Fleetwood Mac - Go Your Own Way

Next week, I’m going to be publishing an episode with Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham about the making of the song “Frozen Love,” from their only album as the duo Buckingham Nicks. That song is what eventually led to them joining Fleetwood Mac. So in anticipation of next week’s episode, I thought it would be great to go back seven years and revisit this Fleetwood Mac episode from 2018, about the making of “Go Your Own Way.” I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you’ll come back to hear the Buckingham Nicks episode. - Lindsey Buckingham is a singer-songwriter, a guitarist, and a producer. In 1974, he joined the band Fleetwood Mac, along with Stevie Nicks, his girlfriend at the time. A few year later, in 1977, Fleetwood Mac released the album Rumours, which would go on to sell over 40 million copies and become the eighth highest-selling album in history. In this episode, Lindsey Buckingham breaks down “Go Your Own Way," a song he wrote for that album about his relationship with Stevie Nicks. For more, visit songexploder.net/fleetwood-mac http://songexploder.net/fleetwood-mac.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Hrishikesh Hirway?

  You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and, piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirway.

• 0:11Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I'm going to be on tour, playing some shows this fall. I'm going to be in London on Wednesday, November 18th. I'm going to be performing solo at Rough Trade Records on Denmark Street, and I'm going to be in conversation about my music moderated by one of my favorite actors and writers, Matthew Bainton. And a ticket to the show also gets you a copy of my album on vinyl or CD. And in December, I'm going to be on tour supporting S. Carrie. We're going to be playing a bunch of shows in the Northeast US. So I hope to see you in one of those places. You can find all the details and get links to tickets at songexploder.net/live. That's songexploder.net/live.

• 0:55Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 1:39Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 1:56Hrishikesh Hirway?

  This episode is sponsored by LinkedIn. Anyone who's ever had to spend money on marketing knows how tricky it can be to feel like you've spent that money wisely. Well, with LinkedIn Ads, you can be sure that you'll get a great return on your investment. You can target your campaigns by company, industry, job title, and more. Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn Ads and get a $250 credit for the next one. Just go to LinkedIn.com/songexploder. That's LinkedIn.com/songexploder. Terms and conditions apply. Next week, I'm going to be publishing an episode with Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham about the making of their song "Frozen Love" from their only album as the duo Buckingham Nicks.

• 2:41Hrishikesh Hirway?

  That's a song that eventually led to them joining Fleetwood Mac. So in anticipation of next week's episode, I thought this week it would be great to go back seven years and revisit the Fleetwood Mac episode that I made in 2018, episode 150, about the making of "Go Your Own Way." I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you'll come back next week to hear the Buckingham Nicks episode about "Frozen Love." Lindsey Buckingham is a singer-songwriter, a guitarist, and a producer. In 1974, he joined the band Fleetwood Mac, along with Stevie Nicks, his girlfriend at the time. A few years later, in 1977, Fleetwood Mac released the album "Rumors," which would go on to sell over 40 million copies and become the eighth-highest-selling album in history.

• 3:25Hrishikesh Hirway?

  In this episode, Lindsey Buckingham breaks down "Go Your Own Way," a song that he wrote for that album about his relationship with Stevie Nicks.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  My name is Lindsey Buckingham. Stevie and I had done this album called Buckingham Nicks, and it had sort of made a little dent, but, you know, nothing to speak of. And one day, we were working on new material, Stevie and I, at Sound City. We were in the small studio in the back, and I went into Studio A, where Keith Olson, who had worked on both Buckingham Nicks and later would work on the Fleetwood Mac album, the first one. He was playing a song from Buckingham Nicks, "Frozen Love." And here's this guy, Mick Fleetwood, just grooving out to the song.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  I said hello and went back to work. And a couple of weeks later, Mick called and said, "Well, our guitar player, Bob Welch, is leaving. Would you like to join Fleetwood Mac?" And I said, "Well, I'm not sure. But, you know, if I do join, you'd have to take my girlfriend, too."

