The Detroit News
Randall Roberts
Los Angeles Times

Vocalist says her first loyalty is to the band

Fleetwood Mac is on a rare 34-date American tour that features co-founders Mick Fleetwood and John McVie along with longtime vocalist Stevie Nicks and singer-guitarist Lindsey Buckingham.

“This band never breaks up,” Nicks said on the phone from her home in Santa Monica. After their most recent tour in 2009 concluded, she added, the understanding was that the band would take a break, work on other projects and reconvene in a few years to do it again.

The rest of the band wanted to tour last year, Nicks said, but she was so happy with her most recent solo album, “In Your Dreams,” that she wanted to give more time to supporting it. “I sat everybody down and said, ‘Listen, please understand. I’m never going to break this band up. Never. I’m never going to leave you. I’m just going to go away for under a year to focus on the record.’

“It’s been a little longer than that,” she conceded, but: “My first loyalty has always been to Fleetwood Mac. And it will always be.”

On the phone, Nicks was chatty, offering unfiltered thoughts on planning the set design, the set list and the ways in which she prepares to get back into Mac. But she sounded relieved and most enthusiastic about reconnecting with her longtime creative — and, for a time in the ’60s and ’70s, romantic — partner Buckingham to work on new material.

Before they joined Mac in 1975, the pair recorded one gorgeous, self-titled album in 1973 as Buckingham Nicks. That work led Fleetwood, McVie and then-keyboardist Christine McVie to ask them to join the band. The rest is (a tangled) history.

Jump to early 2012, when — as Nicks calls them — “the boys” in the band got together to work on new material. (Christine McVie departed in 1999.) Nicks had just lost her mother to pneumonia, then contracted the virus herself, and was unable to join them. Bassist John McVie, drummer Fleetwood and Buckingham soldiered on, and then she heard those rough tracks of a new CD for the first time. Said Nicks, “I went up to Lindsey’s house, he played me all of the songs, and we chose two. He said, ‘I really tried hard to be you, to really see through your eyes when we were doing these songs …’ ”

The process was different from the last time they collaborated in 2002 for “Say You Will” because Buckingham and Nicks weren’t in a professional studio.

“We were in his house where his wife and children are,” she said. “… We laughed and laughed and laughed about all the crazy things that have happened to us,” she said, describing it as “a very cathartic time, and a very healing time, I think. And the songs came out great.”

Fleetwood Mac

Fleetwood Mac

8 p.m. June 12

Joe Louis Arena

19 Steve Yzerman Dr., Detroit

Ticket $49.50 -$149.50

(313) 983-6606

Olympiaentertainment.com