Buckingham Nicks

The value of unsuccessful art, and a love story (not theirs)

This week on Song Exploder, I published an episode with Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks as my guests, telling the story behind their 1973 song “Frozen Love,” from their only album as Buckingham Nicks. Their time as a duo was cut short when they joined Fleetwood Mac, where they made musical history.

As I was doing research for the episode, I kept seeing articles that described the Buckingham Nicks album as having “bombed” or “flopped” or “failed.” But, speaking to Lindsey Buckingham, he told me that a couple months after the album came out, they were starting to get some radio airplay. They’d played some shows, and they were back in the studio working on their second album. They were doing the normal work of any band that’s building their audience and their artistry.

Stevie Nicks told me, “I would’ve been happy to have been in Buckingham Nicks for years. And I think [Lindsey] would’ve too, you know, because we really thought we had something great.”

I suppose the Buckingham Nicks album might be considered a flop relative to the enormous, chart-topping success of Rumours and Fleetwood Mac in general, but by that comparison, most of the albums that have ever been released have also been flops. To call Buckingham Nicks a failure is to disregard everything it brought the two of them.

What is the value of art that isn’t hugely commercially successful? As a lifelong creator of commercially unsuccessful art, I think about this question a lot. Telling the Buckingham Nicks story on the podcast was really lovely, because it implicitly raised this question. If it weren’t for Fleetwood Mac and everything that came afterwards, there would never have been an episode about “Frozen Love.” But if it weren’t for “Frozen Love,” none of that would have followed.

Through the show, I’ve come to appreciate how impossible it is to predict which songs will connect with people. You can hope for it, but a wise person would never expect it to happen. So in my attempts to become wise, I’ve tried to let go of expectations. Instead, I have started to appreciate everything that making my commercially unsuccessful art has brought me.

I was burning the candle at both ends as I tried to finish the edit of the Buckingham Nicks episode, and as a result, October 27 passed by this week without my notice. I usually notice, because that’s the day in 2007 that I proposed to my wife Lindsey. (There are now two Lindseys in this story; please try to keep them straight or things will get weird.)

An engagement isn’t something that usually gets an anniversary, and we don’t make a big deal about it (clearly), but I remember it fondly, because it was a big moment then. Lindsey and I had met for the first time only six weeks earlier. She lived in New York, and this was her first time visiting me in Los Angeles. Though I wasn’t entirely sure if I was going to propose on that trip, I was sure that I had fallen for her very, very hard.

The short version of the way we met is that she’d heard the album I’d released earlier that year, This Too Will Pass, and liked it enough to include it in her favorite music on her MySpace page (as I said, it was 2007) with a note to her 34 friends that she also thought I was cute. That would have been the end of it, but then I ended up stumbling upon her page, seeing that note, and asking her out. Six weeks later, she was in my apartment, and I was fumbling my way through a proposal.

When I made that 2007 album, I wasn’t focused on music as a way to make money. Songs were vessels for my feelings and memories and ideas—for my life. I just wanted to feel like I pushed back into the world, like I might have made a little hole in it, even if it were only big enough for me to crawl through and find some adventures that I otherwise wouldn’t have. Part of what makes an adventure an adventure is not knowing how it’s going to turn out.

I recently got a royalty report from the now-defunct label that released that album. It really was a commercial flop; it has yet to recoup. Then I looked at the calendar, looked around me, and remembered what it brought me.

Hrishikesh