Stevie Nicks’ 1973 Song ‘Long Distance Winner’ Was About Lindsey Buckingham’s Difficult Side

Nicks told Billboard in 1998 that the Buckingham Nicks track captured the push-pull of loving someone you can't quite live with.

Stevie Nicks wrote ‘Long Distance Winner' in 1973 as a direct portrait of her relationship with Lindsey Buckingham, describing him as someone whose ambition and controlling nature made him both irresistible and exhausting to be around. The track appeared on the duo's debut album, Buckingham Nicks, and Nicks later confirmed its subject matter in a 1998 Billboard interview, calling it ‘a heavy kind of song' about the two of them.

What ‘Long Distance Winner' Is Really About

Nicks was candid about the song's meaning when she spoke to Billboard in 1998. ‘Back then, Long Distance Winner was very much about dealing with Lindsey,' she said. The track sketches an ambitious, restless figure for whom achievement never quite satisfies, and a narrator who loves that person anyway, unable to change them and unwilling to leave.

Nicks broke down the lyric ‘Sunflowers and your face fascinate me' in plain terms: ‘your beauty fascinates me, but I still have trouble dealing with you, and I still stay.' She summarized the song's emotional core as ‘the inability to live with someone and the inability to live without them,' a tension that would define much of her creative and personal relationship with Buckingham for decades.

Her own gloss on the song's thesis was equally direct: ‘I adore you, but you're difficult, and I'll stay here with you, but you're still difficult.'

• Sunflowers and your face fascinate me
• You love only the tallest trees
• I come running down the hill
• But you're fast
• You're the winner
• Long distance winner

The Buckingham Nicks Era: Starving Artists and Creative Tension

The album that housed the song was recorded during a lean period in Los Angeles, when Nicks was waiting tables and cleaning houses to keep the two of them afloat. According to the biography Gold Dust Woman, Nicks was the primary breadwinner during those early years, a dynamic that may have fed the resentment the song quietly documents.

Buckingham's approach to the music added another layer of friction. ‘From the beginning, Lindsey was very controlling and very possessive,' Nicks said, as Gold Dust Woman notes. ‘I was never very good with controlling people and possessive people.' She has described instances where she felt Buckingham took too much control over her songs and creative choices.

Yet Nicks also looks back on that period with something close to reverence. ‘It was really Lindsey and me,' she said of the Buckingham Nicks era. ‘And the kind of cool thing about it is that I don't think Lindsey and I will ever again do anything that is that Lindsey and me.' She added that Buckingham ‘really worked on my songs with a, with a fever' during that time, a level of focused collaboration she believes the two could never fully replicate.

Why Buckingham Nicks Can't Be Repeated

Nicks has been clear that the conditions that produced the album were singular. ‘I don't think we can ever be Buckingham Nicks, because that was when it was beginning,' she said. ‘And we spent more time together and we communicated more.' The implication is that the intimacy and intensity of that early period, however difficult, generated something neither artist has been able to recreate in the same form.

The album was not a commercial success on release, but it has grown in stature among Fleetwood Mac devotees as a document of two artists at their most unguarded. Songs like ‘Long Distance Winner' carry the weight of lived experience in a way that the polished Fleetwood Mac records, for all their brilliance, sometimes don't.

What we know

• Stevie Nicks confirmed in a 1998 Billboard interview that ‘Long Distance Winner' was written about her relationship with Lindsey Buckingham.
• ‘Long Distance Winner' appeared on the 1973 album Buckingham Nicks, which was not a commercial success.
• According to the biography Gold Dust Woman, Nicks was the primary earner supporting herself and Buckingham during their early years in Los Angeles.
• Nicks described Buckingham as ‘very controlling and very possessive' from the beginning of their relationship, as cited in Gold Dust Woman.
• Nicks has said she does not believe the two can ever recreate the Buckingham Nicks dynamic because it belonged to a specific, unrepeatable period of their lives.

The take

The Buckingham Nicks album occupies a peculiar place in classic rock history: a commercial flop that became essential listening precisely because it was never polished for mass consumption. Recorded for Polydor and shelved after poor sales, it circulated for years as a cult artifact before finally receiving an official reissue push. Songs like ‘Long Distance Winner' explain why fans kept seeking it out. The track is essentially a field recording of a relationship in real time, written before Nicks had learned to sublimate personal experience into the more mythologized imagery she would develop on Rumours and beyond.

The Buckingham-Nicks creative dynamic has always been one of rock's most analyzed partnerships, partly because it produced some of the best-selling albums in history and partly because the friction was so audible. Nicks has spoken over the years about feeling creatively overshadowed by Buckingham, and Buckingham has acknowledged his own exacting standards as a producer and arranger. What ‘Long Distance Winner' adds to that picture is a timestamp: the tension was present from the very beginning, before Fleetwood Mac, before Rumours, before any of the commercial stakes that would later amplify every disagreement. That Nicks chose to write about it directly, without metaphor, makes the song a rare piece of documentary evidence in a catalog that would later favor allegory.

Why it matters

For classic rock listeners, ‘Long Distance Winner' is a reminder that the Fleetwood Mac saga didn't begin with the band. The creative and romantic friction that powered Rumours was already fully formed on a 1973 album most people have never heard. Understanding that context reframes the Mac's entire run: the tension wasn't a byproduct of fame, it was the engine from day one. Nicks' willingness to articulate it so plainly, decades later, adds a layer of honesty to a story that has often been told in more guarded terms.

What's next

No new Buckingham Nicks project or official reissue has been announced based on current reporting. Nicks continues to perform as a solo artist, and the Buckingham Nicks album remains a touchstone for fans revisiting the origins of the Fleetwood Mac story.

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