“Too bad”: The Fleetwood Mac song Stevie Nicks never wanted to make
Every band has to be a democracy if they want to survive. There might be a few people who act as the team captains whenever they walk into the studio, but there are an equal amount of people who are concerned with getting the right take and not worrying about whether they hurt everyone else’s feelings along the way. While it’s hard for anyone to keep that in check when going after perfection, Stevie Nicks knew that she had some standards whenever she walked in to sing a Fleetwood Mac song.
Granted, the fact that the band were able to survive as long as they did with Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham was a miracle. Aside from them both having a shared history and getting more and more tense with each other during the making of Rumours, Buckingham’s perfectionist tendencies weren’t going to do them any favours when he insisted that she sing a line about how all she wanted to do was leave him and shack up with whomever else she wanted.
Although the band did eventually realise that working together was unhealthy in the late 1980s, The Dance did at least put some hope in fans’ minds. They didn’t guarantee anything outside of that recorded live performance, but looking at the way that the pair looked at each other when performing ‘Landslide’, it finally felt like all of those years of animosity and talking behind each other’s backs were officially behind them.
It was a lot of good vibes, but not enough of them to commit to a full album. Nicks was already having a fine time working on her solo outings, and Buckingham had no reason to go back, but the minute that he began working on his next solo record, his producer Rob Cavallo was the one to suggest that they turn the whole thing into a Fleetwood Mac project. So when they finally came together, did Say You Will work?
Well, yes and no. As much as there is a great Fleetwood Mac album to be found here, the only problem is that it’s far too long. If anyone thought Tusk was a heavy sit, this is much longer than that, and the tonal shifts are even larger. Nicks does get some great moments like her 9/11 tribute ‘Illume’, but it’s hard to take her openhearted songs at face value when Buckingham seems to complain more often than not on tracks like ‘Murrow Turning Over In His Grave’.
“Quite honestly, Stevie really didn’t want that on the album. Too bad! She objected to when I sing, ‘Think of me sweet darling every time you don’t come.’”
Lindsey Buckingham
It’s one thing to be cynical, but Buckingham remembered that Nicks tried to put her foot down when they started working on the song ‘Come’, saying, “Quite honestly, Stevie really didn’t want that on the album. Too bad! She objected to when I sing, ‘Think of me sweet darling every time you don’t come.’ She thought people would think it was about her–it isn’t.”
Then again, even if it isn’t about her specifically, it does seem a little bit racy by Fleetwood Mac standards. They had already flirted with some risque material like ‘Tusk’, but when one of the lines you wrote is enough to make it onto one of the filthier songs in Prince’s catalogue, it’s probably time to step back and take a look at what you’re doing a little bit.
Although the song itself is fine for what it is, it’s easy to see why Nicks had her reservations with it. Even if Buckingham insists that it isn’t about their relationship, no one really went to Fleetwood Mac to hear about something particularly steamy. There were a lot of cynical love songs, to be sure, but this is far too blunt coming from the same band that wrote tunes like ‘Dreams’.
