‘Without You’: The Fleetwood Mac song that waited 40 years to be released
For any artist, there’s never a point when the creative process is officially over. It can take people only a few minutes to come up with a classic if the time calls for it, but there are a few occasions where a certain track has to spend years at a time in the incubator waiting for the right final touches to be put on everything. Although Fleetwood Mac usually had a baseline of quality when it came to picking which tunes ended up on albums, Lindsey Buckingham sat on ‘Without You’ for 40 years before deciding it was right to take out of the can.
When talking about Buckingham’s approach, it often comes down to him being an absolute perfectionist in the studio. Being a student of technicians like Brian Wilson, just good enough was never going to sit well with him, which meant layering guitars on top of each other to fit whatever the song needed or going so far as to do pushups in the middle of the studio to get the right backing vocal sound.
Compared to the masterpieces that he made with Fleetwood Mac, Buckingham Nicks sounds a lot more airy by comparison. The massive sheen hadn’t quite kicked in with the mainline band, but there are shades of magic laced throughout the duo’s official debut, like Nicks’s ‘Crying in the Night’ or Buckingham’s fingerstyle showcase, ‘Django’.
When working on various demos during this stage, ‘Without You’ was the beginnings of an idea that quickly got abandoned to make way for stronger material on the record. Even though those demos would have fit right in during the Rumours era, Buckingham and Nicks could never decide in what arrangement they wanted when it came to work on everything.
Also, given the lyrical content, it’s not like it reflected their state of mind anymore. The kind of youthful innocence of their first album was long gone, and hearing them talk about relying on each other would have made absolutely no sense if they were writing songs regarding their bitter breakup like ‘Go Your Own Way’ and ‘Dreams’.
After letting the dust settle in the 2000s following the release of their comeback album Say You Will, Buckingham thought enough of the tune to bring it out of the vaults, saying, “It definitely predates our involvement in Fleetwood Mac. I believe it was written when we were in the process of culling material for a possible second Buckingham-Nicks album, before we were dropped by Polydor. She claims it was written earlier, but I’m not so sure. But it’s a very sweet song that really harkens back to a time when we were far more innocent.”
But in light of them going through heartbreak, physical violence, and a cocaine hill the size of Mount Everest, some of the lyrics still hold up. It’s still as complicated a world as Nicks claimed it was back then, and even if she was in hell working with Buckingham half the time, they did find ways to lean on each other to get through the hard times.
It’s hard to really look back at any broken relationship with fondness, but ‘Without You’ is at least a decent reminder of the good times. It wasn’t near the heights that they were looking for, but there’s a faint whiff of the same band that made that emotionally raw music all those years ago.
