Stevie Nicks Cites Taylor Swift to Explain Why Fleetwood Mac Can’t Go on Without Christine McVie
Stevie Nicks said she can’t envision another Fleetwood Mac tour following the death of her friend and bandmate Christine McVie, telling Vulture: “You can’t replace her, you just can’t.”
Nicks continued: “Without her, what is it? You know what I mean? She was like my soul mate, my musical soul mate, and my best friend that I spent more time with than any of my other best friends outside of Fleetwood Mac. Christine was my best friend.”
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In an extremely touching moment, the musician went on to frame her relationship with McVie (as she’s done in the past) in terms of Taylor Swift lyrics, specifically “You’re On Your Own, Kid,” and the line, “you always have been.” Nicks said, “That was Christine and I. We were on our own in that band. We always were. We protected each other. Who am I going to look over to on the right and have them not be there behind that Hammond organ? When she died, I figured we really can’t go any further with this. There’s no reason to.”
For Nicks, a Fleetwood Mac tour without McVie would require dropping her songs from the set list, which would mean the absence of a lot of hits (the band tried this during a tour without her in 2009). “She wrote all the really super pop hits. None of the rest of us could write those songs,” Nicks said. “What would happen is we’d have to take the songs out, like we did when she actually retired for 18 years. We couldn’t re-create those songs. So we became a much more hard-rock band.”
Amidst this heartfelt discussion of the gaping void left in Fleetwood Mac following McVie’s death last year, however, were ostensibly some slight digs at Lindsey Buckingham. Before explaining how impossible it would be to tour without McVie, Nicks noted the last tour Fleetwood Mac did in 2019, one year after the band fired Buckingham: “We did go out on the road and do a year-and-a-half tour with Neil Finn and Mike Campbell,” she said. “We had a really great time and it was a huge tour. That was there in the realm of possibility.”
Nicks is in the midst of a solo tour of her own, with dates scheduled through December (the majority are headlining gigs, though she’ll also play a couple stadium shows with Billy Joel). Nicks also just announced more shows in February and March of 2024.
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