“Never goes away”: The song that reminds Stevie Nicks of Lindsey Buckingham breakup
All the best songs are wrought with emotion, but usually, while up on stage, an artist typically only has to grapple with their own feelings about others rather than other people’s feelings about them. That wasn’t the case for Stevie Nicks, though, as Fleetwood Mac was an absolute minefield of emotions as the band, in the 1970s, were busy writing songs about one another and forcing the subject at hand to sing along. Over time, that might get easier, but there was one track that Nicks could never let go of the hurt it caused.
In the mid-1970s, when Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham joined Fleetwood Mac, the lineup became essentially one extended double date. Alongside the married duo of John and Christine McVie, Mick Fleetwood spent the early years with that lineup third wheeling. For a while, everything was happy in a stage of loved-up bliss. But by 1976, when the group went into the studio to record Rumours, it was all collapsing.
But it wasn’t just heartbreak in the mix. No, the band’s couples were collapsing in the most tumultuous, dramatic way possible and were putting every feeling and every stage of the heartache into song. ‘I Don’t Want To Know’ is the denial phase, ‘The Chain’ feels like bargaining, ‘Silver Springs’, which didn’t make the cut of the initial tracklist, is undeniably Nicks’ depressive moment, while ‘Dreams’ sounds more like acceptance. But it’s Buckingham’s track ‘Go Your Own Way’ that speaks to the anger phase in a way that his ex-partner next got over.
In particular, one lyric cut her deep, and the hurt never truly healed. “I very much resented him telling the world that ‘packing up, shacking up’ with different men was all I wanted to do,” she said, quoting from the song. To her, this was an unnecessary cruelty and wasn’t reflective of her heart at all. She said, “He knew it wasn’t true. It was just an angry thing that he said.”
For anyone, going through a breakup from a long-term love is difficult. “I loved him before he was a millionaire. We were two kids out of Menlo-Atherton High School,” Nicks once said of their relationship, “I loved him for all the right reasons. We did have a great relationship at first. I loved taking care of him and the house.” The two had basically grown up together and had built their music careers as a pair, so to now be splitting up and still have to navigate that in the same studio was always going to be a challenge. But while Nicks’ songs attempted to process her own feelings and sadness, she always felt that ‘Go Your Own Way’ was nothing but a mean dig.
“When we play something like ‘Go Your Own Way’, of course, it takes me right back to when we broke up. That never goes away,” she said in 2003, decades on from when the song was first released. Even still, far beyond the immediate pain of the split, the song still has the ability to bring her right back to that heartbreak and the hurt this song caused.
Perhaps that’s part of the reason why Buckingham was eventually booted from the band and why the pair still are on rocky terms as Nicks performs her own Fleetwood Mac songs during her shows but never goes near this one written about her. Or why even back in the 1970s, there are videos of Nicks throwing daggers at the guitarist during live performances of this song, with herself and Christine McVie occasionally purposefully messing the track up, just to get revenge.
