Lindsey Buckingham posted a video to Instagram this week that contained the kind of careful, hedged language that makes entertainment journalists lean forward in their chairs. Speaking about 2026 and what he was looking forward to, he mentioned his upcoming solo album and the authorized Fleetwood Mac documentary for Apple TV. Then he said this:

“The energy of what Buckingham Nicks did to sort of create a resurgence of connection between Stevie and myself, I think on a larger scale that seems to be something that’s in the air. And what that translates to specifically, I wouldn’t want to speculate yet, but I believe with all my heart it will translate to something good and something wonderful and something needed and something extremely appropriate.”

He is not saying Fleetwood Mac is reuniting. He is very pointedly not saying that. But he is also saying quite a lot. He is saying that he and Stevie Nicks have reconnected. He is saying that connection has energy. He is saying that energy is pointing somewhere. For Buckingham, who was fired from Fleetwood Mac in 2018 in a situation that both he and Nicks described with bitterness for years, this is a significant shift in register.

To understand why this matters, you have to understand what was actually broken. Buckingham and Nicks were romantic partners when they joined Fleetwood Mac in 1975, bringing with them a debut album under their own names that had sold poorly but demonstrated the kind of songwriting that would make Rumours inevitable. Their entry into the band coincided with a wave of personal chaos, the band’s own relationships were dissolving at the same time, and the result was an album that turned private devastation into something universal. That is still, by almost any measure, one of the most precisely crafted pop records ever made.

The partnership between Buckingham and Nicks as musicians, as opposed to as people, was always the engine. Nicks wrote songs that Buckingham arranged and produced with a kind of obsessive architectural intelligence. Their creative dynamic produced “The Chain,” “Go Your Own Way,” “Gold Dust Woman,” and a body of work that neither has matched in isolation, though both have made genuinely excellent music on their own.

The firing in 2018 was ugly. Buckingham said it was Nicks who forced it. Nicks said she didn’t demand he be fired, that she had simply removed herself from what she described as a toxic situation. The public disagreement made a reunion seem essentially impossible. Then, in 2025, they reissued the 1973 Buckingham Nicks album, which had never been officially available on streaming. That project required them to actually communicate. According to Nicks, they were back on speaking terms by the time it came out.

What Buckingham is hinting at in that Instagram video is almost certainly not a full Fleetwood Mac reunion. Nicks has said repeatedly that without Christine McVie, who died in 2022, there is no Fleetwood Mac to reunite. That door appears genuinely closed. What seems more plausible, given the language and the existing precedent of the Buckingham Nicks reissue, is some kind of collaborative project between the two of them specifically. Maybe a tour. Maybe new music. Maybe both.

The interesting thing about this possibility is what it would represent musically. Buckingham is 76 years old. Nicks is 77. Whatever they make now will not sound like Rumours, and it should not try to. The question is whether they can make something that has its own reason to exist rather than just trading on a legacy, and whether the creative tension that made the earlier work so powerful still operates between them after everything that has happened.

There is reason to think it might. The best collaborations between people with complicated histories carry that history into the work, and what Buckingham and Nicks have between them is several decades of musical memory, shared grief over Christine McVie, a long estrangement, and apparently a reconciliation. That is, by any measure, a lot of material to work with.

Nothing is confirmed. But something is clearly in motion. “Something extremely appropriate,” as Buckingham put it. For a relationship that has been in various stages of open hostility for years, even that much is a development worth paying attention to.