The most brutal Fleetwood Mac song Lindsey Buckingham wrote about Stevie Nicks
For the members of Fleetwood Mac, the 1970s were brutal. For Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks especially, the decade was a rollercoaster. They started it off dirt broke, trying to make their duo act work. By the midpoint, they were in one of the world’s biggest rock and roll bands. That would be a love story for the ages if they hadn’t also broken up.
But even worse than that, their career was now essentially built on writing songs about their own turmoil. While their first Fleetwood Mac album, the 1975 self-titled record, performed well, it was nothing compared to 1977’s Rumours. On that album, the couple’s sonic swords—‘Dreams’ and ‘Go Your Own Way’—turned their heartbreak into massive hits, making them stars off the back of their pain.
Making that album had been hard enough. For much of it, the two had to be kept apart. With Christine and John McVie also going through a split, the record was essentially made under supervised visitation. The girls and the boys were housed in separate apartments, brought together each day to work, and then promptly separated again—all in a desperate attempt to hold things together long enough to finish the album.
But it’s not like the end of Rumours was the end of the issues. Anyone who has ever been through heartbreak knows just how long that feeling drags on. Then add on top of that the resentment caused by some of the songs on the album, the fact the exes had to see each other each day rather than being able to get space to get over it, and then add on top of the pressure to swiftly find new material to write – it sounds genuinely hellish.
It must have been especially painful given how long Buckingham and Nicks had been together. “I loved him before he was a millionaire. We were two kids out of Menlo-Atherton High School,” Nicks once said in a television interview about how the two had grown up together. So, really, no matter how much blood was now in the water, chances are there was always at least a dash of hope for a reconciliation.
Well, Buckingham killed that in 1977. If Nicks thought ‘Go Your Own Way’ was harsh, ‘What Makes You Think You’re the One’, from Tusk is so much worse. “What makes you think I’m the one / Who will love you forever?” Buckingham sings. Across the song’s verses, he essentially shoots down any suggestion that he will always be there for his ex-partner. In the world of this song, that love he had for her is not only conditional but is very, very much over.
As least in this case though Nicks wasn’t forced to sing along to the cruel song about her. During the chaotic making of Tusk, where Buckingham essentially seized full control of the record, he created this song solely with Mick Fleetwood, building it out of nothing but guitars and crashing drums and saving Nicks from the fate of once again having to sing backing vocals to a cutting track pointed right at her.
