Stevie Nicks' Dating History: From Lindsey Buckingham to Joe Walsh

Stevie Nicks was romantically involved with two of her Fleetwood Mac bandmates

Stevie Nicks' love life and music career often went hand in hand.

The "Landslide" singer was in one of rock history's most infamous love triangles with her Fleetwood Mac bandmates Lindsey Buckingham and Mick Fleetwood during the 1970s.

After joining the rock group in 1975, Nicks and Buckingham's longtime romance crashed and burned — but not before the band could put out their debut eponymous album. The decision to postpone their breakup was a conscious decision on her part, Nicks told The New Yorker.

"You just have to throw yourself into your song. I mean, I broke up with Lindsey in 1976. We'd only been in Fleetwood Mac for a year and a half, and we were breaking up when we joined," she recalled of their young love. "So we just put our relationship kind of back together, because I was smart enough to know that, if we had broken up the second month of being in Fleetwood Mac, it would have blown the whole thing."

Nicks also recalled trying to "make everything as easy as possible" in the early days of the band — though neither she nor Buckingham was happy with the arrangement.

"Then something happened that was, you know, 'We're done.' And he knew it. It was time. And the band was solid, by that time, so I could walk away knowing that he was safe. And that the band was safe. And that we could work it out," she said.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Famer went on to date Eagles bandmates Don Henley and Joe Walsh. Since then, she's poured herself into her music — though she's open to the prospect of finding love again.

"It would be fun if I could find a boyfriend who understood my life and didn't get his feelings hurt because I'm always a phone call away from having to leave in two hours for New York or a phone call from having to do interviews all day long," Nicks told the New York Times in 2014. "It's not very fun to be Mr. Stevie Nicks."

But if that isn't in the cards for her, Nicks would be "just as happy" being single with her "five or six Chinese Crested Yorkies" on a beach somewhere.

Here's a look back at Stevie Nicks' dating history.

Lindsey Buckingham

Nicks first crossed paths with Buckingham during her senior year at Menlo-Atherton High School in Atherton, California. She soon joined Buckingham's psychedelic rock band, Fritz. They both went on to attend San José State University before dropping out to follow their music dreams. Fritz went on to open for acts like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin before they disbanded in 1972. Following the breakup, Nicks and Buckingham's relationship turned romantic.

“I’m not sure we would have even become a couple if it wasn’t for us leaving that band. It kind of pushed us together,” Nicks later said, as Stephen Davis recalled in his biography “Gold Dust Woman" (per the Los Angeles Times).

The duo moved to Los Angeles and released a joint album, Buckingham Nicks, in 1973. Mick Fleetwood asked Buckingham to join his band on Dec. 31, 1974, and Buckingham agreed as long as there was a spot for Nicks in the group as well. While the pair initially put on a united front, their relationship was falling apart at the seams.

"When we joined Fleetwood Mac, I said, 'Okay, this is what we've been working for since 1968. And so Lindsey, you and I have to sew this relationship back up. We have too much to lose here,' " Nicks told Billboard in 2014 of simultaneously navigating their split and the band's rising fame.

Their complicated relationship ended in 1976, right before Fleetwood Mac recorded their second album, Rumours. In a 2005 conversation with Blender, Buckingham recalled he and Nicks went "through this elaborate exercise of denial, keeping our personal feelings in one corner of the room while trying to be professional in the other" during the recording process.

Nicks took particular umbrage with Buckingham's "Go Your Own Way," in which he sings, "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 told Rolling Stone in 1997. "He knew it wasn't true. It was just an angry thing that he said. Every time those words would come out ... I wanted to go over and kill him. He knew it, so he really pushed my buttons through that."

The pair tried to maintain a level of professionalism for the sake of the band. However, in 2018, Buckingham was fired from Fleetwood Mac; he later told PEOPLE that his firing was "all Stevie's doing." He added, "Stevie basically gave the band an ultimatum that either I had to go or she would go."

Nicks denied Buckingham's accusations, writing in a statement: "I did not demand he be fired. Frankly, I fired myself. I proactively removed myself from the band and a situation I considered to be toxic to my well-being. I was done. If the band went on without me, so be it."

Mick Fleetwood

Both Nicks and Mick Fleetwood were nursing broken hearts while recording 1977's Rumours. The album, which would become the sixth best-selling album of the '70s and the 12th best-selling of all time, was largely fueled by the group's insufferable heartaches. Nicks and Buckingham had just called it quits, while Fleetwood had just remarried wife Jenny Boyd, whom he had divorced the year prior (The pair divorced a second time in 1978).

In the midst of promoting Rumours, Nicks — though later "horrified" by her actions — had a brief affair with Fleetwood. "Never in a million years could you have told me that would happen," Nicks later told Uncut magazine. "Everybody was angry, because Mick was married to a wonderful girl and had two wonderful children. I was horrified. I loved these people. I loved his family. So it couldn't possibly work out. And it didn't. I just couldn't."

