Stevie Nicks & Lindsey Buckingham Releasing Music Again Is Healing Me

Musicians dropping hints about new albums and songs and encouraging their fan base to go a little feral like true crime podcast detectives isn’t really new… but seeing that energy come to musicians we all grew up with? Well, that’s a little different. And when Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham both took to Instagram to share a cryptic message — after announcing the re-release of their 1973 album Buckingham Nicks earlier this summer — I swear, something inside me was healed.

I was a Fleetwood Mac kid, and I think many of us ‘90s kids were. Our parents grew up in the ‘70s, knew the drama of Rumours as it unfolded, and were part of a generation that used art openly and loudly to express their feelings — even the ones that might be embarrassing to say out loud. As they drove us to soccer practices and the grocery store, as they cleaned the house or hosted parties, Fleetwood Mac was the soundtrack. Much like my own tween falling in love with Spice Girls and *NSYNC because I play favorite songs from my adolescence in the car, I was a young kid who had a deep, deep love of Fleetwood Mac.

And whatever else is happening between Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, whether we get tour dates or brand new songs or an entirely new album or not, it feels like a gift.

There’s a great meme that says something like, “I sang to songs as a kid like I was a 9-year-old divorceé,” and I felt that deeply. Because sitting in the backseat of my mom’s car, the windows down and Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours blaring through the speakers (I used to hold the CD case, and I swear, I could hand-draw that album cover from memory if I needed to), I really belted out my feelings. I had no idea I was singing along to an album that had been created by a band going through it, and all of the infidelity, sex, and betrayal oozing out every lyric and song was completely lost on me.

But my soul feels like it’s at least 1/3 made up of Fleetwood Mac songs.

Fleetwood Mac was the soundtrack to my childhood. To this day, when I hear “Dreams” playing anywhere, I can immediately smell lemon Pledge and see my childhood living room on a Saturday morning, my mom singing and cleaning her heart out. I heard my parents’ friends sing “You Make Lovin’ Fun” on our back porch one night, off-key and tipsy, and knew every word of “Landslide” — and that it was a song reserved for when I really needed to feel my feelings. (So basically, always from the ages of 10 to 14.)

Fleetwood Mac feels like home. It feels like my mom. And when I play it through our house now, and my girls and I have dance parties in the kitchen, it feels like another little chunk of childhood magic, etching its way into their memories. A chunk of magic that’s roots began in my mom — their Gravy, as they call her — and roots that will keep going and going. (Especially if Stevie and Lindsey give us a chance to add more.)

Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham releasing their iconic album and dropping cryptic hints of more things to come feels very much like a love letter to fans. We all know their tumultuous history; we all know how their relationship went and ended; we all know the spine-tingling harmony of “Silver Springs.” To know that they are coming together, especially after the loss of Christine McVie a few years ago, feels incredibly special.

So move over, Swifties (we love you, too) — there’s a whole bunch of us who want to recreate some of the magic of our childhoods, of our parents’ childhoods, of riding in the car with the windows down, blaring heartbreak songs that sound like punchy upbeat anthems.

This one is for our moms. May we never get away from the sound of the woman who loves us.