The 1973 Song Stevie Nicks Wrote About Lindsey Buckingham Being a “Difficult Artist” To Work With

Although 1973’s Buckingham Nicks wasn’t necessarily a commercial success, it’s a fun album to look back on for plenty of reasons. One being, it gives Fleetwood Mac fans a glimpse into how Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham felt about each other at the time. One of the most insightful songs, from Nick’s perspective, is “Long Distance Winner”, which she later described as “a heavy kind of song about [her and Lindsey’s] relationship.”

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“Back then, ‘Long Distance Winner’ was very much about dealing with Lindsey,” she even admitted to Billboard in 1998.

If you listen closely to the song, it describes a sort of ambitious person for whom nothing ever truly seems to be enough. It also talks about being unable to change them but loving them just the same.

Sunflowers and your face fascinate me
You love only the tallest trees
I come running down the hill
But you’re fast
You’re the winner
Long distance winner.

“What the song is really all about,” Nicks continued, “‘I adore you, but you’re difficult, and I’ll stay here with you, but you’re still difficult.’”

She added, “And the line ‘Sunflowers and your face fascinate me’ means that your beauty fascinates me, but I still have trouble dealing with you—and I still stay. So it’s really just the age-old story, you know?”

Nicks explains, “Meaning the inability to live with someone and the inability to live without them.”

Will There Ever Be Another ‘Buckingham Nicks’?

During their early days living in Los Angeles, Nicks and Buckingham were just a couple of “starving artists” trying to make ends meet. In the early 70s, Nicks would wait tables and clean houses, whatever she could do to help them get by.

According to the biography Gold Dust Woman, Nicks was the one who made the money to support her and Buckingham back then, which might’ve led to some resentment.

Not to mention, when it came to the music, there were times when Nicks felt Buckingham took too much control over her songs and certain creative choices.

“From the beginning, Lindsey was very controlling and very possessive,” she said, as Gold Dust Woman notes. “I was never very good with controlling people and possessive people.”

However, even Nicks is able to acknowledge that there was something rare and special about that time in their lives.

“It was really Lindsey and me,” she shared of that time. “And the kind of cool thing about it is that I don’t think Lindsey and I will ever again do anything that is that Lindsey and me.”

“I don’t think we can ever be Buckingham Nicks, because that was when it was beginning,” she added. “And we spent more time together and we communicated more. And [Lindsey] really worked on my songs with a, with a fever, you know.”

Photo by: Jimmy Wachte