Did ‘Go Your Own Way’ win the ‘Rumours’ battle?
“About a year and a half ago, I told him everything I had wanted to say to him since 1968,” Stevie Nicks said in 2013.
Despite their forever-long perils, Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham have always been hard-pressed to forgive each other. Rumours, for the most part, has a reputation that precedes it, caught in the wilderness of a relationship that could never quite work things out, no matter how hard they tried. No matter how much mutual respect lingered in the haze of unrelenting angst.
But that’s also what makes it so great. For instance, we wouldn’t have half the record we have today without the intense fallouts and disagreements, especially between Nicks and Buckingham, who each used the floor to air their grievances when things got too much. The best part? They’d often take these harsh, cutting words to each other, and work on musical magic, even with hearts soured by the implications of their own verbal attacks.
But their distinctive versions of managing and biting back were also what made the record so great. Instead of providing similar thought processes when it came to betrayal and breakups, Nicks and Buckingham each had distinctive things to say, Buckingham’s a more reactive beast to Nicks’ threats to haunt him for all time. And nothing proves this insatiable dynamic than their two answering songs, ‘Dreams’ and ‘Go Your Own Way’.
Because here we had two songs that dealt with their heartache in two completely different ways; Nicks coming in cool and collected with words that hit where it hurt, promising Buckingham that all his affairs will feel hollow and that he’ll be lonely forever. And Buckingham hitting back with a more prickly oh, bugger off; a more dismissive flicker of the eye that basically told Nicks she was nothing but a lonely soul caught in eternal wallow.
But does that mean Buckingham ultimately won, coming back with a nonchalance that ridiculed Nicks’ poetic confrontation? In short, no. Not a chance. In fact, there’s an inherent complexity to every song Nicks wrote about Buckingham that gives them the edge over anything he wrote about her, and a timeless quality to each that enhances her natural penchant for words that linger on her more whimsical offering in a way that feels like the most cutting thing in the world, even when it’s delivered with the utmost grace.
But Rumours also wouldn’t be the same if it only had one without the other. The moments that showcase the excellence of their dynamic (no matter the turmoil it emerged from) is precisely the reason it became one of the greatest, most timeless records of all time; because together, it’s a force of clashing perspectives that makes it all the more interesting, a switch-up between tracks that takes you in different directions with different emotions and mindsets – an elastic band that stretches with the tension though never finds any breakable limit.
So, while it would be easy to suggest there’s a definitive winner, or completely ignore all the reasons why, when all’s said and done, it’s probably Nicks, there are also countless lines and lyrics that make such a claim far more complicated. And not just within the beauty in comparing something like “the stillness of remembering what you had” with “you can call it another lonely day”. Their requited/unrequited love story might be forever ongoing, but the real winner is the art at the heart of everything they’ve ever been through.
