She got into the biggest band of the '70s as a plus-one and became the whole show.
At a glance
- Known for
- Fleetwood Mac vocalist, songwriter of 'Dreams', 'Rhiannon', and 'Landslide'
- Before fame
- Waitressed and cleaned houses after her first album flopped on Polydor in 1973
- Off-screen
- Sold 80% of her song catalog to Primary Wave for reportedly $100 million in 2020
Rise to Fame
A failed album on Polydor, a waitressing job to pay the bills, and a six-month ultimatum from her father to make music work or go back to school. That was the situation when Mick Fleetwood heard the Buckingham Nicks record in 1974 and called Lindsey to join his band. Buckingham's one condition: she comes too.
Within a year, she'd turned Fleetwood Mac into her stage. The top hat, the black chiffon, the Rhiannon performances Mick Fleetwood called 'like an exorcism.' Rumours came out of total personal collapse (two breakups, a divorce, an affair) and sold over 40 million copies. "Dreams", the only number-one hit the band ever had, was her song. The plus-one wrote the biggest single.
In the Spotlight
A skateboarding TikTok sent "Dreams" back onto the charts in 2020, streams jumping 242% in first-time listeners. She joined TikTok, hit No. 1 on Billboard's Hot 100 Songwriters chart for the first time, 43 years after the song came out.
She sold 80% of her publishing catalog to Primary Wave for reportedly $100 million that same year. That's not retirement planning. In 2019, she became the first woman inducted twice into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She's still filling arenas, touring solo. The career that started as a condition of someone else's hiring has outlasted nearly everyone she shared a stage with.
Side Notes
The cocaine nearly killed her. By the mid-'80s she had a hole burned through her nose and doctors warned of a possible brain hemorrhage. She checked into Betty Ford in 1986 and got clean. Then a psychiatrist, reportedly a Fleetwood Mac groupie, put her on Klonopin.
The prescription was worse than the addiction it replaced. She gained nearly 50 pounds, stopped writing songs, and lost most of the '90s to a Klonopin fog. The nearly seven-week detox in 1993, she has said, was harder than quitting cocaine. She called it 'somebody opened up a door and pushed me into hell.'
'I saved me,' she's said. 'Nobody else saved me.' The woman who wrote 'Landslide' while staring at the Rockies and wondering whether to quit music doesn't do things halfway, including the recovery.