Buckingham Nicks - Frozen Love

0:00You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh Hirway. This episode is sponsored by the new video game Mixtape. It's sort of like if the movie Dazed and Confused were a video game. It's about high school and adventure and nostalgia. And if you're the kind of person who cares about the power of an amazing mixtape, then this game is probably for you. The soundtrack features Smashing Pumpkins, Iggy Pop, Suzy and the Banshees, Joy Division, The Cure, and a lot more. Mixtape comes out May 7th on console and PC.

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1:23Potential savings will vary. On September 5th, 1973, the first and only Buckingham-Nicks album was released. It wasn't a huge hit, but it was how the world was first introduced to the music of Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham, before they went on to become members of Fleetwood Mac. Their time together in Fleetwood Mac led to some of the best-selling, most critically acclaimed, and most influential albums of all time. Their individual talents, their musical chemistry together, and the ups and downs of their romantic relationship all eventually became legendary. Despite all that, the Buckingham-Nicks album went out of print not long after it came out.

2:03For over 50 years, it wasn't available, until it finally got remastered and re-released in September 2025. So for this episode, I spoke to both Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham about the making of one of the songs from that album, called Frozen Love. It's the only song on the album where they're credited as co-writers, And it's the song that led Mick Fleetwood to invite Lindsay Buckingham to join Fleetwood Mac. But Lindsay would only join if Stevie could too. And that's how that story began. So this episode is about a beginning and an ending. It's the story of how Stevie and Lindsay first met, and how they made Frozen Love, and how that song really led to the end of their band.

2:41I also want to mention that not only was Buckingham Knicks out of print for all those decades, no one has heard the isolated tracks that you're about to hear. To make this episode, there was an epic search for the original master tape from Sound City, the studio where they recorded the album, with producer Keith Olson. It took months, but the tape was finally tracked down and digitized, and it feels very special to be able to present this for the first time here, along with the memories and stories from Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. And if you go forward, I'll meet you there. And if you climb up through the cold, freezing air Look down below you Search out above Cry out to die

3:33For frozen love Cry

3:49My name is Lindsay Buckingham. And my name is Stevie Nicks. Do you still remember the first day you two met? I do. Lindsay and I started talking about it last night, and I was like, this whole thing seems really like yesterday to us. I was a junior in high school, and she had transferred in as a senior. We met at a party in San Francisco. I heard this guy singing from a long way away in this big room, and he was singing California Dreaming. And I thought, oh, I know that song. So I kind of made my way over, and I saw him, and I thought, I'm going to walk up there and sing. Oh, he's going to hate me.

4:29Oh, I don't care. I'm going. So I went up, and I just smiled at him, and I stood behind him, and I sang the harmony to California Dreaming. And it was fantastic. And I thought, oh, I better get out of here now before he gets really mad when it was going to end right. So I just like disappeared into the shadows. And so we didn't meet. I didn't turn around and say to him, hi, I'm Stevie Nicks. And he's like, oh, hi, I'm Lindsay Buckingham. That did not happen. I just disappeared. And I really didn't know who he was. And then we didn't see each other or talk to each other again for like, I think, close to two years.

5:02It wasn't until really my senior year of high school that a friend of mine, who was a drummer, asked if I would be in a band called Fritz just to play at an assembly. And the guy who was sort of leading it was a guy named Javier, who was actually quite a good songwriter and played keyboards. And so you were one of the singers and you played bass in Fritz? That's right. And so we got up and did two or three songs for the assembly. And I think blew a lot of people's minds. Holly Anna Louise, who is a joy? Holly Anna Louise, please let me be your boy. We graduated high school. And when we all got to the same college, junior college, the next fall, There was some interest in picking up what we'd done.

6:00But the girl who had been singing in the band at the assembly had gone off somewhere else to school. But Stevie, who was a year older but was still going to that same junior college, was around, and so we sought her out. It was actually Bob Aguirre that called me, who was the drummer. And he just said, how would you feel about joining a band? and I said, what kind of a band is it? And he said, well, it's a hard rock and roll band. And I kind of said, just a minute. And I walked around the room for a second and like went, yes. Because I'd always had it in my heart of heart, even though my granddad was a country singer and there was a lot of other kind of music in my life.

6:43And I said like, that's just what I wanted. Yes, you never knew the life I'd grow When you hear the truth, you feel so small They were bored and now you lost it all Send me back, let me go It was really Javier's band because he wrote the songs and you know, in two or three weeks we were like playing shows and it was really, really exciting and fun. We got to the point where we were playing like big shows. We opened for Chicago at Fillmore West. We opened for Jimi Hendrix for 75 ,000 people. And so it was like in our own minds, we were already famous and we loved it. And then Keith Olsen was there with his kind of partner after we played and it was a big show.

