Is ‘Daisy Jones and the Six’ Based on Fleetwood Mac? What to Know

Credit: Lacey Terrell/Prime Video; AP/Shutterstock

Is 'Daisy Jones and the Six' Based on Fleetwood Mac? What to Know

Alexa, play Rumours by Fleetwood Mac … followed by Aurora by Daisy Jones & the Six. Years before Daisy Jones & the Six became a series for Amazon, author Taylor Jenkins Reid opened up about the inspiration behind her beloved characters, giving credit to former Fleetwood Mac band members Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. In a post for production company Hello Sunshine, Reid recalled seeing a performance of “Landslide” when Fleetwood Mac: The Dance (a TV special) re-aired on MTV when she was 13 years old. “As the song was coming to an end, Stevie and Lindsey moved closer to one another, smiling tenderly, maybe even a little bit wistfully. Lindsey stopped strumming for a moment and Stevie let it fly as he watched from the sideline. And for one split second — truly, a slice of a moment — Lindsey put his fist under his chin and looked at Stevie as if she was a miracle,” Reid wrote. “And I thought, ‘Oh, they’re in love with each other.’ I did not think it in any sort of revelatory way. It didn’t even seem like that big of a realization. It just seemed obvious.” When Reid learned that the two musicians hadn’t been in a relationship for decades at the time of the performance, she was shocked. Years later, she watched the full Fleetwood Mac: The Dance TV special on YouTube and sought a better understanding of the complicated dynamic between Nicks and Buckingham. “When I decided I wanted to write a book about rock ‘n’ roll, 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,” she explained about her 2019 novel. “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.” Nicks and Buckingham inspired Reid to create Daisy Jones (played by Riley Keough in the TV adaption) and Billy Dunne (Sam Claflin). Those aren’t the only two characters that can be tied to the real-life band, however. Suki Waterhouse, who plays keyboardist Karen Sirko on the series, named late Fleetwood Mac keyboardist and vocalist Christine McVie as inspiration. “Karen Sirko is English onscreen so obviously I looked at Christine. An absolutely legendary woman. I was completely enamored with her,” Waterhouse told NME in March 2023. Graham Dunne’s portrayer, Will Harrison, also pulled from Buckingham. “Graham is Billy’s little brother. He’s kind of the peacemaker in the group,” Harrison explained to the outlet. “Lindsey Buckingham’s [inspiration] can’t be ignored. There was a lot of fingerpicking stuff for me to play on this show and a lot of that was inspired by him.” Daisy Jones & the Six starts streaming on Amazon Friday, March 3. Scroll through for more on the comparisons to Fleetwood Mac:

Credit: Lacey Terrell/Prime Video; AP/Shutterstock

Is 'Daisy Jones and the Six' Based on Fleetwood Mac? What to Know

Alexa, play Rumours by Fleetwood Mac … followed by Aurora by Daisy Jones & the Six. Years before Daisy Jones & the Six became a series for Amazon, author Taylor Jenkins Reid opened up about the inspiration behind her beloved characters, giving credit to former Fleetwood Mac band members Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. In a post for production company Hello Sunshine, Reid recalled seeing a performance of “Landslide” when Fleetwood Mac: The Dance (a TV special) re-aired on MTV when she was 13 years old. “As the song was coming to an end, Stevie and Lindsey moved closer to one another, smiling tenderly, maybe even a little bit wistfully. Lindsey stopped strumming for a moment and Stevie let it fly as he watched from the sideline. And for one split second — truly, a slice of a moment — Lindsey put his fist under his chin and looked at Stevie as if she was a miracle,” Reid wrote. “And I thought, ‘Oh, they’re in love with each other.’ I did not think it in any sort of revelatory way. It didn’t even seem like that big of a realization. It just seemed obvious.” When Reid learned that the two musicians hadn’t been in a relationship for decades at the time of the performance, she was shocked. Years later, she watched the full Fleetwood Mac: The Dance TV special on YouTube and sought a better understanding of the complicated dynamic between Nicks and Buckingham. “When I decided I wanted to write a book about rock ‘n’ roll, 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,” she explained about her 2019 novel. “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.” Nicks and Buckingham inspired Reid to create Daisy Jones (played by Riley Keough in the TV adaption) and Billy Dunne (Sam Claflin). Those aren’t the only two characters that can be tied to the real-life band, however. Suki Waterhouse, who plays keyboardist Karen Sirko on the series, named late Fleetwood Mac keyboardist and vocalist Christine McVie as inspiration. “Karen Sirko is English onscreen so obviously I looked at Christine. An absolutely legendary woman. I was completely enamored with her,” Waterhouse told NME in March 2023. Graham Dunne’s portrayer, Will Harrison, also pulled from Buckingham. “Graham is Billy’s little brother. He’s kind of the peacemaker in the group,” Harrison explained to the outlet. “Lindsey Buckingham’s [inspiration] can’t be ignored. There was a lot of fingerpicking stuff for me to play on this show and a lot of that was inspired by him.” Daisy Jones & the Six starts streaming on Amazon Friday, March 3. Scroll through for more on the comparisons to Fleetwood Mac:

