The classic Fleetwood Mac lyric Don Henley wanted to change: “Doesn’t sound good”
When you’re a celebrated songwriter, it’s naturally frustrating when others try to meddle with your proven formula. Most songwriters hold the finer details of their craft close, protecting the creative flow from unwelcome disruption.
Yet, some can’t resist offering unsolicited advice – even when it’s not needed (especially if they’re male). Imagine the audacity of telling Stevie Nicks her idea wasn’t good enough or suggesting she take a different approach. It’s difficult to fathom anyone interfering with the Fleetwood Mac icon’s creative process, yet someone once dared to do just that.
As a songwriter, there are few who shaped the sound of 1970s pop as much as Nicks did alongside her bandmates Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie. While songs such as ‘Rhiannon’ and ‘Landslide’ were major hits for the group, the one that has stood the test of time the strongest appears to be ‘Dreams’, a song that earned Fleetwood Mac their only US number one and has seemingly never wavered in its popularity.
Nicks has previously attested that when she’s finished writing a song, it’s pretty much done and “set in stone”, with very little room for alteration. “I’m not changing that,” she told American Songwriter in 2018. “The second it comes out of my mouth, I’m like ‘Oh, that was good.’” While this is a pretty solid method to prevent needless tinkering with a song and the minutiae of what could be done to improve it ever so slightly, there are always times when someone else tries to meddle with an already perfect song.
This would happen to Nicks during the writing and recording of ‘Dreams’, and due to her dating Eagles’ Don Henley at the time when Fleetwood Mac were piecing together their 1977 classic Rumours, he was present for some of her time in the studio. Listening to the way she pronounced the word “washes” in the song’s chorus with an emphasis on the second syllable, Henley was adamant that something didn’t quite sound right about it and that she could be placing stress elsewhere in the line.
So, what ‘Dreams’ line did Don want to change?
“When I was writing ‘Dreams’,” Nicks said in the interview, and it says, ‘When the rain washes you clean, you’ll know.’ Well, he didn’t like that ‘washes you’ [sung with stress on ‘-es’], and he wanted me to go, ‘When the rain washes you clean’ [with stress on ‘wash’].” While this seems like more than a case of nitpicking, Henley was right in as much as nobody would ever naturally pronounce the word in this manner, and there’s something unusual about the way Nicks delivers the line.
“He’s like, ‘Well, wash-ES doesn’t sound good,’” Nicks said, “and I’m like, ‘Well, wash-ES is the way it’s gonna be.’” Refusing to budge on her interpretation of how the line should sound, the second syllable stress is how the song ended up sounding on the track, and despite its clunkiness, that’s the way people will always remember it.
Because of how well-known ‘Dreams’ is and how you can immediately hear her pronounce the offending word in a strange fashion, it’s incredibly hard to place how it might have sounded if Henley had got his way and encouraged Nicks to alter how she sang it, and would probably have required her to change the cadence of the entire line to sound correct in his eyes.
After all, if it did have stress on the first syllable of ‘washes’, the rest of the line would surely have felt rushed, as she would have had to pause for longer after ‘rain’ to squeeze in the remaining words in a way that would work with the beat of the song.
It’s probably for the best that things were kept the way they are, and Nicks would wholeheartedly agree on that matter. “So then you start getting into that with somebody, and we’re talking an ego [of] a fantastic songwriter here,” she told the publication. “I’m arguing with Don Henley over this, you know? That’s why I really stayed away from writing songs with other people.”
While Nicks’ intervention against Henley’s meddling ways ultimately left her greatest song unscathed and warned off from ever wanting to work with or as an external songwriter – something that would later come to the fore when she snubbed Prince – it’s hardly a surprise that this is the sort of attitude that the Eagles drummer and songwriter brings to a situation such as this.
Known for having fought to get his way while in his own band and constantly at war with those who didn’t agree with him in the perpetually feuding Eagles, it’s evident that Henley has always been a sulker when he doesn’t get his way, and for him to have been humbled by Nicks in such a way would have probably sent him away seething with rage.