7:46and they said, we would really like to maybe work with you. Why don't you guys come down to Los Angeles? And so Fritz went down and did a bunch of performances for people at labels. Keith was extremely supportive, but Fritz was never able to secure a record deal. But what did happen was that not just one, but a number of labels expressed interest in Stevie and me. So Keith Olsen called us and said, they really like you and Lindsay, but they don't appreciate the importance of the other three members of the band, which was terrorizing to us because we loved these guys. So we were not at all happy about that, but there was nothing that we could do.

8:34And that was very sad and very hard. It hurt us, you know, it was our first like super disappointment, I think, in the music business. But it must have been a little bit mixed, right? Because even though you had to leave those three other guys, it was still sort of an invitation to maybe get to another level. It was an invitation to greatness. And we both knew it. We thought, well, okay, if we're going to pursue that and we still want to keep going with music, then what does that mean? So one of the things that it meant was that I had to start writing songs. Now, Stevie was already a fairly prolific writer.

9:12I think I wrote my first song when I was 15 and a half, and it was about a lost love. Therefore, began my tragic love songs. And for me, the timing couldn't have been better because I was now being influenced by a new kind of music that had started to come in when James Taylor hit the scene or when Joni Mitchell hit the scene. These are people who were right up my alley in terms of my style of guitar playing. All of this was obviously and ultimately going to help define myself as a writer. So I just started writing songs. So while we came back to Northern California somewhat in defeat from having not been able to get a record deal as Fritz, it became a catalyst for Stevie and me to bond in a different way.

10:11We probably never would have even had a relationship had it not been that we had to fire the rest of our band. That was just such a crushing blow, and it drove us together because we just couldn't figure it out. And then we fell in love with each other, and that was it. We were together. We started writing songs like ourselves and brought our songs in to each other and decided which ones we wanted to do. My dad, who was in the coffee business and had a coffee plant south of San Francisco, let me go up there nights and take my four-track tape machine. So I would take my songs, and I would take the songs Stevie had, and I'd go up and work, and she'd come up some of the time and sing.

10:58And we just sat on the floor, and he worked on the music, and I crocheted and was the cheerleader. And we started to work on the songs that then became the Buckingham Knicks album. And Frozen Love started kind of as a full-on folk song because I wrote it on guitar. I'm not the greatest guitar player in the world. I play just good enough to write. The song, I think, is about two people that were in love that had a lot of differences and saw the world slightly differently, but had this relationship that seemed to be like a gift. So it was like a strong relationship and then also a strong musical relationship.

11:46And those two relationships together made for a pretty determined relationship. If you read just the poem from me before it ever went to Lindsay, See, it was, you may not be as strong as me, and I may not care to teach you. That's pretty flippant, isn't it? It may be hard to keep up with me, but I'll always be able to reach you. Even more flippant. But I like to think of it as like weathering heights or great expectations. You know, like modern day love affair tragedies. Because nobody really loves happy songs. certainly I didn't and neither really did Lindsay. So for us, the more dramatic it was, the better.

12:32And so Frozen Love to me was a lot of fun because it was so dramatic. That was where we, I think, found that string that was like, don't be afraid to write a poem that's a little bit about me because what else are you going to write about? It was never like, was that about me? How come you wrote that about me? Because we never went there. We were just like, that is great. If I went in there with two verses of it and the chorus, you know, with my simple, simple guitar playing, and he would just go like, keep writing. I like it. She was very confident she should have been in her lyrics and didn't necessarily have a motivation to run them by me or to discuss them.

13:18Sometimes after we started living together, I would write a song and I'd put it on a cassette and I'd leave it by the coffee pot. And I just put a note saying, you know, here it is, produce it, but don't change it, don't change the actual core of it. I don't think she craved my input on that level, nor did I crave hers on production or instrumental level either, you know. I mean, she understood that I was transforming things for her, and I understood that I wouldn't have had anything to transform without the beautiful center that she'd given me to work with. And I would just wait to see what he did.

13:56And so the center of the song was there, but rhythmically I wanted to create something that would have interest in terms of guitar. I was interested in coming up with my own tunings, and that was, what was that? It was like an open D tuning. You want me to show you? Yes, please. If I can, I don't know if I'll...

14:35You get the idea. Amazing. What an honor. Thank you so much.