Credit: Lacey Terrell/Prime Video

How the Bands Compare

The fictional band from the novel is made up of Billy (male vocalist), Daisy (female vocalist), Warren Rhodes (drummer), Karen (keyboardist and vocalist), Eddie Roundtree (bass guitarist), and Graham (lead guitar). ​Fleetwood Mac has a similar set-up with Buckingham at lead guitar and vocals, Nicks as a vocalist, Mick Fleetwood at the drums, Christine at keyboard and vocals and John McVie at bass guitar.

One major difference is Nicks was part of seven studio albums with Fleetwood Mac, while Daisy only joins The Six for one album.

Credit: Shutterstock; Lacey Terrell/Prime Video

The Romances

At the time of recording their popular album Rumours, Nicks ended things with Buckingham.

“I broke up with Lindsey in 1976. We’d only been in Fleetwood Mac for a year and a half, and we were breaking up when we joined Fleetwood Mac,” she told The New Yorker in 2022. “So, we just put our relationship kind of back together, because I was smart enough to know that, if we had broken up the second month of being in Fleetwood Mac, it would have blown the whole thing. … Something happened that was, you know, ‘We’re done.’ And he knew it. It was time. And the band was solid, by that time, so I could walk away knowing that he was safe. And that the band was safe. And that we could work it out.”

“Dreams” (penned by Nicks) and “Go Your Own Way” (written by Buckingham) were about their split. “Both songs kind of mean the same thing — it’s really about our breakup,” she added. “He’s looking at it from a very unpleasant, angry way, and I’m saying, in my more airy-fairy way, we’re gonna be all right. We’ll get through this.”

Things got more complicated when Nicks had an affair with Fleetwood in 1977 as they toured Rumours. “One night we had a party and everybody was drunk and everybody was gone and it was just me and Mick, and we ended up spending the night together,” she recalled to Q Magazine in 2008. “And I fell in love with Mick and I think Mick fell in love with me. … It had its month of glory, which was fantastic and very romantic, and then when we got back to L.A. it was not romantic anymore, it was horrifying. It should never have happened.”

In Daisy Jones & The Six, Billy’s character is married to Camila (played by Camila Morrone) when Daisy joins the band and complicates the dynamics.

Another romance explored in the novel is between band members Karen and Graham. While Reid hasn’t drawn direct comparisons, Christine and John were another one of the romantic relationships within Fleetwood Mac. The twosome were married from 1968 to 1976, also ending things around the time of the Rumours recording.

“I dare say, if I hadn’t joined Fleetwood Mac, we might still be together,” Christine told Rolling Stone in 1997. “I just think it’s impossible to work in the band with your spouse. Imagine the tension of living with someone 24 hours a day, on the road, in an already stressful situation, with the added negativity of too much alcohol.”

Credit: Courtesy of Amazon Studios

The Time Period

Daisy Jones & the Six takes place in the 1970s. While Fleetwood Mac was formed in 1967, Buckingham and Nicks joined in 1974 and the much-talked-about Rumours album was released in 1977.