The 1977 Fleetwood Mac lyric Stevie Nicks wants to delete from history: “Go over and kill him”
One of Fleetwood Mac’s most captivating qualities was the raw honesty embedded in their songwriting. This unfiltered openness gave their music an emotional resonance that drew listeners in. However, such vulnerability often came at a personal cost to the band members, particularly Stevie Nicks, who bravely allowed the world to witness her life unravel in real-time through her poignant lyricism.
Although Nicks proudly wrote with her heart on her sleeve, she didn’t know any other way. While this doesn’t make her any different from a vast proportion of her contemporaries, the unique relationships between those in Fleetwood Mac added more intrigue for audiences and placed Nicks further under the microscope.
Like any right-minded artist, the trials and tribulations of enduring a breakup inspired new material. However, unlike most acts, Nicks remained part of her ex-partner’s life, as Lindsey Buckingham was also a member of Fleetwood Mac. Vice versa, he also used the experience for songwriting purposes.
Naturally, both artists wrote about the end of the relationship from their respective perspectives with devastating veracity. While Nicks was the band’s principal songwriter, Buckingham threw in his contributions, such as ‘Go Your Own Way’, which included one particular lyric that upset his former partner.
Buckingham and Nicks first met at high school, bonding over their love of music. They played together in Fritz before eventually starting a romantic relationship and releasing an album as a duo. “I loved him before he was a millionaire. We were two kids out of Menlo-Atherton High School,” Nicks once said in a television interview. “I loved him for all the right reasons. We did have a great relationship at first. I loved taking care of him and the house.”
While it was once perfect, the good times didn’t last forever. Over time, it became clear to Nicks they were no longer compatible as a couple. Being placed in the limelight by fronting a famous rock band certainly added to their difficulties. However, a personality clash ultimately caused them to part ways romantically and made them incompatible.
“From the very beginning, Lindsey was very controlling and very possessive,” she told Rolling Stone in 2015. “And after hearing all of the stories from my mother and how independent she was and how independent she made me, I was never very good with possessive people or with controlling people.”
Although they were no longer romantically linked, they were still colleagues who couldn’t escape each other. Nicks wrote about the breakdown of the relationship in ‘Silver Springs’, which she later said was penned to haunt Buckingham.
Meanwhile, Buckingham penned ‘Go Your Own Way’, which greatly upset Nicks as it alluded to her promiscuity on her behalf. Naturally, Nicks, who had been faithful throughout their relationship, was devastated by how fans could potentially interpret the lyric. “I very much resented him telling the world that ‘packing up, shacking up’ with different men was all I wanted to do. He knew it wasn’t true. It was just an angry thing that he said,” she told Rolling Stone.
It would have been a different scenario if Buckingham had included the aforementioned lyric in a solo song. Still, the fact that Fleetwood Mac needed to perform ‘Go Your Own Way’ was incredibly troubling for Nicks every time they took to the stage.
Nicks explained: “Every time those words would come onstage, I wanted to go over and kill him. He knew it, so he really pushed my buttons through that. It was like, ‘I’ll make you suffer for leaving me.’ And I did.”
In 2009, the band’s drummer, Mick Fleetwood, recalled the tension in the studio during the recording of ‘Go Your Own Way’ and how Nicks was uneasy with the line from the start. Fleetwood told Q: “I’m ashamed to say, from capitalizing on my own ineptness. There was some conflict about the ‘crackin’ up, shackin’ up’ line, which Stevie felt was unfair, but Lindsey felt strongly about. It was basically, On your bike, girl!”
Due to the bitter series of events that led to the relationship between Buckingham and Nicks concluding, he wanted to use ‘Go Your Own Way’ to inflict pain upon his ex-partner. To this day, Nicks still feels sour about the particular line within the son. In an ideal world, the issue would have been resolved in the studio, but her wishes fell on deaf ears.
The tension surrounding the song perfectly encapsulated the emotional volatility that powered Rumours. Rather than disguising their conflicts behind polished pop songwriting, Fleetwood Mac leaned directly into the discomfort, allowing heartbreak and resentment to become part of the album’s DNA.
That honesty is a major reason the record continues to resonate decades later. Songs like ‘Go Your Own Way’ do not feel carefully sanitised for public consumption; they sound like real people processing emotional devastation in front of millions of listeners.
For Nicks, however, the song became more than just another hit in the Fleetwood Mac catalogue. Performing it night after night forced her to relive one of the most painful periods of her life while standing only a few feet away from the person who wrote it. The bitterness may have softened with time, but the emotional scars remained visible whenever the band revisited the track live.
In many ways, ‘Go Your Own Way’ stands as the clearest example of how Fleetwood Mac transformed private heartbreak into timeless art, even when the process itself bordered on unbearable.
