Twisters, the Daisy Edgar-Jones– and Glen Powell–starring disaster film, ruled the box office this weekend, earning a staggering $81.25 million domestically. But huge as that take is, it may not be as impressive as the original Twister’s most notable achievement: how the 1996 blockbuster may have led to Fleetwood Mac getting back together, and making a blockbuster album of their own.
Fleetwood Mac’s rocky history—particularly the tumultuous relationship between members Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham—has captivated audiences for decades, inspiring media like the best-selling book turned Prime Video series Daisy Jones & the Six and the Tony-winning play Stereophonic. Both of those accounts focus on Nicks- and Buckingham-inspired characters recording records a lot like Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, a 1977 album filled with songs about Nicks and Buckingham’s terrifically messy breakup. Though their romance didn’t last, Fleetwood Mac did: The band’s lineup would remain unchanged until Buckingham left in 1987 to focus on his solo career. Over the following years, Nicks and keyboardist Christine McVie would also leave.
By the mid ’90s, Fleetwood Mac had become more of a tribute band than an active artistic engine, with drummer and founder Mick Fleetwood trying to keep the party going with a series of rotating members. And while the band’s Rumours lineup did briefly reunite in 1993 to perform at Bill Clinton’s inauguration, it would take a few more years—and a movie about Helen Hunt hunting for tornados—for the members to come back together creatively.
In 1995, a recently sober Nicks wrote a song for the Twister soundtrack. “I had my friend Rebecca read the script,” Nicks explained in the liner notes of her 1998 box set, Enchanted. “She then gave me the Reader’s Digest condensed version so I could decide whether to do it or not. As she explained it to me, I realized that this really was…my story. It was about people who had extreme jobs…like chasing tornadoes, or being in a rock band. Anyway…I really handcrafted this song for the movie.”
Buckingham produced the song. The track, “Twisted,” became a duet between the pair, who also brought in Fleetwood on the drums. It marked the first duet between the two outside of Fleetwood Mac since their early days as duo Buckingham Nicks, with harmonies reminiscent of the singular eponymous record they released in 1973.
While “Twisted” did appear in the movie, Nicks evidently didn’t think it got the spotlight it deserved: “Unfortunately, if you saw the movie, you missed the song…and you certainly missed my message,” she wrote in the Enchanted liner notes. Later, Nicks told Uncut magazine, “When songs go into movies you might as well dump them out the window as you’re driving by because they never get heard.”
Regardless, this foray back into collaborating may have eventually led to all members of the Rumours lineup getting back together the next year and recording their wildly successful live album, The Dance, in 1997. The project led to an MTV special, the birthplace of Nicks and Buckingham’s haunting, viral performance of “Silver Springs.”
Fleetwood Mac supported The Dance with a tour—and although McVie left the band again from 1998 to 2014, the group continued touring on and off for the following two decades, until Buckingham was fired in 2018. Though Fleetwood Mac did replace him, since McVie’s passing in November 2022, it’s now unlikely they’ll ever tour again, with Nicks telling Vulture in an interview that when McVie passed, she “figured [Fleetwood Mac] really can’t go any further with this. There’s no reason to.” Still, the band might have remained broken up if not for Twister—so we have it to thank for nearly 30 extra years of Fleetwood Mac.
