The Fleetwood Mac songs Lindsey Buckingham considered his best: “Fell together properly”
Getting an artist to name their favourite song they’ve written is a near-impossible task, and if they have any sense of pride in their work, then they’re likely to treat all of their songs like their children. For someone as prolific and talented as Lindsey Buckingham, this ought to be a tough choice to make.
While Buckingham was only a present member for six of the 17 studio albums that Fleetwood Mac released, one might be able to argue that within those records are some of the band’s greatest material, and as someone who contributed large amounts of the songwriting for those albums, he would have plenty of options to choose from across the two stints he spent with the band when selecting his favourite song.
Of course, he would also enjoy a solo career outside of the band, writing plenty of timeless tracks that helped elevate him to star status. It was, after all, a track that he wrote while performing alongside partner and fellow future Fleetwood Mac recruit Stevie Nicks that got them both inducted into the band, with ‘Frozen Love’ compelling Mick Fleetwood to get in touch and ask if they wanted to become a part of the group.
However, despite the strength of his work outside of the group, it’s the efforts that he made during his initial run with the band that are the most celebrated, and if he were to select even just a couple of highlights from his storied career, it would undoubtedly have come from this period in the late 1970s and early ‘80s where he was at the top of his game.
The arguable apex of his career came with the fabled release of Fleetwood Mac’s eleventh album, Rumours, which, despite being written and recorded during a personally tumultuous time for all of the members who were suffering from drug addictions and experiencing breakdowns in their respective relationships with one another, produced some of the band’s finest material that has taken on a life of its own in the near 50 years since its release.
Despite the pain that he would have been going through at this time, it’s no surprise that he looks back on tracks from Rumours as being his favourite songs that he wrote for the band, and in a 2004 interview with Australian newspaper The Sunday Mail, he named two tracks from this standout album as being his favourites.
“Obviously I’m going to favour guitar songs in any list that I come up with,” Buckingham argued. “I especially like ‘Never Going Back Again’ with its sentiment of moving forward, of having been hurt but being resilient. Again, there’s an irony there. Everytime you’re in a happy state, you kind of have the illusion that you’re never going to be hurt again.”
He then continued by adding another classic track from the record, stating: “I’d probably have to name ‘Go Your Own Way’. It’s something that I’m proud of, something that fell together properly.” There are, of course, other tracks of his on the record, with ‘Second Hand News’ being another of his most celebrated compositions, and ‘The Chain’ being a collective effort between all members, but there’s no denying the power of his two selections that he put forward as his two personal favourites.