14:48From the very beginning, I wanted us both to take one of those verses so that it was both of us, so that it was more a relationship made of two instead of a relationship just made of one. Both the verses lyrically are written from Stevie's point of view, at least in my opinion, but I think we had just an idea that it was going to play better if it felt a little bit more like a dialogue. You may not be as strong as me, and I may not care to teach you. It may be hard to keep up with me, but I'll always be able to reach you. The song is about sort of love interrupted, so to speak. this love that we had, which somehow got intruded upon by other things.

15:51Some of those were my fault, and some of those were her fault. This was a pretty, like, not really hateful song, but it's a little bit mean. That's what I said about great tragedies. They're not always nice. Our relationship was up and down and up and down and up and down and difficult, but at the same time, fantastic. and what we were doing was so fantastic that it was worth putting up with the trials and tribulations of a relationship that's difficult. But I think she just saw herself in that role that even then, even though I was sort of the producer and I was sort of the musical leader, I think she felt like she was the one who was ahead of the game in some ways and she was probably right.

17:02Life gave me you, the change was made, and there's no beginning over. You are not happy, but what is love? That sounds like an old person, doesn't it? And then I've got here written, this is a question that I've gone back and forth over for the last few days. Fate gave you me for a lover. I would swear to God, the words I wrote was fate gave you me for a lover. Fate. But when I hear myself sing that line, it sounds like I'm saying hate. Hate gave you me for a lover. But I would never have written, hate gave you me for a lover, because I never felt that way. I can't even imagine that I didn't hear that in time to change it.

17:50So, that's not good. I'm sorry, Lindsay. I'm calling him later. And then we would just play around with it and have really a lot of fun working out harmonies. If you go forward, I'll meet you there. And if you climb up through the cold, freezing air, look down below you. That was always something Stevie and I would figure out, you know, sitting in our living room, basically. We would sit and start going like, okay, let's sing the words. You sing the lower part and I'll sing the higher part, and then we'll both sing a higher part above that. And when you balance my vocal and her vocal and listen to it as a two-part, I mean, that's a thing that we had, you know, that was noteworthy.

18:48And it was ours. Cry out to life for a frozen love. Cry love

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21:55Keith Olsen had been a producer for a while, plus was an excellent engineer as well, and had a studio, which was Sound City, that became Our Home Away From Home, and we're off to the races.

22:16It wasn't a song you could really think about cutting live with drums, because the number of twists and turns rhythmically that the guitar manifests. So we pieced it together with a click, and then when the rest of it was done, or most of it anyway, we had our friend Gary Hodges, who was quite a good drummer, come in and overdub drums, which is not an easy thing to do anyway. But on a song like this, what a difficult evening that was for him, I'm trying to get the drums on this. And yeah, I can see why.

23:17So you two would write songs individually. Frozen Love is the only song on the album that's credited to the two of you as co-writers. And I was wondering, how did that work? What did that collaboration look like? And how did that come about? Well, I mean, it isn't strictly a collaboration, you know, like two writers who are co-captaining the entire process. With Frozen Love, the verse and chorus parts where the singing is, that was Stevie's basic song. But we wanted to do this one song that would have this epic quality to it in order to create sort of a mini movie in the middle, still allowing you to get back into the song at the end.

24:05Because I was a huge Jimmy Page fan, not just of Led Zeppelin as a whole, but just of him as a producer and how he approached what he did. if you think of Stairway to Heaven or something, they would start off with a basic song and it would go through all sorts of angular changes and work its way back to the beginning. So all of that, I think, helped get me to where I needed to be for Frozen Love. It really evolved into an opus of sorts because those middle sections that it goes through were not part of the original plan in her mind. The middle is probably longer than the song itself. So that was the main reason for a co-writership.

24:59The orchestrated part, that's my favorite part. Pretty much of the whole record, it's my favorite part. Because I started to look at it as a dark ballet. You know, with one of us standing on each side of the stage and having, like, I don't know, the Bolshoi Ballet or something, dancing to this recording.

25:26And how, like, Swan Lake-esque it was, you know, total tragedy, which I just absolutely loved, and so it just couldn't be better.

25:49How did you write your electric guitar parts?

25:56Because you recorded three different guitar tracks.

26:02Even in the guitar solo. And so was everything written out or would you improvise the solo and then go back and retract what you already did?

26:13Most of my solos are a balance between what you discover when you improvise and things that will help it to remain thematic. I needed to be paced exactly right over a very long period of time, so it had to be very specific.