Is Daisy Jones & The Six Based On A True Story? Fleetwood Mac Is An Inspiration

Daisy Jones & The Six just dropped on Prime Video, and the highly anticipated series invites viewers into the rise and fall of the titular 1970s rock group — and all its attendant drama and romantic entanglements, too. The show is presented as an oral history, 20 years after a pivotal concert that changed the bandmates’ trajectory forever. But is Daisy Jones & The Six based on a true story?

Sadly, Daisy Jones & The Six isn’t actually a real band. Taylor Jenkins Reid invented the group for her 2019 novel, a fictional oral history set against the music scene of the 1970s. But it feels real because it’s inspired by some very well-known musicians — and their equally well-known drama. Fleetwood Mac, for example, was definitely on Reid’s mind while writing. She actually mentions them in the acknowledgments section of her book, thanking her husband, Alex, who “listened to Rumours [and] fought about Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie with [her].” The support!

Rumours, of course, is widely regarded as one of the best albums of all time, featuring timeless classics like “Go Your Own Way” and “The Chain.” But much like Aurora in Reid’s novel and TV series, it was also fueled by lots of drama behind the scenes, including Christine and John McVie’s breakup, and Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham’s own impending split. “[Christine and I] would talk about how we weren’t going to let this whole thing implode and break up the band,” Nicks told Bustle in 2020. “So we figured as the women — and as we know, women are always the ones that are going to keep things together anyway — we [wouldn’t] let this break up this band.”

It wasn’t just reading about Rumours that inspired Reid, though. In a Hello Sunshine blog post, the author said the band’s 1997 reunion concert caught her attention as a teenager. While revisiting it on YouTube years later, Reid said, “I saw that later on in the show, Stevie sung ‘Silver Springs,’ like a woman scorned, holding that microphone like a weapon, drilling holes into Lindsey’s head with her eyes as she sang that her voice would haunt him.” The haunting performance remains a viral hit today.

Reid also said she revisited the 1997 performance of “Landslide” after deciding to write Daisy Jones. “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,” she wrote.

While Fleetwood Mac was already baked into Reid’s book, of course, the audiovisual elements of the adaptation seem to lean further into the comparison — from the design of the albums to the music itself. (The opening of “The Chain” and “Look At Us Now (Honeycomb),” for example, are very similar.)

While Fleetwood Mac is the most obvious source of inspiration, it’s not the only band that fueled Daisy Jones & The Six. Upon the book’s 2019 release, Reid told Bustle that The Civil Wars’ 2014 breakup played a role in her creative process. “They were a man and a woman who were incredibly in sync musically but not romantically involved. At least, that’s what it seemed like from the outside,” she explained. “Then, they randomly broke up and never talked about why. I was so intrigued, and thought, ‘Can I do my own version of The Civil Wars?’”

The similarities are clear here, too. The musical duo of Joy Williams and John Paul White weren’t romantically linked (despite rumors), but they went through a “creative divorce” in 2014, as Williams put it to WNYC. The duo had previously canceled a European tour, too, citing “internal discord and irreconcilable differences of ambition” — another storyline that definitely echoes in Daisy Jones.