Music Review: HAIM return with a superb and salty breakup album
'I Quit,' the fourth full-length album from the trio, is a breakup collection that never gets too weepy. You can dance to a lot of it. Even the song 'Cry,' which name-checks the seven stages of grief, is an upbeat bop.
Six years after the trio released their jazzy, Lou Reed-y single 'Summer Girl,' the mood has somewhat soured this summer. Across 15 tracks, the songs are about fresh splits, old wounds and newfound independence.
'Now I'm gone/Quick as a gunshot/Born to run/Can't be held up,' go the lyrics for the opening track 'Gone,' which samples from George Michael's anthem of liberty 'Freedom! '90.'
Sisters Este, Danielle and Alana Haim found themselves all single for the first time in a long time while making the album, looking back with equal parts venom and guilt. 'You know I'm trying to change/'Cause I know I'm not innocent,' goes 'Love You Right.'
'The Farm' has a rootsy twang, 'Down to be Wrong' has a Sheryl Crow vibe and 'Take Me Back' has a Go-Go's feel. 'Love You Right' is pure Fleetwood Mac harmonies, even making reference to a chain. 'Spinning' is a slice of house bliss with overlapping harmonies, easily the most danceable Haim song since 'I Want You Back.' The wistful, warm 'Million Years' leans into electronica.
The bluesy 'Blood on the Street' has more vitriol ('I swear you wouldn't care/If I was covered in blood lying dead on the street') but ends with freedom: 'Now the sun's up, I'm out, and that's that.' And 'Relationships' is a standout on a standout album, with Danielle Haim's falsetto exploring the agony of romantic ties and her sister's bass thumping.
But the best song has to be 'Everybody's Trying to Figure Me Out,' in which each Haim shines as tempos change and the song morphs from folk to indie rock to blissed-out '70s, with the final mantra: 'You think you're gonna die/But you're not gonna die.'
The album is co-produced by Danielle Haim and HAIM's frequent collaborator Rostam Batmanglij of Vampire Weekend. The trio's usual producer, Ariel Rechtshaid, split with Danielle Haim, which may account for the new energy.
The album closer, 'Now It's Time,' interpolates U2's industrial-pop song 'Numb,' adds cool drum rhythms and an Alanis Morissette-like strut, ending with an exhilarating jam session. 'It's time/To let go,' says the lyrics. Not to this album.
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Yahoo
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- Yahoo
Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham Confirm Rumored Project: 'A Very Natural Thing'
Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham Confirm Rumored Project: 'A Very Natural Thing' originally appeared on Parade. Billboards don't lie. The release of the - album that fans recently saw promoted on a billboard on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles was confirmed on July 23. The rare 1973 album titled Buckingham Nicks, featuring Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks before they went on to join Fleetwood Mac, will be released on Sept. 19 with newly remastered sound on CD and digitally for the first time. 🎬 SIGN UP for Parade's Daily newsletter to get the latest pop culture news & celebrity interviews delivered right to your inbox 🎬 It will also be available in two different limited-edition vinyl versions, including one with bonus replica 7-inch singles. The duo of Buckingham and Nicks, formerly of the San Francisco group Fritz, recorded the self-titled album for Polydor in 1973. Mick Fleetwood discovered them when engineer Keith Olsen played him a few cuts off Buckingham Nicks to demonstrate the sound capabilities of Sound City in Van Nuys, Calif. Fleetwood was impressed not only by the sound of the studio, but by Olsen and the guitar player. The song Olsen played Fleetwood that day was 'Frozen Love,' which is included on the reissue of Buckingham Nicks, along with 'Crying in the Night,' the first track from the reissue that was released to streaming services on July the Rhino High Fidelity liner notes, written by noted music journalist David Fricke, Nicks spoke about her partnership with Buckingham. '[We] knew what we had as a duo, two songwriters that sang really well together. And it was a very natural thing, from the beginning,' she said. Buckingham added that although they were inexperienced when the recorded the album, 'it stands up in a way you hope it would, by these two kids who were pretty young to be doing that work.' Not long after Fleetwood first heard Buckingham Nicks, then-Fleetwood Mac singer-guitarist Bob Welch left the band. Fleetwood reached out to Buckingham to fill the spot, but he would only take the gig if his partner, Nicks, was part of the deal. On New Year's Eve 1974, Buckingham and Nicks officially joined the band, launching not only the group's most successful chapter, but one of the best-selling recording acts in music history. It remains to be seen if the re-release of Buckingham Nicks will lead to the duo reuniting to promote the album or Buckingham rejoining Fleetwood Mac. Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham Confirm Rumored Project: 'A Very Natural Thing' first appeared on Parade on Jul 23, 2025 This story was originally reported by Parade on Jul 23, 2025, where it first appeared. Solve the daily Crossword
CNN
a day ago
- CNN
How Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham went from lovers to bandmates and back again
