How Fleetwood Mac created the hardest guitar song in pop history
When talking about the most intense shredders of all time, no one tends to think of Fleetwood Mac first. Sure, they may have had artists like Peter Green laying down some of the best blues of the 1960s, but the second half of their career with Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham created songs reserved for radio-friendly pop fodder. While some points are to be made about the band losing that edge initially, there is a hidden nightmare for any guitar player in their magnum opus.
Throughout the recording of Rumours, most of the band were taking their internal issues out on each other. Since everyone was going through relationship trouble, songs were being used as weaponised forms of emotion, with every song being derived from the tensions going on within the group.
Out of all the band members, Buckingham seemed to be the most cutthroat of his bandmates, going in on his relationship with Nicks on tracks like ‘Go Your Own Way’. Although ‘Never Going Back Again’ seems like a tame song by lyrical comparison, what Buckingham is doing behind the fretboard will leave guitar players confused from the very start.
Before delving into the song itself, it’s important to go over how Buckingham plays in the first place. Raised on playing songs from the bluegrass world, Buckingham had a traditional way of playing fingerstyle, never using a pick throughout the band’s tenure.
As such, ‘Never Going Back Again’ is a song that most guitarists will need to practice fingerstyle with beforehand, getting used to approaching the instrument in a far more natural way than using a plectrum. Once they get used to fingerstyle, though, the rhythmic patterns Buckingham plays throughout the song are enough to drive anyone crazy.
Given the cascading nature of how the song sounds, one would assume that the song relies on triplets, with the fingers handling groups of three notes played in succession, right? Well, yes and no. While Buckingham does various triplet rhythms with most of his fingers, his thumb is a different story, playing the bassline in groups of two, creating a counterpoint rhythm with the rest of the strings.
This kind of approach is known as polyrhythm, which is usually reserved for genres like progressive rock. Although artists like Tool or King Crimson may not be a stranger to polyrhythms, putting one on top of another is virtually unheard of in pop music, let alone a song that clocks in at just over two minutes.
If the mental strain put on Buckingham isn’t bad enough, he’s creating a completely different rhythm when singing, initially having to scrap the entire song because he had written it in a key too high for him to sing. Lowering the song a few steps, ‘Never Going Back Again’ is still a beast for its nonstop rhythm.
Rather than the polyrhythm being one part of the sound, all two minutes of the song are centred around putting both rhythms to work, with the entire song practically collapsing if everything isn’t performed correctly. Even though Fleetwood Mac has relied on making pop-friendly material throughout their career, this is a classic example of how difficult it is to write a pop song with musical ingenuity.
