Fleetwood Mac - Go Your Own Way

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 Rishikesh Hirway. Next week, I'm gonna be publishing an episode with Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham about the making of their song Frozen Love from their only album as the duo Buckingham Nick.

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 Knicks episode about frozen love.

Lindsay Buckingham is a singer songwriter, a guitarist, and a producer. In 1974, he joined the band Fleetwood Mac, along with Stevie Nix, 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. In this episode, Lindsey Buckingham breaks down Go Your Own Way, the song that he wrote for that album about his relationship with Stevie.

My name is Lindsay Buckingham. Stevie and I had done this album th called Buckingham Nicks and it had sort of made a little dent, but, you know, nothing to speak of. And um One day we were working on new materials, Stevie and I at Sound City We were in the small studio in the back and I went into studio A where Keith Olsen, who had worked on both Buckingham Nick's and later would work on the Fleetwood Mac album, the first one, he was playing a song from Buckingham Nick.

Frozen Love. And here's this guy, Mick Fleetwood, just grooving out to the song. 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 would you like to join Cleawood Mag? And I said, Well, I'm not sure I but you know, if I do join you'd have to take my girlfriend too.

And so Stevie and I joined Fleetwood Mac in seventy four. That first album that we did came out in seventy five. 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 a 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 gonna 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 for the album that would become rumors. and really 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.

I was just chunking away on those chords and coming up with the lyrics to go with it. 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. 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, I mean Everything was so written on the sleeve, so to speak. I had broken up with Stevie at that point. John and Christine McVeigh, 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, 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.

Everything to her 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. 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 a really great drum pattern that I thought would work over Go Your Own Way. The song is Street Fighter.

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 was He opens up the kick and keeps a four four going. And instead of going from snare to Tom, which felt like He's playing the Tom across the beach. And letting the kit drum be the middle of the Then it came to the base.

That was an interesting exercise for me as well because John McVeigh is not someone who enjoys playing eighth note bass. In fact, he's pretty averse to doing it. We started tracking it and he s was playing like a back and forth ding deeki ding dee thing. And it was making the song sound sort of country and I was like, I know you don't like this, but w could you play an eighth note? And he was he says, Well you're playing eighth notes

So I said, Well yeah, but that's really the point, you know. We don't want this to get too ornate. 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 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 gonna 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. With rumors we were trying to make something rawer. We wanted to use a B three organ in a more, shall we say, grittier way, not so much in a polished way.

Christine played the organ. It's 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.

You can call it another lonely day. 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 and You can go, YAA oh Go your own way You can call it a no Oh the lonely day.

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.

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 work that blend to our advantage almost every time. The acoustic guitar part on Go Your Own Way almost didn't make it on the song. 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.

It was clearly the missing part. It was also ironically a source of some disorientation for the sense of the beat of the song. Cut two 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. Okay. AFWB time and the B. Mitchell Reed show, four after the hour.

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. He comes back on and goes, that was the new Flavored Mac single. He takes a beat. He goes, I don't know about that one. And I was able to call up the station in that moment after hearing that and be put through to be Mitchell Reed.

while a song was on. And, you know, he got on the phone and said, Hey B, this is Lindsay Buckingham here. He oh hi Lindsay. You just played my song, Go Your Wrong Way, and you said you weren't sure about it. What why what didn't you like about it? He's saying, Well, you know, I couldn't find the beat. I mean 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.

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. Coming up, you'll hear how all those ideas and elements came together in the final song.

I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length, and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishikesh Herway. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists.

And it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast. Like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabond, Fenn Lilly, and the producer Phil Weinrobe. I'm gonna be on tour playing in cities across the US starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing.

Will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city, like Adam Scott. Samine Nosrat, Jason Manzucas, Josh Molina, Min Jin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all gonna be my conversation partners on stage. And then I'll play with my band. In the last hour of light, and the first couple songs are out now, you can listen to the book.

Get tickets for the shows on my website, rishices.co, or just go to songeploder.net slash That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. And now, here's Go Your Own Way by Fleetwood Mac in its entirety. 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.

This episode was originally produced by me and Christian Koons, with booking help from Mac Burris and music clearance by Kathleen. The reissue of this episode was produced by me and Mary Dolan, with production assistance from Tiger Biscup. 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 slash shirt. I'm Rishikesh Herway. Thanks for listening.