People in entertainment Music MediaFacebookTweetLink Follow When Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham joined Fleetwood Mac, they helped propel the band to a commercial and creative pinnacle. For the couple, though, joining the band was the beginning of the end of their love story. Nicks and Buckingham's infamously tumultuous relationship, which began in the early 1970s, ended just two years into their tenure in Fleetwood Mac. Though they've been broken up for nearly 50 years, their mutual antipathy remains as legendary as their musical output. 'I met her when I was about 16,' Buckingham said in a 2009 BBC documentary about the band. 'It's been most of my life. Sadly, for the lion's share of those years, there has been distance and animosity of some kind, mixed in with everything else, too. It's never been just one thing.' And yet, after decades of performing love songs onstage while ripping into each other backstage, Nicks and Buckingham seem to have paused their ongoing feud to rerelease the only album they made as a duo, 1973's 'Buckingham Nicks.' Whether the pair will do more to promote the album than share cryptic corresponding Instagram posts remains to be seen. Their acrimony fueled enduring, influential music, but any reunion between the two likely won't be as effortless as their sound. Nicks and Buckingham met in 1966 as high school students in California's Bay Area. Though they played guitar a bit together, it wasn't until they were both attending San Jose State University that they officially teamed up musically, when Buckingham invited Nicks to join his first band, the psychedelic-folk rock group Fritz. The pair resisted romance until after Fritz broke up in the early '70s. 'I think there was always something between me and Lindsey, but nobody in that band really wanted me as their girlfriend because I was just too ambitious for them,' Nicks told Cameron Crowe in a 1977 interview for Rolling Stone. The pair fell for each other while writing 'Buckingham Nicks,' a folk-rock record released in 1973. Despite the talent evident on the album (not to mention its cover art, in which Nicks and Buckingham appear nude), 'Buckingham Nicks' flopped almost everywhere –– except Birmingham, Alabama, where local DJs regularly played the record and developed the duo a small but devoted fanbase. (It's also where the pair played their final show before joining Fleetwood Mac.) 'That album holds up pretty well,' Buckingham told Dan Rather in 2015. 'It did not do well commercially, but it certainly was noticed. More importantly, it was noticed by Mick Fleetwood.' The Fleetwood Mac co-founder discovered 'Buckingham Nicks' at a pivotal time for the band, which was hemorrhaging guitarists and vocalists, including founding member Peter Green. Fleetwood was seeking a new recording space when he met an engineer who played him a record he had produced. It was 'Buckingham Nicks.' A few weeks after hearing the album, and shortly after losing yet another band member, Fleetwood asked Buckingham to join the band without having heard him play live. Buckingham remembered saying he wouldn't go without Nicks. 'Didn't think about Stevie one way or the other, 'cause I was looking for a guitar player,' Fleetwood said in the BBC documentary. 'And very quickly we realized they were totally joined at the hip.' Fleetwood Mac's 1975 eponymous album was the first to feature Buckingham and Nicks –– and the group's first No. 1 album in the US. Many of the album's enduring hits were written by Nicks, including the heartbreaking ballad 'Landslide' and 'Rhiannon,' a haunting song about a Welsh witch. (Witchiness would soon become integral to Nicks' onstage persona.) While Nicks and Buckingham were still dating when they joined the group, their relationship was already deteriorating under the weight of working together so closely, Nicks said in 2009. 'I think we kind of all made a little silent vow — let's fix these relationships for right now,' she said. Nicks and Buckingham's relationship was on the brink of collapse throughout the recording of what would become Fleetwood Mac's most successful record, 'Rumours.' Nicks wrote 'Dreams,' the group's first and only No. 1 Billboard Hot 100 single, about the imminent demise of her relationship, she said. But her take on heartbreak was mellow, if melancholy: 'Say women, they will come and they will go,' she sings. 'When the rain washes you clean, you'll know.' 'In other words, we're all gonna come out of this,' she said in 2009. 'And Lindsey, you and I will come out of this, and we'll be friends, and it'll be okay.' Buckingham's rebuttal, the upbeat 'Go Your Own Way,' was 'angry and nasty,' Nicks said. 'Loving you isn't the right thing to do,' Buckingham sings. 'How can I ever change things that I feel?' Nicks said in the 2009 documentary that she had thought Buckingham's lyrics accusing a lover of 'shacking up' were 'extremely disrespectful.' 'It may be a rather truthful and blunt observation,' Buckingham countered. 'But that's the way you write songs.' Their fraying relationship ended during the recording of 'Rumours,' after months of playing on tracks that were not-so-secretly written about the other. As Nicks recalled to the BBC, Nicks told Buckingham after one last fight that she would fly home without him. The behind-the-scenes tumult only fed audience interest in 'Rumours,' which became the band's defining album, spending 31 weeks at No. 1. 'Everyone knew that these songs, the subject matter, was what we were living,' Buckingham said in 2015. 'And I think there was an investment in not just the music but in the people who made the music because of that.' The album was fueled by heartbreak, rage and a massive 'community bag of cocaine,' said album engineer Ken Caillat. Nicks' addiction to cocaine began during the recording of 'Rumours,' she said, a habit she picked up 'just to get through' the process. Nicks started writing and recording solo material while making 'Tusk,' the experimental follow-up to 'Rumours' that Buckingham spearheaded. In 1981, she released 'Bella Donna,' which featured the hit 'Edge of Seventeen,' the first of four solo albums she made in the '80s. In 1985, Nicks sought treatment at the Betty Ford Center for her cocaine addiction. But when she left rehab, she was prescribed Klonopin, a tranquilizer she became dependent on. As a result, she was often absent from recording sessions for the group's 1987 album 'Tango in the Night.' 