Why Is Gen Z So Obsessed With Fleetwood Mac?

Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham still know how to make a scene.

Earlier this month, the former lovers and Fleetwood Mac stars caused a stir when they posted complementary lyrics on their respective social media pages.

“And if I go forward,” Nicks posted, just as Buckingham shared “I’ll meet you there.”

LOVE IS REAL pic.twitter.com/VJwK2ATM5D

— stevie nicks manager (@kajolswife) July 17, 2025

The twin halves form the refrain of the couple’s song “Frozen Love,” from the album “Buckingham Nicks,” which they recorded before joining the band that would make them famous.

Were they teasing that they would be releasing a remastered version of the album, as of yet not available on Spotify? Or were the famously on-again, off-again duo announcing that they were reuniting in their twilight years, as Nicks had once suggested they would do?

The fact is, it doesn’t matter what they were teasing. The world perked up when they teased.

Weirdly, today, that’s not entirely unsurprising.

Buckingham and Nicks rose to fame, not with their titular album, but when they joined Mick Fleetwood and John McVie’s blues rock band in 1974 — seven years after it formed — and lent their sound to the otherwise average project, propelling Fleetwood Mac into stardom.

After “Rumours” dropped in 1977, it was clear that Fleetwood Mac would forever be famous. By the time Bill Clinton replaced the Democratic Party’s theme of “Happy Days Are Here Again” — chosen by Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 — with the band’s “Don’t Stop,” it was clear that the Fleetwood Mac had made it.

But that’s not why people cared about Buckingham and Nicks’ posts. In recent years, the band — and its tumultuous lead duo — has become a bit of a phenomenon among millennials and Gen Z.

It started, perhaps, with a viral 2020 TikTok in which Nathan Apodaca filmed himself longboarding down the road while drinking cranberry juice and listening to “Dreams.” It continued as denizens of “BookTok” fell in love with Taylor Jenkins Reid’s “Daisy Jones And The Six,” a novel inspired by the band that became an equally popular Amazon Prime series.

Still, that’s not enough to explain the Fleetwood Mac renaissance among a generation whose parents grew up thinking of the band as a staple of classic rock radio. Really, the revival has to do with a single performance of a song the band never actually released.

“Silver Springs” was cut from “Rumours,” though contemporary fans of the song likely struggle to understand why. In it, Nicks chides a former romantic partner, “Time cast a spell on you, but you won’t forget me/I know I could have loved you/But you would not let me.”

It’s clear to anyone who knows the tangled romantic history of Fleetwood Mac that Nicks is singing to Buckingham, a point made abundantly clear by the now-viral clip from the band’s 1997 concert film “The Dance” in which she stares down the guitarist, who almost fumbles his solo as she spits “you’ll never get away from the sound of the woman that loves you.”

It’s a striking scene, and an incredible performance. But why, one wonders, did this particular clip gain so much traction in recent years? For as long as Fleetwood Mac has been famous, it’s been known that its members had been cheating on each other — often with each other — and writing their romantic vicissitudes into their songs.

Why is it that, almost half a century after the release of a best-selling album that contained the  biting “Go Your Own Way” and the cheeky “You Make Loving Fun” — a song that the late Christine McVie wrote about having an affair with the band’s lighting director and told her husband and bandmate John McVie was about their dog — a single music video ignited an entirely new fervor for the band with a generation that would have otherwise viewed these songs as their parents’ music?

At first glance, it’s easy to write the Fleetwood Mac revival off as another TikTok phenomenon. The cranberry juice-swilling longboarder lit the match, and the fire spread throughout social media.

But there is something about young people’s embrace of “Silver Springs” and the entire Fleetwood Mac oeuvre that makes it different from, say, the recent popularity of Connie Francis’s “Pretty Little Baby.” Teenagers who adopted the late crooner’s hit as a TikTok sound didn’t do so because they yearned for the chippy vibes of the 1950s — they did so because, like so many other social media trends, someone started it and they followed.

