‘Say Goodbye’: The song Lindsey Buckingham wrote as the final word on his romance with Stevie Nicks
When reflecting on the tumultuous scene that sparked Fleetwood Mac’s masterpiece Rumours, Lindsey Buckingham recalled, “Whatever was going in the band, specifically between the two couples, very much informed the material, and I think that was a very great appeal of the album. If you look at the success that the album enjoyed, I think it goes a little bit beyond the music itself.”
He continued: ”I think a resonance kicks in that has to do with the interaction of the people, the whole being greater than the sum of the parts, and I think a tangible element of that is the fact you had these dialogues shooting back and forth between members of the band about things that were happening to all of us while we were recording these songs.”
At the time, Fleetwood Mac found themselves in a unique position whereby their chief songwriters each had a muse, tormentor and collaborator all rolled into one within the same studio. Far from precluding productivity, this mixed-up milieu of emotional mayhem spawned some of the greatest pop-rock songs that the world has ever heard, not just in spite of it but almost because of the alchemical energy bottled up in the studio that crackles and the soaring record.
However, while we may have been impacted by the music in a second-hand capacity, we can often forget that this was the band’s lives. The drama doesn’t start and stop when the final song finishes for them. And when it comes to the romance between Buckingham and Nicks, the guitarist figured things had gone on too long without a final word, putting a line under things so that he could enjoy life with his family, having declared his public peace on the matter.
‘Say Goodbye’ appeared on the 2003 record Say You Will, the fitting final original piece in the band’s discography to date. Usually, these car-crash cash-ins are a waste of everybody’s time, but with Fleetwood Mac, there’s simply too much talent and adeptness at handling tricky situations that triumph ensued, particularly with this Buckingham guitar masterpiece.
It is a track that Buckingham was hoping to complete a long time before it was ever put to an album, and in that time, it matured, mellowed and became more measured; any pent-up bitterness and fury made way for a solemn goodbye. In fact, it would seem that he had been musing over it for decades, filled with not only highs and lows but rock bottoms and stratospheres, and then ultimately, the distance of moving on and looking back at it all.
By this stage, he was married and had three kids, and it was finally time to croon out the adage ‘we can still be friends’ but this time with sincerity. The twisted backstory to this song imbues it with a bittersweet gut punch of emotion. Contrary to how that may sound, the song steps over the tired idea of love coming with an expiration date and simply transfigures the final throes of an affair with a sense of circumstantial reality. In short, ‘it didn’t work out’ doesn’t sound like such a sad sentence after all; lamentable, yes, but what it implies is anything but.
