How did The Rolling Stones inspire Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Go Your Own Way’?
One of Fleetwood Mac‘s best-loved songs has to be ‘Go Your Own Way’, the first single from 1977’s Rumours album. The track was written by the band’s guitarist Lindsey Buckingham and explored the difficulties of nurturing a romantic relationship with someone you are in a band with.
As for the actual composition of the track, Lindsey Buckingham had been inspired by the Rolling Stones song ‘Street Fighting Man’, particularly Charlie Watts’ grooving drumbeat. In a similar fashion to the Stones’ song, the drum pattern for ‘Go Your Own Way’ switches between the tom drum and the snare.
Buckingham was adamant that this drumbeat would inform the rest of the song, and he sat down with Mick Fleetwood to get him into the groove. Fleetwood Mac’s producer, Ken Caillat, once noted that Buckingham was seemingly possessed in getting Fleetwood to find the right rhythm for the new tune.
He said: “I remember watching him guide Mick as to what he wanted – he’d be so animated, like a little kid, playing these air tom fills with his curly hair flying. Mick wasn’t so sure he could do what Lindsey wanted, but he did a great job, and the song took off.” From there, the basis of the song was born, and the rest of the instrumentation could be added.
Lyrically, the song explores the strain on the relationships between several of the members of the band, particularly the one between Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. The pair had recently broken up, and Buckingham wrote the song to express his pent-up frustration. “I was completely devastated when she took off,” he once said.
“And yet I had to make hits for her,” he continued. “I had to do a lot of things for her that I really didn’t want to do. And yet I did them. So on one level, I was a complete professional in rising above that, but there was a lot of pent-up frustration and anger towards Stevie in me for many years.”
Nicks later responded by explaining that she had been hurt by Buckingham, making the difficulties of their relationship public. “I very much resented him telling the world that ‘packing up, shacking up’ with different men was all I wanted to do,” she said. “He knew it wasn’t true. It was just an angry thing that he said.”
She added: “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.”