No, the re-embrace of Fleetwood Mac is more earnest. New fans delight not just in the music, but in the rawness of the performance, the expression of emotion performed by jilted lovers, yearning hearts, once and future friends,

Perhaps we should not be surprised that Gen Z embraced Fleetwood Mac for these reasons. After all, this is a generation that is not having sex, drinking, doing drugs, or even driving their own cars. It’s understandable that they would yearn for something more real, more primal, more exciting than what they’re used to. Smothered by helicopter parents and numbed by antidepressants, it makes sense that young people today would latch onto a band known for its almost comical licentiousness, fueled by drugs meant to exacerbate emotions, not control them.

It helps, of course, that Fleetwood Mac is an incredible band. Stevie Nicks is a generational performer, her voice made for belting in an arena while doing a witchy dance. Lindsey Buckingham is one of the great guitarists, and his solos, both passionate and elegant, never distract from his vocal prowess.

And then there’s the rest of the band, who are made all the more likable by the fact that they exist in the shadows of their leaders’ steely glares and rocky pasts. As one fan put it on X, during the aforementioned performance of “Silver Springs,” “Lindsay stares at Stevie to get a rise and a also better performance out of her…Christine looks like she wants to murder them both and Mick Fleetwood is just like ‘I LOVE DRUMS!!!!!’”

thinking again about the performance of Silver Springs where Lindsay stares at Stevie to get a rise and a also better performance out of her in a Dennis Reynolds kind of way, Christine looks like she wants to murder them both and Mick Fleetwood is just like “I LOVE DRUMS!!!!!” pic.twitter.com/P0uzHZ4GN4

— chatpile roan (@lornashawty) July 22, 2024

That of course is to say nothing of John McVie, who plucks his bass guitar with a workmanlike fervor unencumbered by the fact that he’s standing just feet from his ex-wife.

It’s tempting to say that Buckingham and Nicks know what they’re doing. And of course, to a certain extent, they do. Whether they’re announcing a romantic reunion, a tour, a remaster, or some combination of the three, the pair is certainly aware of their image as a couple, and use it to their advantage.

Watch Fleetwood Mac perform, however, and it quickly becomes clear that the fiery core of the band that has spawned a new generation of fans has little to do with the band’s performative element. Of course Buckingham and Nicks glare at each other while performing “Silver Spring,” a song entirely about their breakup.

But watch their performance from the same concert of “The Chain” — the only song on “Rumours” for which the entire band is credited, a hodgepodge of various songs each member was working on at the time they recorded — and you’ll see why the memes have made such an impact.

Nicks is glaring at Buckingham like she hates him. Christine McVie looks morose behind her keyboard, while her ex plucks the bass, emotionless. And all the while, Mick Fleetwood bangs on his kit with a wide-eyed, open-mouthed expression that really cannot be described better than “I LOVE DRUMS!!!!!”

True rockstars are dying. Most of those still performing, like the Rolling Stones, have become punchlines because they are so clearly superannuated. But not Fleetwood Mac.

Mick Fleetwood is 78. Stevie Nicks is 77. Lindsey Buckingham a sprightly 75. They’re not jumping around like Bruce Springsteen, nor are they aging into respectable rocker tenure like Paul McCartney.

No, the members of everyone’s favorite transatlantic blues rock pop band are simply doing their thing, musically and personally. It’s why a bunch of twenty-somethings are as excited about their coquettish trysts as they are about their now-classic tracks.

Fleetwood Mac is simply, unequivocally, unchangeably real. They began as a totem of a rollicking and troubled generation. They became a cautionary tale for the same cadre as they aged. And now, in their golden years, they are a beacon for a new generation removed enough to see their promiscuity as fascinatingly anachronistic as their honest instrumentation.

So, are Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham getting back together? It really doesn’t matter. They’ve been given a new life, and their music has inspired a new generation to go their own way. That’s a legacy that means more than any of their songs or personal squabbles. And boy does it still sound great.