• 5:02Speaker 01

  And so Stevie and I joined Fleetwood Mac in 74. That first album that we did came out in 75. And it had actually done very well, much better than anyone could have predicted. And we had been on the road touring, and we're talking about beginning to prepare for our second album. We had this idea to take a break from the road and to rent a house for like a week or so in Florida and start working on some material for the album we know we're going to have to start in a few months. The very first thing that got presented was "Go Your Own Way." That was the first song that I wrote

• 5:45Speaker 01

  for the album that would become Rumors. And really, it was the beginning of my having a dialogue with Stevie, who had been my lover and a musical partner pretty much through the time that the first album was made. And we were sort of on again, off again, on again, off again. But by the time we got to Rumors, she had sort of split. And "Go Your Own Way" was written almost as a stream of consciousness.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  I was just chunking away on those chords and coming up with the lyrics to go with it.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  If you start with the first lyric, "loving you isn't the right thing to do," it sounds like you're beginning a conversation with someone. There was nothing about it that was thought out. It was just the raw expression of the emotion behind the song.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  I sort of was coming to terms with the fact that I may not be over this person, and at the same time, I'm aware that I've got to accept what's happened and move on. I don't think there was ever any worry in my mind about trying to mask who I might have been talking about. And really, in the case of Fleetwood Mac, everything was so written on the sleeve, so to speak. I had broken up with Stevie at that point. John and Christine McVie, who had been married, had broken up. Three of those people were writers and were writing to each other. So, I mean, usually if you break up with somebody and you want closure,

• 7:34Speaker 01

  you know, you're gonna not see them for a long time, or maybe ever. And so, there was this exercise of the making of rumors especially, where you had to kind of compartmentalize everything. Writing the song and singing it required me to do that.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  Initially, the song did sound very basically like that. I had not really thought about how to orchestrate it, per se. Most of that was done later, when we actually got in the studio.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  Mick had this bright idea of getting out of Los Angeles, almost an extension of the Florida idea, I suppose. Let's make it a working vacation or something. So, we went up to Sausalito. There was a record plant, recording studio up there. We rented a couple of places to live. And, you know, again, that was sort of my final nail in the coffin with Stevie, because I thought maybe she and I would find a place together, and she was not into doing that. But we settled in in Sausalito. And there was a song by The Rolling Stones that had a really great drum pattern that I thought would work over "Go Your Own Way." The song is "Street Fighting Man."

• 9:06Speaker 01

  It's going from the snare to the tom.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  I said, "Mick, I think this pattern going from snare to tom, snare to tom, not in the chorus, but in the verses, would be just great." But Mick is someone who, he's playing strictly from the heart and from the gut. And as such, he just has to do what feels right to him. So when I showed him the pattern, he couldn't actually play it. And finally, I'm just saying to him, "Look, I mean, is there a way you can paraphrase that to make it your own?" Which he does.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  He opens up the kick and it keeps a 4/4 going on it. And instead of going from snare to tom, which felt wrong to him, he's playing the tom across the beat and letting the kick drum be the middle beat.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  Then it came to the bass. That was an interesting exercise for me as well because John McVie is not someone who enjoys playing eighth-note bass. In fact, he's pretty averse to doing it. We started tracking it and he was playing like a back-and-forth ding-dicky ding-dicky thing. And it was making the song sound sort of country. And I was like, "I know you don't like this, but could you play an eighth note?" And he was... He says, "Well, you're playing eighth notes." So I said, "Yeah, but that's really the point, you know? We don't want this to get too ornate.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  In the verse, I think we just have to hold this tension where everyone's kind of holding it in, holding back, waiting for that chorus to open up." Where, of course, John came up with that great melody line.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  I'm playing all the guitars. The objective was to try to get a few guitars to meld and sound like just one very extraordinary sounding guitar. There is something that's dirtier and has less transience and less clarity. And then there's something else which is going to be a little clean on its own, which might be a little anemic if you were only using that, but then you put them together. And that's just a technique of having a little bit richer landscape to work with.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  With "Rumors," we were trying to make something rawer. We wanted to use a B3 organ in a more, shall we say, grittier way, not so much in a polished way.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  Christine played the organ.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  It was clearly a guitar song. And I was not wanting her piano textures and her weaving around that she could do so beautifully. I just wanted to keep it very direct.

