Today, we will be talking about Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide"! I'm sure you've asked yourself the pressing question at one point or another while listening to this absolute jam: "What is 'Landslide' about?" Well, let's start from the top! "Landslide" first appeared on Fleetwood Mac's 10th studio album... Fleetwood Mac. Which isn't to be confused with their debut studio album... Fleetwood Mac.
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Though "Landslide" is billed as a Fleetwood Mac song, it's more of a Buckingham Nicks song with Mac branding. Buckingham Nicks, of course, refers to the musical duo of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. The pair would later join Fleetwood Mac after their own musical endeavors didn't quite pan out. I promise this gets less complicated as we move forward!
"Landslide" would become one of Nicks' most significant songs across her entire discography. The song soared to the top of many charts, including Adult Contemporary's Top 10 and Billboard's Hot 100. "Landslide," in fact, came in at #163 on Rolling Stone's "500 Greatest Songs of All Time" list in 2021! Basically, if Fleetwood Mac is performing today, "Landslide" is a guarantee in the tracklist. With all that said, let's dive into the song itself!
What Is 'Landslide' About?
Stevie Nicks is an enigma all by herself. When I initially listened to "Landslide," I thought it was about familial love. Then, I listened to it again and had a different interpretation. It kind of hits that "perfect mid-life crisis" point where you're in your late 20s or early 30s -- young enough to be a mindful adult with many years ahead but old enough to be wholly intimidated by the fullness of the surrounding world. Nicks would shut me right up, it turns out!
Nicks told The New York Times that she wrote the song while romantically entangled with her Buckingham Nicks partner, Lindsey Buckingham. She was 27 years old and deciding whether she wanted to go back to school or continue her musical endeavors with Buckingham.
I took my love, took it down / I climbed a mountain and I turned around.
And I saw my reflection in the snow-covered hills / 'Til the landslide brought me down.
Stevie Nicks Creates 'Landslide' At A Low Point In Her Life
Things with Buckingham were going... poorly. By the time the duo joined Fleetwood Mac, they were basically on the cusp of breaking up. "I did already feel old in a lot of ways," Nicks told NYT. "I'd been working as a waitress and a cleaning lady for years. I was tired." Nicks was financially supporting the pair during that time through odd jobs.
Oh, mirror in the sky, What is love? / Can the child within my heart rise above?
Can I sail through the changin' ocean tides? / Can I handle the seasons of my life?
Nicks remembered the pair's youthful determination to make things work, recounting that time with Rolling Stone. "I was only 27 -- I wrote that in 1973, a year before I joined Fleetwood Mac. You can feel really old at 27. [Lindsey Buckingham and I lived in L.A., and] it makes me remember how beautiful and frightening it all was. Asking each other, 'Now what? Should we go back to San Francisco? Should we quit?' We were scared kids in this big, huge, flat city where we had no friends and no money. But we didn't quit."
Fleetwood Mac's Stevie Nicks Reaches A Breakthrough
Even as the foundation of their relationship was cracking and falling apart, Nicks and Buckingham did everything they could to power through. The uncertainty surrounding her relationship with Buckingham combined with her unease about where her life was headed made magic in Aspen, Colorado.
Well, I've been afraid of changin' / 'Cause I've built my life around you.
But time makes you bolder, Even children get older, And I'm getting older, too.
Looking out at the snow-covered Aspen mountains, "Landslide" struck Nicks like a bolt of lightning. Before joining Fleetwood Mac, Buckingham Nicks was dropped by their former record label, Polydor Records. Their only album as a duo, Buckingham Nicks (I know, I know), was a commercial failure.
When all seemed lost, that's when Buckingham was approached by Fleetwood Mac to join their ranks. Buckingham was clear, however, that he didn't join unless Nicks could join, too. The rest, as they say, is history!
Take my love, take it down / Climb a mountain and turn around.
And if you see my reflection in the snow-covered hills / Well, the landslide bring it down.
Okay, So What Is 'Landslide' Actually About?
...You know, ultimately, that's a hard question to answer -- simply by virtue of the song having so many meanings. If you ask Nicks, she was "looking out at the Rocky Mountains pondering the avalanche of everything that had come crashing down on us ... at that moment, my life truly felt like a landslide in many ways."
Under that lens, it leans on the literal. But that's not art! Nicks sat at a major crossroads in her life. Her musical aspirations, as far as she knew, had gone up in smoke. Her relationship with Buckingham was on its way to flatlining. She was dancing between cleaning gigs and being a waitress.
She was 27, and nothing made sense at an age where things are supposed to "click." You're meant to have cracked life's code by then, and Nicks didn't know what to do with herself. Life wasn't going "according to plan," and she was hanging on because she had to. Because failure was unacceptable. You can imagine, then, what it must've been like to look outside of that window in Aspen. To see the snowy mountains and have a fleeting thought of, "At any second, all of that snow could come barreling toward me, and there would be nothing I could do about it."
In Conclusion
"Landslide" is helplessness. In love. In life. Climbing, trying to make everything work. Knowing that life, at any moment, could bring on that landslide and, at best, leave you back at square one. You're married to your decisions sometimes, and time ain't stoppin' for you to easily decipher if you made the "correct" choices.
And from the middle of the mountain, can you really afford to turn back now?
And if you see my reflection in the snow-covered hills / Well, the landslide will bring it down.
The landslide will bring it down.
