Many bands have recorded break-up songs throughout music history, but few have done it like Fleetwood Mac. The classic rock band wrote their break-up tunes about each other. Usually, breaking up with someone is hard enough, but Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, Christine McVie, and John McVie found it even more difficult when they remained bandmates.
Fleetwood Mac dealt with their respective splits like any other artist; they vented in their songs. Their 1977 album, "Rumours", is a testament to breaking up and moving on, but one of Lindsey Buckingham's contributions was the harshest song on the now 20x platinum diamond record.
Why Did Lindsey Buckingham And Stevie Nicks Break Up?
Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks met in high school. The guitarist, who was later fired from Fleetwood Mac, had a band called Fritz and asked Nicks to join as the lead singer. In the early 1970s, the band broke up, and the pair decided to move to L.A. Suddenly, they became romantically involved.
According to the L.A. Times, Nicks said, "I'm not sure we would have even become a couple if it wasn't for us leaving that band. It kind of pushed us together." After a year of taking care of Buckingham while he had mononucleosis, the pair finally moved to L.A. in 1972. People immediately recognized that the couple had an aura about them.
Buckingham and Nicks had star power.
They soon became the duo Buckingham Nicks, but their 1973 eponymous album flopped, and their record label dropped them. The pair began fighting. Nicks was sick of taking odd jobs to pay the bills, but at least their creativity didn't stop flowing. They began writing future profitable Fleetwood Mac songs like "Rhiannon" and "Landslide."
Thankfully, that's when Fleetwood Mac met Buckingham in a recording studio. The blues band was down a few members and only consisted of drummer Mick Fleetwood, pianist and singer Christine McVie, and bassist John McVie. They wanted Buckingham alone, but the guitarist said he and Nicks were a package deal.
Initially, Buckingham didn't want to join the band. He didn't like giving up on Buckingham Nicks. However, Nicks was done being a waitress, so she convinced him to join.
Which Fleetwood Mac Song Did Lindsey Buckingham Use To Get Back At Stevie Nicks After Their Break-Up?
In the early recording process of Rumours, the two relationships at the heart of Fleetwood Mac were coming undone. Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks were breaking up, Christine McVie and John McVie, who had been married since 1968, were divorcing, and Fleetwood was splitting from his wife, Jenny Boyd.
Yet, after a long tour, they thought renting a house in Florida for some downtime would be mutually beneficial. According to Rolling Stone, Fleetwood said, "Aside from the obvious unstated tension, I remember the house having a distinctly bad vibe to it, as if it was haunted, which did nothing to help matters."
During their stay, Buckingham wrote songs for the album, including "Go Your Own Way," which reflected his anger toward Nicks and their break-up. The guitarist wasn't just venting about his relationship with Nicks; he was taking his biting revenge. He's telling Nicks to pack her things and go her own way because "shacking up is all you want to do."
Buckingham said the song is "filled with anger, it was filled with angst." The lyrics came to him "almost as a stream of consciousness." Understandably, Nicks was not happy.
Did Stevie Nicks Write A Song About Lindsey Buckingham?
Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks fought about the "shacking up is all you want to do" line in the Fleetwood Mac song. Nicks thought the line was brutal and tried to get her bandmate to omit it. He didn't budge.
"I very, very much resented him telling the world that 'packing up, shacking up' with different men was all I wanted to do," Nicks told Rolling Stone in 1997. "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 kill 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."
Buckingham might've been a little spiteful on "Go Your Own Way," but Nicks clapped back with her own break-up song, "Dreams." She wrote it on Sly Stone's bed and then handed a rough take to the guitarist.
In 2009, Nicks told The Daily Mail, "Even though he was mad with me at the time, Lindsey played it and then looked up at me and smiled. What was going on between us was sad – we were couples who couldn't make it through. But, as musicians, we still respected each other."
Nicks called "Go Your Own Way" and "Dreams" "twin songs" because they told two sides of their toxic relationship. "Even though 'Go Your Own Way' was a little angry, it was also honest," Nicks wrote in the liner notes on the 2013 reissue of Rumours. "So then I wrote 'Dreams,' and because I'm the chiffony chick who believes in fairies and angels, and Lindsey is a hardcore guy, it comes out differently.
"Lindsey is saying go ahead and date other men and go live your crappy life, and [I'm] singing about the rain washing you clean. We were coming at it from opposite angles, but we were really saying the same exact thing."
It's worth pointing out that Buckingham and Nicks weren't together for that long. Yet, the end of their romance affected them both so deeply they had to immortalize it in some of Fleetwood Mac's most famous songs.