• 12:51Speaker 02

  You can go your own way. Go your own way. You can call it another lonely day.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  There's a lot of oomph behind the lead vocal in "Go Your Own Way" because there was a lot of resolve behind the subject matter. I was feeling a lot of that subject matter as being something I was living. And so it was a bit cathartic to get that vocal out. It was a way of exercising certain hurts.

• 13:28Speaker 02

  You can go your own way. Go your own way. You can call it another lonely day.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  As a kid, Stevie was uprooted repeatedly from her environment because her dad changed jobs and changed cities, probably six or seven times while she was growing up. But it also set kind of a life rhythm for her. I think she was uncomfortable having things go on too long. And so there's a little bit of that observation in the chorus. "You can go your own way, but you can call it another lonely day." Because what happens ultimately is that you will continually find yourself being alone rather than pushing through to the next level with a particular situation.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  The backing vocals on "Go Your Own Way" are very straight ahead. Once the lead vocal had been done, you know, then the three of us worked out just a triad. Christine and Stevie were the other two voices. That's Stevie's. And that's Christine. And we worked that blend to our advantage almost every time.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  The acoustic guitar part on "Go Your Own Way" almost didn't make it on the song.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  It was not something that I had preconceived going in. And yet, as we lived with the track and as more things went on, I felt like there was something in the area of the counterpoint to the verse that was missing. The verse vocals were sort of timed in a strange way. And I think that was what made me feel I needed something on the other side that was equally timed strangely to counterbalance as a call and response. Otherwise, the verse vocal felt like it was dangling a little.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  It was clearly the missing part. It was also ironically a source of some disorientation for the sense of the beat of the song.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  Cut to months later. I was back in LA and I was in my car. And there was a DJ in LA back then, whose name was B. Mitchell Reed.

• 16:32Speaker 03

  KFWB time on the B. Mitchell Reed Show, 4 after the hour of 6. KFWB temperature right now.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  I was listening to him in the car and he says, "Hey, I've got the new Fleetwood Mac single for you now. I'm gonna put that on right now." And he plays it and I'm sitting there grooving to it in the car. Yeah, first time I've heard it on the radio.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  He comes back on and goes, "That was the new Fleetwood Mac single." He takes a beat. He goes, "I don't know about that one."

• 17:01Speaker 01

  And I was able to call up the station in that moment, after hearing that, and be put through to B. Mitchell Reed while a song was on. And, you know, he got on the phone. I said, "Hey, B, this is Lindsey Buckingham here." He goes, "Oh, hi, Lindsey." "You just played my song, 'Go Your Own Way,' and you said you weren't sure about it. What didn't you like about it?" He's saying, "Well, you know, I couldn't find the beat." I went, "Oh, okay." I mean, that was an element to "Go Your Own Way," but obviously it didn't make any difference in the long run. I was proud of what I was hearing on the radio. And that's all that mattered.

• 17:45Speaker 01

  "Go Your Own Way" really was the first song that kind of expressed acceptance of the fact that there was a bigger picture beyond my own needs and beyond our issues as two people. Our sensibilities were so disparate. It was just a very unlikely group of people to end up in the same band. And yet, it was those differences that added up to something greater than the sum of the parts.

• 18:12Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Coming up, you'll hear how all those ideas and elements came together in the final song. Song Exploder is sponsored by DistroKid. If you're an independent artist, DistroKid is now offering a new way to start selling merch without dealing with inventory or running an online store. DistroKid Direct automatically turns your existing album artwork into merch products like shirts and hoodies, posters, totes, all kinds of things. And you choose what to sell, you set your prices, you connect PayPal, and DistroKid handles the printing, the shipping, and the customer support. They don't take a commission, so you keep 100% of your merch sales. It's a simple way to add another revenue stream to your music career without adding more work to your plate.

