In the summer of 1974, Mick Fleetwood flew to Los Angeles on a mission that would transform his band’s commercial trajectory and simultaneously plant the seeds of a personal and professional drama that would consume the following three years. He was looking for a recording studio. What he found, in a record store on Sunset Boulevard, was a copy of an album called Buckingham Nicks — a debut record by a young couple, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, that had been released to commercial indifference and critical near-silence in 1973 and that was already headed toward deletion from the catalog.
Fleetwood listened to the album and heard, specifically and immediately, a guitarist whose style would complement the space left by the recent departure of guitarist Bob Welch. He tracked down Buckingham and invited him to join Fleetwood Mac. Buckingham agreed, on the condition that Nicks came too. Fleetwood agreed. Neither party fully understood what they were agreeing to.
What Fleetwood was importing into his band were two people who were romantically involved, professionally intertwined, and carrying between them a dynamic of love and resentment and creative competition that had been building since they met as teenagers in California and that the pressure of Fleetwood Mac’s sudden, enormous commercial success in 1975 and 1976 would accelerate to a breaking point. By the time Rumours was being recorded in 1976 and 1977, Buckingham and Nicks had ended their relationship in a manner that the music documents with uncomfortable specificity. Christine and John McVie’s marriage was also disintegrating. Mick Fleetwood’s marriage was collapsing.
The specific betrayal at the center of the Rumours story — the one that nearly ended the band before the album was finished — involves not one of the romantic dissolutions but a decision Buckingham made during recording that Nicks experienced as a profound violation of the creative trust between them.
Buckingham had written Go Your Own Way as a direct address to Nicks — a song that accused her, in terms she has consistently disputed, of behaviors she found both inaccurate and humiliating. He did not consult her before bringing it to the band. He did not warn her what the song said. She heard the lyric for the first time in the studio, in front of the rest of the band, in the professional environment that made any emotional response immediately visible to everyone present.
And then he asked her to sing backup on it.
Nicks has said, in interviews across decades, that singing harmony on a song that publicly accused her of things she denied doing was the hardest professional thing she ever did — that she begged not to have to perform it and was overruled, told by Fleetwood and the production team that the song was too good to leave off the album and that her harmony was essential to the arrangement. She sang it. Every night on tour, for years, she sang backup on a song about herself.
Rumours sold forty million copies and became one of the best-selling albums in history. The band continued performing. The personal damage was never fully repaired. Buckingham was fired from the band in 2018 following what has been described as a confrontation with Nicks — forty-two years after the recording of Go Your Own Way, some wounds apparently still open.