Ultimately, they mutually decided to end their affair out of fear that continuing "would have been the end of Fleetwood Mac."

Don Henley

In 1977, Nicks began dating Eagles founding member and vocalist Don Henley. The duo struck up a romance following Nicks' fling with Fleetwood. While Henley taught Nicks the tricks of the trade, his over-the-top romantic gestures and wild spending also exposed Nicks to a lavish lifestyle.

"He was responsible and I blame him every day. The Eagles had it down," Nicks told Uncut magazine of her unhealthy spending habits. "They had the Lear jets and the presidential suites long before we did and so I learnt from the best. And once you learn to live like that, there's no going back. It's like, 'Get me a Lear jet. I need to go to L.A. I don't care if it costs $15,000. I need to go now.' "

Their relationship fizzled out in 1978, but the two remained friends. Henley is featured on the song "Leather and Lace" off Nicks' debut solo album Bella Donna, released in 1981.

In a 2020 interview with The Guardian, Nicks shared her concerns about losing abortion rights in the U.S., noting that she had an abortion during her relationship with Henley.

"If I had not had that abortion, I'm pretty sure there would have been no Fleetwood Mac," Nicks told the outlet. "There's just no way that I could have had a child then, working as hard as we worked constantly. And there were a lot of drugs, I was doing a lot of drugs … I would have had to walk away."

Speaking with Billboard in 2014, Nicks said Fleetwood Mac's 1979 hit "Sara" was inspired both by her pregnancy and a friend of hers.

"Had I married Don and had that baby, and had she been a girl, I would have named her Sara," she said. "But there was another woman in my life named Sara, who shortly after that became Mick's wife, Sara Fleetwood."

When Nicks was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2019 for her solo work, making her the first female double inductee, Henley joined her on stage for a performance of their duet "Leather and Lace."

Jimmy Iovine

In the early 1980s, Nicks secretly began dating Interscope Records co-founder Jimmy Iovine, who was producing her first solo album at the time. Nicks wanted a sound like Tom Petty's for her album, so she called up his producer. The "Free Fallin' " singer was both a friend and client of Iovine's and would go on to become good friends with Nicks.

During her 2018 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction speech, Nicks credited Iovine with propelling her solo career. They got into the studio and "10 days later we were living together," she said in her speech, per Variety. "Things moved fast in those days."

To keep his professional relationship with Petty intact, Iovine sneaked Nicks down to his basement whenever Petty came over.

"I just kept making social mistakes in my career. I was doing better musically, but I made more and more social mistakes," Iovine told Howard Stern on his SiriusXM show in 2018. "So I said [to Nicks], 'Do me a favor, the basement is a set-up basement, when he comes just stay down there.' And she did."

While their romance was short-lived, the pair worked together for several more years.

Kim Anderson

In 1982, Nicks' best friend, Robin Anderson, died of leukemia. As godmother to her late friend's son, Nicks felt like she had a responsibility to take care of Anderson's family. That year, she married Anderson's widower, Kim Anderson. Despite the good intentions behind their nuptials, Nicks soon realized their union was a "terrible, terrible mistake."

"We didn't get married because we were in love, we got married because we were grieving and it was the only way that we could feel like we were doing anything," Nicks once said, according to Vulture.

The pair divorced three months later, though Nicks still maintains a close relationship with her godson, Matthew Anderson, to this day. She's even assumed the role of "Grandma Stevie" to Matthew's daughter, Robin, whom he named after his late mother.

"Little Robin is 5 years old," Nicks told The Guardian in 2020. "Last Christmas, she was at my house and she comes into the kitchen, grabs my hand and goes: 'Come with me, Grandma Stevie,' and I'm going: 'Did this child just call me Grandma Stevie?' She did. And on that day I wrote in my journal and it said: 'I promise you, Robin, that I will be Grandma Stevie until death do us part.' "

She continued, "Life has these weird turnarounds, you know. I say to my friend Robin, who died so long ago: 'Look through my eyes at your granddaughter. She was yours and now she is mine.' "

Joe Walsh

From 1983 to 1986, Nicks was romantically involved with Eagles singer and guitarist Joe Walsh, whom she has called her "greatest love." In a 2007 interview with The Telegraph, Nicks said it was love at first sight when she ran into Walsh at the Mansions Hotel in Dallas, Texas.

"I looked at him and I walked across the room and I sat on the bar stool next to him, and two seconds later I crawled into his lap, and that was it," she recalled.

Describing her and Walsh as a "perfect, complete, crazy pair," Nicks said she was prepared to marry the Eagles guitarist, noting, "I would probably have changed my life around for [him]." But their respective relationships with drugs got the better of their romance. She remembered Walsh going to Australia "to get away from me, basically."

"He thought — or so I'm told by my friends that Joe told — that one of us was going to die, and the other person would not be able to save them," she told the outlet. "And I did think I was going to die, absolutely. It took me a long, long time to get over it — if I ever got over it. Because there was no other man in the world for me."

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