Whether you’ve tirelessly re-read the best-selling Daisy Jones & The Six book, binge-watched the first three episodes of the small screen adaption or have the show’s original music blasting at every possible moment, you’ll know of the chokehold the 70s-era fictional universe has on the cultural zeitgeist.
And while Daisy Jones or The Six aren’t real-life musicians who existed during the heyday of live music, debaucherous rockstars and 70s counterculture, the book’s author, Taylor Jenkins Reid, was inspired by this chart-topping and best-selling band whose own love life is worthy of a dissertation (and small screen treatment) itself.
We are, of course, talking about Fleetwood Mac.
Particularly, the romantic relationship turned Greek tragedy between the band’s most notable figures Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham.
During the height of Fleetwood Mac’s success—the period around 1977 when they released and toured their Rumours album—Stevie and Lindsey had gone through a volatile breakup, leading to the decades of in-fighting, backstabbing and emotional vitriol-fuelled singles that have become synonymous with the band.
But it’s not just this peripheral parallel that Daisy Jones & The Six and Fleetwood Mac share.
In fact, TikTok users have a theory that a performance during Fleetwood Mac’s 1997 live album recording of The Dance was the inspiration behind Daisy Jones & The Six altogether, and now Jenkins Reid has pretty much confirmed it.
Below, everything you need to know about the Fleetwood Mac song that served as inspiration for Daisy Jones & The Six.
Is Daisy Jones & The Six Inspired By Fleetwood Mac?
While there were plenty of other iconic 70s bands who inspired Jenkins Reid, the author confirmed back in 2019 that Fleetwood Mac was indeed the biggest source material.
From The Six’s love lives to the origin story of how the band formed, it’s almost a fictional companion to Fleetwood Mac’s own meteoric history.
The most glaring similarity is the relationship between Daisy Jones and The Six front man Billy Dunne and the real-life volatile romance between Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham (though, Lindsey certainly didn’t cheat on a spouse with a bandmate).
Not only that, the late Christine McVie (who is clearly embodied by keyboardist Karen Sirko a.k.a. Suki Waterhouse) also had a complicated relationship with Fleetwood Mac bassistJohn McVie.
The pair divorced during the recording of Rumours after seven years of marriage, and it’s their relationship that serves as the inspiration for Karen’s fictional fling with The Six basses Graham (which also happens to be John’s middle name). Coincidence? We think not.
Aside from the resemblance between Daisy Jones’ costumes and Stevie Nicks’ own wardrobe, one of the most well-hidden similarities is one only music aficionados would pick up on.
As we saw in the show’s third episode, The Six recorded their duet with Daisy, ‘Look At Us Now (Honeycomb)’, at Los Angeles’ famous recording studio Sound City to. As any Fleetwood Mac fan would know, this was actually an Easter Egg to their own origin story, as it was the real-life studio city where Lindsey and Stevie first connected with the band. It’s safe to say Jenkins Reid is staying true to the source material.
She just may not agree with you though. In 2019, Jenkins Reid told The Guardian in an interview that “almost nothing in the book actually happened with Fleetwood Mac—it’s a Fleetwood Mac vibe but it’s not their story. I haven’t actually ripped off their lives”. We’ll take her word for it…
How Fleetwood Mac’s 1997 Live Recording Of ‘The Dance’ Inspired Daisy Jones Best Moments
As Jenkins Reid admitted herself in 2019, it was a 1997 recording of Fleetwood Mac’s The Dance that mainly inspired some of the novel’s most poignant parts. And now, TikTok has caught on.
The social media app is flooded with users reposting the band’s rendition of ‘Silver Springs’, a song Stevie wrote in 1977 about her breakup with Lindsey and overdubbing snippets from the tumultuous Soldier Fields performance scene from the book.
For context, ‘Silver Springs’ is a haunting breakup song that charts the emotions of the end of a relationship, with profound lyrics like: “I’ll follow you down til’ the sound of my voice will haunt you” and “You’ll never get away from the sound of the woman that loves you/Time cast a spell on you, but you won’t forget me/I know I could’ve loved you, but you would not let me”.
Sounds like something Daisy would write for Billy, no?
Stevie revealed during a special segment on Rumours that the song’s name was taken from a town the band drove past while on tour, and that Silver Springs is a “Symbolic thing of what [Lindsey] could have been to me”.
In fact, it was the moment Jenkins Reid saw Stevie bewitched Lindsey by singing his own breakup song to him in front of millions that inspired one of the original songs in the book, specifically ‘Regret Me’.
“That concept of a woman’s right to be angry is absolutely based on Stevie Nicks singing ‘Silver Springs’ at Lindsey Buckingham during their reunion [album and] show, The Dance [in 1997],” Jenkins Reid told The Guardian.
“I have always been very moved by Stevie Nicks singing that song the way she did then,” she added.
In a personal essay for Hello Sunshine (the production company helmed by Reese Witherspoon that adapted Daisy Jones & The Six), Jenkins Reid also revealed that Fleetwood Mac’s 1997 performance of ‘Landslide’ also played a part in the making of the novel.
She wrote:
“I kept coming back to that moment when Lindsey watched Stevie sing ‘Landslide’. How it looked so much like two people in love. And yet, we’ll never truly know what lived between them. I wanted to write a story about that, about how the lines between real life and performance can get blurred, about how singing about old wounds might keep them fresh.”
Of course, this is best summarised in the chapter when Daisy Jones says: “I started singing and I looked at him. And he looked at me. And, you know what? For three minutes, I think I forgot we were performing for twenty thousand people. I forgot his family was standing there. I forgot we were singers in a band. I just existed. For three minutes. Singing to the man I loved”.
If this isn’t a reason to go listen to Rumours and hug the person we love we don’t know what is.
The first three episodes of Daisy Jones and The Six will be released on Amazon on March 3, with new episodes airing every Friday. Sign up for a Prime Video free trial here.
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