Why Go Your Own Way Was So Painful for Stevie Nicks

By the time Fleetwood Mac began making Rumours, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham were no longer simply two musicians working together.

They were former lovers trying to survive inside the same band.

Their relationship had collapsed just as Fleetwood Mac were becoming one of the biggest groups in the world. Instead of escaping each other after the breakup, they went into the studio and turned their anger, resentment and heartbreak into songs.

For Buckingham, one of those songs was Go Your Own Way.

For Nicks, singing it would become a painful reminder of how he had portrayed their relationship.

Before Fleetwood Mac

Nicks and Buckingham had known each other since their school days in California. Music eventually brought them together professionally as well as romantically, first in the band Fritz and later as the duo Buckingham Nicks.

Their album failed commercially, and the couple struggled financially as they attempted to build a career.

Then came Fleetwood Mac.

When Mick Fleetwood approached Buckingham about joining the band, Buckingham insisted that Nicks should come with him. In Nineteen Seventy-Five, both joined Fleetwood Mac alongside Christine McVie, John McVie and Mick Fleetwood.

The effect was immediate.

The group’s self-titled album produced songs including Rhiannon and Landslide and transformed the new line-up into major stars.

Their professional lives were taking off.

Their relationship was falling apart.

Nicks and Buckingham joined Fleetwood Mac together in Nineteen Seventy-Five, but their romantic relationship soon began to unravel.

Heartbreak Becomes Rumours

By Nineteen Seventy-Six, Fleetwood Mac had become an extraordinary collection of personal breakups.

Nicks and Buckingham were separating. John and Christine McVie’s marriage was ending. Mick Fleetwood was experiencing serious problems in his own marriage.

Rather than keeping those problems away from their work, the musicians wrote about them.

Christine McVie wrote You Make Loving Fun about a new relationship. Nicks addressed her breakup with Buckingham in Dreams. Buckingham responded with Go Your Own Way.

One particular line immediately caused trouble.

Buckingham sang that “packing up, shacking up” was all his former partner wanted to do.

Nicks strongly objected to the implication. She later described the line as untrue and something Buckingham had written out of anger.

But it stayed in the song.

Singing About Her Own Breakup

The situation became even more uncomfortable because Nicks wasn’t merely the subject of Go Your Own Way.

She had to sing on it.

Her backing vocals became part of a recording in which her former boyfriend publicly presented his version of their breakup. Once the song became a Fleetwood Mac favourite, she then had to perform it repeatedly on stage alongside him.

The emotional conflict at the heart of Rumours was therefore never safely contained inside the recording studio. Night after night, the musicians recreated songs about relationships they had actually experienced with the people standing beside them.

Fleetwood Mac turned the breakdown of their relationships into the songs that made Rumours one of the world’s biggest albums.

Stevie Nicks Writes Her Answer

Nicks had her own musical response to Buckingham.

Silver Springs was written about their relationship and was originally intended for Rumours. Ultimately, it was left off the album and appeared as the B-side of Go Your Own Way.

Its absence from Rumours became another source of frustration for Nicks.

Twenty years later, however, the song finally received an extraordinary moment in the spotlight.

During Fleetwood Mac’s Nineteen Ninety-Seven reunion performance for The Dance, Nicks sang Silver Springs while staring directly at Buckingham.

The performance transformed a song once excluded from Rumours into one of the most memorable moments of Fleetwood Mac’s later career.

The Breakup That Never Really Left the Stage

Rumours eventually became one of the best-selling albums ever made, and Go Your Own Way became one of Fleetwood Mac’s defining songs.

But its success meant that the relationship which inspired it could never completely disappear.

For audiences, the song became an exhilarating breakup anthem. For Nicks, it carried the memory of a far more complicated period in her life.

That contradiction sits at the heart of the Fleetwood Mac story.

Nicks and Buckingham couldn’t make their relationship work, but the songs they wrote about its collapse helped create one of the most successful albums in rock history.