Stevie Nicks was 26 years old, broke, and seriously thinking about giving up music when she wrote “Landslide.” She and Lindsey Buckingham had moved to Los Angeles with nothing, recorded one album as Buckingham Nicks, and been dropped by their label, Polydor, before they could make a second. Nicks was supporting them both, working as a waitress and a cleaning lady, while Buckingham practised guitar all day. On a trip to Aspen, Colorado, she sat in someone’s living room, looked out at the Rocky Mountains, and thought about the snow coming down. “I was looking out at the Rocky Mountains, pondering the avalanche of everything that had come crashing down on us,” she later said. “At that moment, my life truly felt like a landslide in many ways.” The question she was asking herself was brutally practical: should she go back to school, or keep going with Buckingham and the music?
A Song About Getting Older, Written Young
The lyric that came out of that living room is a marvel of double vision. Nicks was in her mid-twenties, yet “Landslide” is sung from the far end of a life: “Oh, mirror in the sky, what is love? Can the child within my heart rise above?” Its central image — taking her love down a mountain and watching the seasons turn — turns her immediate crisis into a meditation on time itself. “Well, I’ve been afraid of changing,” she sings, “’cause I’ve built my life around you,” a line aimed at Buckingham that would grow more complicated, and more poignant, every year the two of them kept performing it together.
When Fleetwood Mac recorded the song in 1975 for the album Fleetwood Mac — the self-titled “White Album” that introduced the Buckingham-Nicks line-up — the arrangement was kept to almost nothing: Nicks’s voice, and Buckingham’s acoustic guitar. He played a Martin D-18 using Travis picking, his thumb alternating the bass notes in what he described as a “three against four pattern that crosses the bar line and gives the chorus another level of lift.” The song closes with a gentle electric guitar solo that Buckingham himself praised, even while insisting “Landslide” was not a “signature guitar piece.” He also bristled, years later, when anyone filed the song under country music — a categorisation that would come to look very ironic indeed.
The recording itself lasts barely three minutes, and producer Keith Olsen kept the frame almost empty: no rhythm section, no harmonies crowding the edges, just voice and guitar and the space between them. That spareness is why the song has proved so portable. It asks almost nothing of the musicians who take it up — one singer, one accompanying instrument, and the willingness to mean it — while the lyric does the heavy lifting, shifting its meaning as the singer ages. Nicks wrote it as a young woman interrogating her future; she has sung it as a daughter, as a survivor of the band’s implosions, and eventually as an elder stateswoman of rock, dedicating performances across the decades to her father. The words never changed. The woman singing them kept doing so, which turned out to be the point of the song all along.
Not everyone was convinced at first. Reviewing the album in 1975, Rolling Stone sniffed that Nicks seemed “lost and out of place” on the song and called her voice “callow and mannered.” Other contemporary critics were warmer — Phonograph Record praised what the song showed of Nicks’s range as a songwriter — but the song was not released as a single, and it settled into its long second life as an album track that audiences refused to let go of. Nicks sang it on virtually every Fleetwood Mac tour and every solo tour for the next half-century.
The Hit That Waited Twenty-Three Years
“Landslide” did not reach the charts until 1998 — and then only in a live recording. Fleetwood Mac’s reunion album The Dance, recorded in May 1997 with the Rumours line-up back together, presented the song stripped to Nicks and Buckingham at centre stage, two decades of history audible in it. Released as a single in January 1998, the live “Landslide” climbed to No. 51 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 10 on the Adult Contemporary chart — respectable numbers that wildly understated what the song had become. By 2009 it had been certified Gold in the United States, and by 2017 Nielsen SoundScan counted more than 2.09 million copies sold there. Rolling Stone placed it at No. 163 on its 2021 list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, and in Britain it has been certified 3× Platinum.
In between, the song’s catalogue life never paused. It anchored every major Fleetwood Mac compilation — 25 Years – The Chain in 1992, The Very Best of Fleetwood Mac in 2002, 50 Years – Don’t Stop in 2018 — and the live recordings accumulated alongside the studio one: a performance from London’s Wembley Arena in June 1980 on the band’s Live album, a Boston performance in 2004, even an orchestral reading with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra on Nicks’s Crystal Visions collection. AllMusic called the song a traditional-sounding piece “built on a very simple (and very effective) country-folk-inspired chord progression,” which perhaps explains why it keeps resurfacing whenever a new format or show goes looking for it: in 2020 it reached No. 13 on Billboard‘s Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart without any promotion at all.
The song’s reach kept widening in ways nobody planned. In January 2026, after it was used in the series finale of Netflix’s Stranger Things, the original 1975 studio recording finally made its own chart debut — entering the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 41 with some seven million streams in a week, and reaching No. 20 in the UK, Fleetwood Mac’s first new entry on the British chart since “The Chain” in 2009. A song written as a private reckoning had become, fifty years on, a season finale for the streaming age.
The Covers That Carried It
Long before that, other artists had adopted “Landslide” as their own. The Smashing Pumpkins recorded an acoustic version as the B-side of their 1994 single “Disarm,” later collected on Pisces Iscariot. Billy Corgan’s fragile reading reached No. 3 on the US Modern Rock Tracks chart and became one of the band’s best-loved recordings. Nicks was delighted. “There’s nothing more pleasing to a songwriter than someone else doing one of their songs,” she said in a 1998 online chat, adding that the cover had made her friends with Corgan — and that “my poetry is really meant for everyone, no matter what age.”
Then, in 2002, the Dixie Chicks — now the Chicks — put “Landslide” on their album Home and released it as a single. Lead singer Natalie Maines said she was drawn to the song because she was then about the same age Nicks had been when she wrote and first performed it. Their harmony-laden country version climbed to No. 7 on the Hot 100, No. 2 on the Hot Country Songs chart and No. 1 on Adult Contemporary — still the group’s only No. 1 on that chart — and was certified double platinum in the US. The circle was completed when the Chicks performed the song alongside Nicks herself at VH1’s Divas Las Vegas show in 2002. The cover’s chart run ended abruptly the following spring, when Maines’s on-stage criticism of President George W. Bush, on the eve of the Iraq invasion, triggered a country-radio backlash; “Landslide” plunged from the top ten and fell off the Hot 100 within a fortnight.
The covers never really stopped. In 2011 the cast of the television series Glee performed the song, with Gwyneth Paltrow, Naya Rivera and Heather Morris singing; Nicks attended the filming and called the result a “beautiful mix” of her original and the Chicks’ version. In May 2017 she sang it as a duet with Harry Styles at his show at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, an anointing of pop’s next generation in the tiny club where the Los Angeles music scene of her own youth had centred. Anohni recorded it for a Fleetwood Mac tribute album, the Japanese House cut it for a streaming single, and by the time Nicks performed it at the Metropolitan Museum of Art beside Sabrina Carpenter for the Met Gala in May 2026, the song had been covered by artists from at least four distinct musical generations — several of whom had not been born when she wrote it.
That a song Buckingham once defended against the label “country” should become a country standard is only the largest of “Landslide”‘s ironies. It was written by a young woman who feared her life was already sliding away; it became the song she would sing, decade after decade, as the evidence mounted that she had built something permanent. “Can I sail through the changing ocean tides?” she asks, in a living room in Aspen, with no record deal and no money. The half-century of performances since — and the new chart peaks still arriving in her late seventies — is the answer.