“Stop Right There”: Lindsey Buckingham’s Reaction to Dixie Chicks’ “Landslide” Cover

Nearly three decades after Fleetwood Mac first released “Landslide” on their eponymous album from 1975, country music trio The Chicks (who went by Dixie Chicks at the time) released their cover version of the wistful, retrospective classic. With genre-appropriate banjo and the tight vocal harmonies that propelled The Chicks to global fame, the trio managed to turn the Stevie Nicks hit into something entirely their own.

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The ease with which “Landslide” fit into the country music world might have been great for The Chicks. But the initial buzz around Fleetwood Mac’s apparent genre shift gave guitarist Lindsey Buckingham pause.

Lindsey Buckingham’s Reaction to Dixie Chicks’ “Landslide” Cover

Comparing prime-1970s Stevie Nicks to any other artist is no small feat, but in the early 2000s, the Dixie Chicks came close. The country music trio included their cover of “Landslide” on their 2002 album Home, garnering their only No. 1 single on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart. The song also peaked in the top ten of other notable charts, including No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100, No. 2 on Adult Pop Airplay, and No. 2 on Hot Country Songs.

Shortly after the Dixie Chicks released “Landslide,” frontwoman Natalie Maines found herself in the middle of a PR crisis after backlash over her criticism of President George W. Bush practically blacklisted the band from the country music world for years. But in Fleetwood Mac, a different crisis was brewing: an identity crisis—albeit one that seemed to affect guitarist Lindsey Buckingham more than other members of the British-American rock band.

In a 2003 interview with Guitar World, Buckingham called “Landslide” a “great song, but I don’t want anyone to get the funny idea about Fleetwood Mac and country. Somebody at our label was talking about how we should broaden our audience, and they started talking about putting us on Country Music Television. I had to say, ‘Woah! Stop right there.’ There’s a certain kind of profile you want to put out there. And that isn’t it.”

Songwriter Stevie Nicks Had a Much Different Take

However, Stevie Nicks, who actually wrote “Landslide” in the early 1970s, showed no similar qualms about Fleetwood Mac’s potential genre crossover. In a CMT.com interview of Nicks and the Dixie Chicks from 2002, the Fleetwood Mac frontwoman shared her excitement about the trio’s cover version. “I love it,” she insisted. “Since I got to go to Las Vegas [for VH1’s Divas Las Vegas] and actually sing it with the girls, that was such a treat for me. I think we ended up in a four-part harmony.”

“You know, I remember sitting in some house in Colorado in, like, 1973, with a beautiful view in someone’s big, beautiful home where I had gone to dinner or something. I took my guitar, and I went into this beautiful room, and I sat, and I wrote “Landslide.” I can remember it and seeing it through my eyes when I was, gosh, in my early 20s, and then through my eyes all the way up until now—and through you guys’ eyes. It’s really quite an amazing metamorphosis for this song from generation to generation to generation, and I’m so proud to be a part of it.”

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