The Sound of Silence: When Nicks and Buckingham Stopped Time with “Landslide”
The arena went silent the moment Lindsey Buckingham stepped into the spotlight, taking a seat on the stool. There was no pyrotechnic explosion, no drum roll, no showmanship—just him, Stevie Nicks, and a single acoustic guitar breathing in the same quiet air. For a band known for the chaotic, drug-fueled melodramas and electric rock anthems that defined the 1970s, this sudden minimalism was startling. It was a vacuum of sound that sucked the breath out of twenty thousand people.
When Lindsey picked the intricate first notes of “Landslide,” something shifted in the room. It wasn’t just a chord progression; it was a skeleton key unlocking a door that had been sealed for decades. Stevie carried the opening line—“I took my love, I took it down”—like she was telling a secret she’d kept for years. Her voice, raspier now than in her youth but richer with the patina of survival, didn’t project to the back of the stadium so much as it seemed to whisper directly into the ear of every person present.
For the uninitiated, this was just a hit song being performed by rock legends. But for the devotees, the history hanging in the air was heavy enough to touch. They knew that “Landslide” wasn’t just a ballad; it was a biography.
Written in 1973 in Aspen, Colorado, long before the fame, the money, and the heartbreak, the song was originally a meditation on uncertainty.1 A young Stevie Nicks, waitressing to support a struggling Lindsey Buckingham, looked out at the snow-covered Rocky Mountains and wondered if she could handle the “seasons of her life.” She was asking the universe if she should stay with Lindsey or leave him to find her own path. Ironically, the song became the vehicle that kept them bound together for a lifetime.
