The Stevie Nicks line Lindsey Buckingham never understood
Lyrics don’t always need to be the prime focus in any rock and roll outfit. The best songs in the rock canon aren’t known for making the most sense, but ever since Bob Dylan opened up the playing field, the written word has meant more to musicians, and Stevie Nicks knew that her words were more important than anything else when she started writing a song.
After all, Nicks never claimed to be proficient at any instrument during her prime, and while she could play a half-decent tune with the handful of chords that she knew, a lot of the heavy lifting on her Fleetwood Mac songs were done by the rest of the group. But even if Lindsey Buckingham helped her along during their salad days, that didn’t mean that he had to enjoy every single thing that he worked on.
Both he and Nicks vowed to not let their breakup impede on the band’s future, so it was much easier for him to treat her songs like a work job some of the time. He had his own grievances to get out of his system across his tracks, so if he could throw in tunes like ‘Second Hand News’ and ‘Go Your Own Way’, Nicks deserved to air her side of the story on tracks like ‘Silver Springs’ and ‘Gold Dust Woman’.
Then again, she was never going to be that cutthroat when she wrote her songs. She never got into the music business trying to be malicious, and while Buckingham did have a nasty streak that reared its head every time he got pissed off, ‘Dreams’ was a much more plaintive song than anything else on the record.
Because let’s think about the entire record for a second. Most of the songs are fairly breezy and wouldn’t sound out of place on AM radio, but since everyone was writing about each other, it’s shocking that there weren’t more fights in the studio or screaming matches than the ones that happened in between takes. But even after plugging away at ‘Dreams’, Nicks felt that Buckingham had his mind permanently shut whenever she talked about the fallout of their relationship.
She was wishing him peace, but she knew he would never hear it, saying, “[The line] ‘When the rain washes you clean you’ll know’ was meant to mean ‘We’re going to be okay. We’ll get through this.’ I understand that he doesn’t feel the same way about it, but that is, in truth, what it was written about. No matter what happens to Lindsey and I as a couple, this band will go on and we’ll see it through. He seems to take it a different way.”
We’ll never know what’s going on in Buckingham’s head as to what he really thinks about it, but perhaps the line about rain washing someone clean could have been taken as Nicks washing her hands of him as a romantic partner after years together. Still, that would have been a large stretch coming from a song that was meant to be a calming force through the emotional storm that everyone was going through.
While ‘Silver Springs’ is far more explicit about the details of their breakup at the time, it’s hard for anyone to find anything but comfort when listening to a track like ‘Dreams’. The relationships in Fleetwood Mac were never meant to last that long, but even if the love between each of them faded over time, ‘Dreams’ should serve as a gentle reminder of the good times and how the band was strong enough to transcend any kind of romantic tension in the room.
