateurish.
This is especially apparent on the seven-minute closer “Frozen Love,” a majestic cut that features an moving string section and an extended bridge that burns with fiery emotion. The chords dissolve into one another as Buckingham plucks his guitar with bewildering speed, the urgency mirrored by growing dynamics and an expansive arrangement. Recorded at the legendary Sound City Studios with future Fleetwood Mac producer Keith Olsen at the helm, the album benefited from state-of-the-art equipment (including the studio’s new Neve console) and world-class musicianship back then; it sounds even more crisp and immersive now.