'Being in Fleetwood Mac, even to this day, is very tense,' Nicks said in 2009. 'In my solo career, I'm not tense, I'm not uptight.' In 1987, the band met at member Christine McVie's home to discuss their upcoming concerts in support of 'Tango in the Night.' Buckingham refused to join the group on tour. 'When Lindsey said, 'I'm not going,' I think I got up and ran across the room and tried to strangle him,' Nicks remembered in the BBC documentary. 'And then he chased me out of the house through Christine's driveway, and we had a huge fight. That was that. He was done.' The group made one more album with Nicks and without Buckingham, 1990's 'Behind the Mask,' but Nicks left the group soon after, when Fleetwood refused to let her release 'Silver Springs,' a B-side she wrote about Buckingham, on a box set of Nicks' solo work. Fleetwood Mac reformed with Nicks and Buckingham in 1997 for 'The Dance,' a successful tour tied to the 20th anniversary of 'Rumours' that also spawned a No. 1 live album. And every night, Buckingham would join Nicks on guitar as she sang 'Silver Springs.' She often ended the performance by resting her head on Buckingham's back. The following year, the group was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and spent the next several years touring on and off, recording one last album, 2003's 'Say You Will.' Despite spending extended periods of time on and offstage with each other, Nicks was loath to get close to Buckingham again. 'Lindsey and I will never be touchy feely friends,' she said in 2009. 'Maybe later on down the line, all those wounds will heal.' In 2018, as the group was gearing up for yet another reunion tour, Fleetwood Mac started to splinter again. Buckingham was ousted from the group that year, telling Rolling Stone that his manager said Nicks never wanted to perform onstage with him again. Buckingham admitted to Rolling Stone that he'd had an 'outburst' stemming from the choice to introduce the band onstage with 'Rhiannon,' Nicks' witchy hit. Fleetwood said the group had reached an 'impasse' with Buckingham on tour. 'Our relationship has always been volatile,' Buckingham said of Nicks to Rolling Stone. 'We were never married, but we might as well have been. Some couples get divorced after 40 years. They break their kids' hearts and destroy everyone around them because it's just hard.' When Christine McVie died in 2022, Nicks said she doubted that Fleetwood Mac could reunite again without her. At McVie's memorial, Nicks spoke with Buckingham briefly after an extended period without contact. 'I dealt with Lindsey for as long as I could,' she told Rolling Stone in 2024. 'You could not say that I did not give him more than 300 million chances.' Less than a year after that interview, though, Nicks and Buckingham have seemingly patched things up to release 'Buckingham Nicks,' which will be available to stream for the first time on September 19. Aside from their Instagram posts, neither musician has commented on the rerelease of the only album made as a duo.
Vogue
a day ago
- Vogue
I Loved Stevie Nicks‘s 'Silver Springs' for Years—Then a Breakup Made Me Actually Understand It
After teasing some sort of reconciliation through cryptic Instagram posts, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham formally announced on Wednesday that they'll be reissuing Buckingham Nicks—the long-forgotten album they released as a duo in 1973 before joining Fleetwood Mac—this September. Considering that the former on-again, off-again couple has been quite publicly feuding since Buckingham was asked to leave the band in 2018 (allegedly at Nicks's request), the news is surprising, to say the least. Over the decades, Buckingham and Nicks's tumultuous relationship yielded some of the greatest breakup songs ever written: tracks like 'Go Your Own Way,' 'Never Going Back Again,' 'Dreams,' and Nicks's spellbinding ballad 'Silver Springs,' which has gone somewhat viral in recent years. I was a shy 16-year-old when I first heard 'Silver Springs,' and it immediately became an obsession. Never mind that I'd never been in a relationship (I'd barely even been kissed); the pleading lyrics and the unfiltered anguish with which Nicks sang about splitting from her longtime boyfriend and musical partner in 1976 changed my world. Soon, I had no fewer than five different recordings of it on repeat: demos, live versions, and the final cut. My favorite was 'Silver Springs (Sessions, Roughs & Outtakes),' featured on one of the countless re-releases of Fleetwood Mac's 1977 album Rumours. It's angrier than the final version and less polished—Nicks at her best, in my opinion. The song came about when, while driving on the freeway, Nicks saw a sign for Silver Springs, Maryland, and loved the name. 'It sounded like a pretty fabulous place to me,' she later told Rolling Stone. 'It's a whole symbolic thing of what [Lindsey] could have been to me.' But due to its length and tempo, 'Silver Springs' was criminally left off Rumours' original tracklist. It was eventually revived with The Dance, the band's hit live album in 1997, and all that old tension culminated in a version even more powerful than the studio cut. From then on, during performances, Nicks would turn her mic stand to face her ex directly, and sing the words she had written about him years prior while Buckingham strummed and harmonized back at her.
