A few fiery glances between Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham during a 1997 live performance of “Landslide”—that’s all it took to spark author Taylor Jenkins Reid and what would become her best-selling novel, Daisy Jones & the Six, now a series on Prime Video.

“I kept coming back to that moment when Lindsey watched Stevie sing ‘Landslide,’” Jenkins Reid wrote in a 2019 essay for Hello Sunshine, the production company behind the show. “How it looked so much like two people in love. And yet, we’ll never truly know what lived between them. 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.”

Turning one’s broken heart into art is at the center of Reid’s behind-the-music-style story. Although folksy singer Daisy Jones (Riley Keough—granddaughter of Elvis Presley) and frontman/lead guitarist Billy Dunne (Sam Claflin) are fictional characters, they’re obvious proxies for Nicks and Buckingham, who remained bandmates for years after their tumultuous breakup during the recording of Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 album, Rumours.

In the throes of her research, Reid found herself transfixed by their dynamic. “It got to the point where I was driving in my car, and I thought: I just want to know if Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham slept together after Rumours,” she would later tell The Guardian. “I heard myself think that–and that’s insane. I feel so close to them, but that’s because they’re writing about universal things in a specific way that I have a connection to.”

The stormy making of Rumours, which won the Grammy for album of the year and sold more than 40 million copies worldwide, was also compounded by the divorce of bass guitarist John McVie and late keyboardist Christine McVie after eight years of marriage. That fissure is reflected by the Six’s bass guitarist, Graham Dunne (played by Will Harrison), and keyboardist Karen Sirko (Suki Waterhouse), whose split coincides with Billy and Daisy’s parting during the tour for their record, Aurora. In real life, the Rumours era also contained the breakup of Mick Fleetwood’s marriage and the origins of an ill-fated love affair between him and Nicks.

“We broke up because being in that band was just too difficult to be in a relationship,” Nicks told Chum Radio in 2001 of the band’s meteoric rise in the 1970s. “I mean, I think it’s why Lindsey and I, and Chris and John, broke up; the band got so big so fast that we were all just, like, blown away, you know. And it was almost like, we can’t do this. We can’t. This is destroying our business. The business of Fleetwood Mac is being destroyed by these relationships. And…none of us [were] willing to give up the band.”

Although Buckingham and Nicks would continue to work together somewhat harmoniously for decades, the passion between them would always pose a problem. “You would think, after all these years, there would be nothing left to work on. But oddly enough, Stevie’s and my relationship is still a work in progress,” Buckingham told CBS in 2015. “And I guess that says something, doesn’t it, about the care, about, possibly, the parallel motives that have driven us down the roads that we’ve been on.”

Fleetwood Mac–inspired artifacts litter Daisy Jones & the Six. Some of the show’s performances were filmed at Sound City, “where Fleetwood Mac made their first Lindsey and Stevie album and just all of it felt real and just great for us,” cocreator Scott Neustadter told Vanity Fair. The fictional band’s earworm “Regret Me” is based on Nicks’s “Silver Springs,” which includes the scorching line: “You’ll never get away from the sound of the woman that loves you.” As Reid told The Guardian, it’s influenced by “that concept of a woman’s right to be angry” as performed in their aforementioned 1997 reunion show, The Dance. “I have always been very moved by Stevie Nicks singing that song the way she did then.”

But the Daisy Jones vision board extends far beyond Fleetwood Mac’s purview. Reid has also cited Vanity Fair’s 2015 oral history of the Laurel Canyon music scene as inspiration, as well as the Civil Wars—an indie duo who earned four Grammys before they mysteriously dissolved their partnership in 2014. “They wrote these incredibly romantic and intimate songs, and they would perform them so beautifully and so intensely,” she told Entertainment Weekly in 2019. “They’re both married to other people, and one night they just break up [the group].”

As for the project’s other influences, original music on the show features songwriting contributions from Blake Mills (who has worked with Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell), Phoebe Bridgers, and Marcus Mumford. Patti Smith’s “Dancing Barefoot” serves as the series’ opening credits theme. Wardrobe head Denise Wingate funneled her experiences touring with the Bangles into the show’s aesthetic choices, with future-tense Karen drawing comparisons to Blondie lead vocalist Debbie Harry. Claflin has credited Bruce Springsteen with shaping his onstage persona. Reid has revealed disco star Simone (Nabiyah Be) is loosely based on Donna Summer. And tonally, the author has said Daisy Jones feels “exactly like” 2019’s A Star Is Born. 

Given that the book and series are formatted like an oral history and documentary, respectively, Neustadter also says he studied various rock documentaries while writing, including Cameron Crowe’s David Crosby: Remember My Name, Andy Grieve’s Can’t Stand Losing You: Surviving The Police, Alison Ellwood’s History of the Eagles, and Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense about the Talking Heads.

As for that enduring Fleetwood Mac connection, Reid told The Guardian in 2019 that she had “no idea” if any of the band members knew of her novel. “But here’s the thing: almost nothing in the book actually happened with Fleetwood Mac–it’s a Fleetwood Mac vibe but it’s not their story. I haven’t actually ripped off their lives,” the author insisted. “I just wanted to spend more time listening to Rumours and needed a good reason to do it.”

The first three episodes of Daisy Jones & the Six are now streaming with new episodes launching every Friday through March 24 on Prime Video.