Why Stevie Nicks Once Compared Herself and Lindsey Buckingham to a ‘Fairy’ and a ‘Gnome’
Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks’ relationship inspired some of the best Fleetwood Mac songs, and the singer once poetically compared herself and her ex-boyfriend to a “fairy” and a “gnome.” Here’s how their contentious love story inspired the song “Dreams,” and why Nicks compared them to fairy tale characters.
Stevie Nicks wrote the hit Fleetwood Mac song ‘Dreams’ about her relationship with Lindsey Buckingham
Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joined Fleetwood Mac together as a couple. When founding member and drummer Mick Fleetwood invited Buckingham to join the band after hearing his guitar playing, Buckingham accepted on one condition: that Nicks join, too.
Fleetwood Mac reached new heights of fame and success with Buckingham and Nicks in the group, but their romantic relationship didn’t survive. Nicks has since called Buckingham a “very powerful, controlling man,” while Buckingham has said it was “stupid” of him to ask Fleetwood Mac to let Nicks join the band.
But their love story and bitter breakup inspired some of the group’s greatest hits. Lindsey Buckingham wrote “Go Your Own Way” about their split. The track features the lyrics: “Tell me why/ Everything turned around/ Packing up/ Shacking up is all you want to do.”
“I very, very much resented him telling the world that ‘packing up, shacking up’ with different men was all I wanted to do,” Nicks, who sang backup vocals on the song, told Rolling Stone in October 1997. “He knew it wasn’t true. It was just an angry thing that he said.”
She added, “Every time those words would come out onstage, I wanted to go over and kill him. He knew it, so he really pushed my buttons through that. It was like, ‘I’ll make you suffer for leaving me.’ And I did. For years.”
Stevie Nicks compared herself to a ‘fairy’ and Lindsey Buckingham to a ‘gnome’
Lindsey Buckingham wrote several breakup songs about Stevie Nicks, but the singer retaliated with her own Fleetwood Mac tracks. Her song “Dreams,” which appears with “Go Your Own Way” on the Rumours album, contains the scathing lyrics, “Thunder only happens when it’s rainin’/ Players only love you when they’re playin’/ Women, they will come and they will go/ When the rain washes you clean, you’ll know.”
“‘Dreams’ and ‘Go Your Own Way’ are what I call the ‘twin songs,’” Nicks told Mojo magazine in January 2013 (per Songfacts). “They’re the same song written by two people about the same relationship.”
The former couple opened up about the two songs in a June 2009 interview for Q Magazine. “There had been some traumatic moments already,” said Buckingham. “Betrayals, whatever you want to call them. ‘Go Your Own Way’ was a focal point of the album early on, and sort of set the tone in many ways.”
“It was certainly a message within a song,” said Nicks. “And not a very nice one at that. ‘Dreams’ was a different response. It was the fairy and the gnome. I was trying to be all philosophical. And he was just mad.”
The Fleetwood Mac singer said sharing the song with her ex-boyfriend was ‘sad’
Stevie Nicks got candid about working on the breakup song “Dreams” with her ex-boyfriend Lindsey Buckingham. “I remember the night I wrote ‘Dreams.’ I walked in and handed a cassette of the song to Lindsey,” she told Daily Mail in October 2009. “It was a rough take, just me singing solo and playing piano. Even though he was mad with me at the time, Lindsey played it and then looked up at me and smiled.”
She admitted that creating the track with Buckingham was “sad,” but they still “respected each other” enough as musicians to work together despite their personal turmoil.
“What was going on between us was sad,” Nicks said. “We were couples who couldn’t make it through. But, as musicians, we still respected each other – and we got some brilliant songs out of it.”