• 18:57Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Artists can learn more and launch a merch store at distrokid.com/direct. This year, my wife and I are hosting Thanksgiving at our house. And in anticipation of that, I've already started some of the planning. And one of the things that I realized I wanted to have was some kind of small but elegant serving tray that I could put snacks and stuff on while we're just hanging out before the meal starts. So I turned to Wayfair, and I found the perfect thing: these small wooden plates made from acacia. They match the rest of the vibe of my house, and I'm going to be using them even when it's not Thanksgiving. For all things hosting, Wayfair delivers high-quality, customer-trusted products for your home, so you can host and celebrate without the stress.

• 19:41Hrishikesh Hirway?

  If you're hosting for any of the many holidays coming up, take a look at the website to browse for ideas or look for something very specific. You can use filters and reviews and photos from other customers to help you find the perfect thing. When you're refreshing your home this holiday season, Wayfair delivers exactly what you need. Head to wayfair.com to shop all things home. That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R dot com.

• 20:06Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Thanks to Reddit for sponsoring Song Exploder. One of the best parts of being a music fan is finding other people who love the same music that you do. And one of the things I love about Reddit is that there are so many different places to find that kind of community. If you want to nerd out about shoegaze, there are literally thousands of users on the r/shoegaze subreddit. Or if you're into 90s hip-hop, or opera, or vaporwave, there are subreddits for all of that. Over on r/indieheads, there are hundreds of thousands of indie music fans. And for me, that subreddit is one of the main hubs on the internet to find out about new music. And it's always really exciting to see anyone on Reddit discussing a Song Exploder episode

• 20:51Hrishikesh Hirway?

  by their favorite band. Every song has a story, and on Reddit, fans are the ones telling that story. Find the details, the deep cuts, and a Reddit community that loves the music as much as you do. Download the Reddit app today. And now, here's "Go Your Own Way" by Fleetwood Mac in its entirety.

• 21:15Speaker 04

  Loving you isn't the right thing to do.

• 21:22Speaker 04

  How can I ever change things that I feel?

• 21:29Speaker 04

  If I could, baby, I'd give you my world. How can I when you won't take it from me?

• 21:43Speaker 02

  You can go your own way.

• 21:47Speaker 04

  Go your own way.

• 21:51Speaker 02

  You've been calling another lonely day.

• 21:58Speaker 02

  You can go your own way.

• 22:02Speaker 04

  Go your own way. Tell me why everything turned around?

• 22:11Speaker 04

  Packing up, checking up, so you won't do.

• 22:18Speaker 02

  If I could, baby, I'd give you my world. Open up, everything's waiting for you.

• 22:33Speaker 02

  You can go your own way, go your own way. You can call it another lonely day.

• 22:47Speaker 02

  You can go your own way, go your own way.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  You can go your own way, go your own way. You can call it another lonely day, another lonely day. You can go your own way, go your own way. You can call it another lonely day.

• 24:50Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Visit songexploder.net for more on Lindsey Buckingham and Fleetwood Mac, including a link to buy or stream Go Your Own Way. Lindsey Buckingham has a deluxe album spanning his career called Solo Anthology: The Best of Lindsey Buckingham, and I've got a link to that up on the site as well.

• 25:06Hrishikesh Hirway?

  This episode was originally produced by me and Christian Koons, with booking help from Mac Burris and music clearance by Kathleen Smith. The reissue of this episode was produced by me and Mary Dolan, with production assistance from Tiger Biscuit. The episode artwork is by Carlos Lerma, and I made the show's theme music and logo. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at radiotopia.fm. If you'd like to hear more from me, you can subscribe to my newsletter, which you can find on the Song Exploder website. You can also get a Song Exploder shirt at songexploder.net/shirt. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirway. Thanks for listening.

• 25:55Speaker 02

  Radiotopia.

• 25:58Speaker 02

  From PRX.