No band mastered the art of forcing your ex to sing songs you wrote about them quite like Fleetwood Mac, and there’s no better track to exemplify this skill than the ‘Rumours’ A-side that included a Fleetwood Mac lyric Stevie Nicks hated and would later say she wanted to end Lindsey Buckingham over.
From “Dreams” to “The Chain,” some of the pop rock band’s greatest hits were ones they wrote about each other: the intense love affairs, messy breakups, and the drug-fueled turmoil they experienced throughout the 1970s. But no lyric bothered Nicks quite like that pesky ‘Rumours’ cut.
The Fleetwood Mac Lyric Stevie Nicks Especially Hated
Three years after folk-rock duo Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham joined the British blues band Fleetwood Mac, the band released one of their most commercially successful albums—and their most scathing breakup songs. “Go Your Own Way,” the penultimate track to the ‘Rumours’ A-side, spells out Nicks and Buckingham’s split in no uncertain terms.
Loving you isn’t the right thing to do, Buckingham begins. How can I ever change things that I feel? He amps up the emotion in the chorus, singing, You can go your own way; you can call it another lonely day. But it was the third verse that really got under Nicks’ skin: Tell me why everything turned around. Packing up, shacking up is all you want to do.
“I very, very much resented him telling the world that ‘packing up, shacking up’ with different men was all I wanted to do,” Nicks later said in a 1997 Rolling Stone interview. “He knew it wasn’t true. It was just an angry thing that he said. Every time those words would come out onstage, I wanted to go over and k*** him. He knew it, so he really pushed my buttons through that. It was like, ‘I’ll make you suffer for leaving me.’ And I did.”
The Good And Bad Side Of Fleetwood Mac’s Interpersonal Drama
Breakup song or not, it’s hard to argue with the enduring qualities of Fleetwood Mac’s late 1970s work. In a way, their in-fighting contributed to some of the greatest tracks in rock ‘n’ roll history. And not every track was explicitly about fighting, either. Some iconic songs, like Christine McVie’s “Songbird,” were a pseudo-prayer that the band could find some type of inner peace amidst their constant bickering and butting heads.
McVie told Rolling Stone the drama inspired her song “Songbird,” which she wrote in “half an hour. Just stayed up late one night. I think I just was thinking of all the band members. ‘God, wouldn’t it be nice just to be happy?’”
Still, not even a tremendously successful discography stopped the band from showing their hard feelings on stage. Nicks recalled Buckingham mocking her twirling “Rhiannon” dance in front of their adoring fans, and another time, “We had some kind of a fight, and he came over—might have kicked me, did something to me, and we stopped the show. He went off, and we all ran at breakneck speed back to the dressing room to see who could kill him first. Christine got to him first, and then I got to him second. The bodyguards were trying to get in the middle of all of us.”
Fortunately, Fleetwood Mac managed to avoid harming each other on or offstage, no matter how badly they thought they would like to at the time. The silver lining, of course, is the incredible body of work they managed to create despite their near-constant drama behind the scenes.
Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images For The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
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