Buckingham Nicks reissue revives early spark as Joy Crookes rises with Juniper

A reissue of Buckingham Nicks, the 1973 duo album by Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, shines a spotlight on the pair’s early promise as rumors of a Fleetwood Mac reunion swirl online. In July, the two artists posted cryptic lyrics from Frozen Love on Instagram, reviving fan speculation about a possible Mac revival after the band’s 2022 Christine McVie milestone. The reissue, released on vinyl, CD, and streaming services for the first time in decades, is a much-anticipated collector’s item. It preserves the original LP sleeve and package, including the same black-and-white imagery that once drew mixed feelings from Nicks about the nude cover shoot. The vinyl is priced at about £30, with the CD available for around £11, and all formats bring new attention to a record long treated as a formative, if overlooked, stepping stone in the Mac orbit.

Adrian Thrills revisits the duo’s story, tracing how, after meeting in California high school, Nicks and Buckingham became lovers and collaborators who joined Fleetwood Mac in 1974. Their arrival helped rejuvenate the British blues band by adding Californian harmonies that would foreshadow the group’s later pop-saturated triumphs. The pair’s romance would become core material for Rumours, with Buckingham writing Go Your Own Way about Nicks and Nicks crafting Dreams and Silver Springs in response. The Buckingham Nicks album itself, though it did not burn bright in its first release, offers the duo’s chemistry in raw form and hints at the alchemy that would power later Mac records. The reissue features the same LP sleeve as the 1973 original and benefits from the contributions of drummer Jim Keltner and guitarist Jimmy Wachtel (the latter’s brother, Waddy Wachtel, would later help shape Stevie Nicks’s solo sound). The upstairs-downstairs dynamic—his harder-edged, more matter-of-fact writing versus her more lyrical, impressionistic approach—remains a through-line, offering glimpses of the greatness that would come to define the Rumours era. Thrills notes a few missteps in the package, including Lola My Love, which he views as throwaway, and two instrumental tracks that feel superfluous, yet the overall balance of strengths makes the record worth revisiting as a historical marker. Cryin In The Night, a femme-fatale cautionary tale, showcases Nicks’s melodic gift, while Crystal, a pastoral ballad written by Nicks and sung by Buckingham, hints at the harmonic chemistry that would later fuel their biggest successes. The release also anchors a broader conversation about Fleetwood Mac’s lineage, given that the pair would soon re-enter the Mac fold and contribute to a string of enduring songs that shaped rock and pop. The reissue re-introduces listeners to a chapter before the explosion, a time when the pair’s potential was still largely a whispered promise rather than a public spectacle. In this context, the material feels both intimate and historically significant, a reminder of where Rumours began and how the threads of that story started to weave through the band’s most famous era.

Joy Crookes: Juniper (Insanity) – Rising star in full bloom. Thrills notes that Crookes has built a patient, resilient arc since the BRITs Rising Star nomination in 2020, and Juniper marks a deliberate return that leans into emotional candor and sophisticated production. The album follows four years after her Mercury-nominated Skin, a gap that is unusually lengthy in the fast-moving UK scene, but Crookes makes it count. Juniper brings a polished, emotionally open set of songs, with guests including Vince Staples and Kano and co-writes with Athlete’s Joel Pott. A standout collaboration with Sam Fender on Somebody To You underscores a breadth of influence across urban and indie textures. Thrills highlights Brave as a centerpiece, a track that captures the tension of new relationships with a poised, bluesy vocal delivery backed by piano and lush strings. I Know You’d Kill provides a playful jab at industry hypocrisy in a northern soul-infused groove, while Carmen leverages a string-drenched arrangement and nods to Elton John’s Benny And The Jets—an interpolation done with the singer’s blessing. Juniper’s wider sound palette is complement by Crookes’s confident, open storytelling, a hallmark of her growth as an artist. The album’s energy is balanced by intimate moments, and the result is a record that feels both contemporary and rooted in a long lineage of soulful, observational songwriting. Crookes has built a slow-burn path since her early recognition, and Juniper positions her as a durable voice in UK pop-soul.

The two releases—Buckingham Nicks’s archival re-emergence and Joy Crookes’s Juniper—illustrate distinct trajectories in contemporary culture and entertainment. One revisits a foundational partnership that helped seed a global phenomenon, while the other pushes forward with a confident, mature sound that points to further growth. For fans of Fleetwood Mac’s origin story, the Buckingham Nicks reissue offers a compact, revealing window into the duo’s early dynamics and the seeds of the widescreen pop that would follow. For listeners tracking the next wave of UK songwriting, Juniper marks a clear statement that Joy Crookes is not a momentary blip but a rising artist who has earned a broader audience through careful craft, collaborative risk-taking, and an expansive emotional vocabulary.