A billboard along Los Angeles’s Sunset Boulevard of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham got fans’ hopes up about a possible collaboration.
It features the iconic cover of their 1973 album “Buckingham Nicks” and the date of Sept. 19.
To add to the mystery, they both posted elusive messages onto social media.
Nicks posted a photo on Instagram six days ago that read: “And if you go forward…” That same day, Buckingham posted a photo that read, “I’ll meet you there.” The lyric is from their song “Frozen Love.”
Fans immediately flooded the comment sections of both posts, inquiring about what this may mean.
“DID WE KISS AND MAKE UP? Oh my god GUYS. WHAT IS HAPPENING?!” one fan wrote.
Kate Hudson posted multiple raising hand emojis on both posts.
While it isn’t new music, the duo will be re-releasing their album “Buckingham Nicks.” It’s set to be released on Sept. 19 in all formats. It’s been out of print since the early ’80s. So, this will be the album’s CD debut as well as its first time on streaming and digital download.
In the meantime, the single “Crying In The Night” is available to listen to now.
Buckingham and Nicks were in their early to mid-20s during the making of their album. “It was a very natural thing, from the beginning,” Nicks says in the re-release’s liner notes, written by music journalist David Fricke.
Despite their relative inexperience, “it stands up in a way you would hope it would, by these two kids who were pretty young to be doing that work,” Buckingham says, according to the announcement release.
In 2011, Buckingham told Uncut that he and Nicks had “every intention of putting that album back out and possibly even doing something along with it, but I can’t put any specifics on that.”
In 2013, on the album’s 40th anniversary, Fleetwood Mac released “Extended Play,” their first new studio material since 2003’s “Say You Will.” The four-track collection featured a song titled “Without You,” which had been originally slated for “Buckingham Nicks.”
The reissued version of “Buckingham Nicks” features the same album cover as the original, despite Nicks’ public dissatisfaction with the photograph, telling classic rock magazine MOJO that she “felt like a rat in a trap” during the shoot.
“I’m actually quite prudish. So when they suggested they shoot Lindsey and I nude I could not have been more terrified if you’d asked me to jump off a speeding train,” Nicks told MOJO in 2013. “Lindsey was like, ‘Oh, come on – this is art. Don’t be a child!’ I thought, ‘Who are you? Don’t you know me?’”
“Buckingham Nicks” was released one year before they joined Fleetwood Mac, and was met with little commercial success. But it did attract the attention of Mick Fleetwood, who invited Buckingham to join Fleetwood Mac. Buckingham in turn insisted Nicks come, too. The two, then a couple, became the central faces, voices and songwriters of the group for the four decades that followed.
The pair’s tumultuous relationship appeared across the band’s discography: She wrote “Dreams” about him. He wrote “Go Your Own Way” about her. Infamously, they broke up while writing the 1977 hit album “Rumours.” Footage of Nicks staring down Buckingham 20 years later during a performance of “Silver Springs” routinely goes viral: “You’ll never get away from the sound of the woman that loves you,” Nicks and Buckingham sing in unison, at one point, holding each other’s gaze.
Buckingham left the band in 1987, returning in 1996. The last time the band reunited, however, for a 2018-2019 tour, the rest of the members kicked Buckingham out, and as a result, he sued them.
He claimed he was told five days after the group appeared at Radio City Music Hall that the band would tour without him. He says he would have been paid at least $12 million for his share of the proceeds. Later that year, Buckingham said they had settled the lawsuit.
Both Buckingham and Nicks have also released reams of solo music.
Some fans had theorized that Nicks and Buckingham were teasing a Fleetwood Mac reunion, which would have been the first since the death of vocalist, songwriter and keyboard player Christine McVie in 2022.
Last year, Nicks told MOJO that without McVie, “there is no chance of putting Fleetwood Mac back together in any way.”