Fleetwood Mac - Go Your Own Way

0:00Stevie Nicks: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 Hirwe. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Insurance isn't one size fits all. That's why drivers have enjoyed Progressive's Name Your Price tool for years now. With the Name Your Price tool, you tell them what you want to pay and they'll show you options that fit your budget. So whether you're picking out your first policy or just looking for something that works better for you and your family, they make it easy to see your options.

0:32Stevie Nicks:Visit progressive.com. Find a rate that works for you with the Name Your Price tool. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Thanks so much to Quince for their support. They make really well-made clothes, and their stuff has become a big part of my wardrobe. I've been touring this summer, and that can be kind of a tricky mission clothes-wise. I want to feel like myself on stage and feel good about what I'm wearing. And I also need to be comfortable while I'm traveling. So I got this short sleeve knit button up that I wore for a lot of the shows.

1:06Stevie Nicks:And I love it. I also just wore it the other day to go out to dinner. It's made of 100 % organic cotton. So it also feels great. That's the deal with Quince. They make high quality essentials that feel and look great without charging luxury prices. So elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to quince.com slash songexploder for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. It's now available in Canada too. That's quince.com slash songexploder for free shipping and 365 day returns. quince.com slash songexploder. Next week, I'm going to 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 Knicks.

1:55Stevie Nicks: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'll enjoy it, and I hope you'll come back next week to hear the Buckingham Knicks episode about Frozen Love.

2:19Stevie Nicks:Lindsay 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. 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.

2:52Go your own way

2:55Lindsey Buckingham:You've been called it another lonely day My name is Lindsey Buckingham. Stevie and I had done this album called Buckingham Knicks 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 Olsen, who had worked on both Buckingham Knicks and later would work on the Fleetwood Mac album, the first one he was playing a song from Buckingham Knicks, Frozen Love and here's this guy, Mick Fleetwood just grooving out to the song For frozen love

3:48Cry low

3:52Lindsey Buckingham: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.

4:15Lindsey Buckingham: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 were 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 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 for the album that would become Rumors.

5:01Lindsey Buckingham: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. I was just chunking away on those chords and coming up with the lyrics to go with it.

5:42Lindsey Buckingham: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. How can I ever change things that I feel? 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.

6:33Lindsey Buckingham: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, you know, you're going to 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. Tell me why everything turned around Packing up, shacking up's all you want to do Initially, the song did sound very basically like that.

7:21Lindsey Buckingham: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 really great drum pattern that I thought would work over Go Your Own Way.

8:15Lindsey Buckingham:The song is Street Fighting Man. It's going from the snare to the tom.

8:32Lindsey Buckingham: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.

9:11Lindsey Buckingham:He opens up the kick and 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.

9:29Lindsey Buckingham: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, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. 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 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. In the verse, I think we just have to hold this tension.

10:14Lindsey Buckingham: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.

10:34Lindsey Buckingham: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

11:22Lindsey Buckingham:with rumors we were trying to make something raw we wanted to use a b3 organ in a more shall we say grittier way not so much in a polished way

11:43Lindsey Buckingham:Christine played the organ 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 You can go your own way, go your own way. 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. You can go your own way, go your own way.

12:48Lindsey Buckingham:You can call it another 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. You can go your own way Go your own way The backing vocals on Go Your Own Way are very straight ahead.

13:45Lindsey Buckingham:Once the lead vocal had been done, you know, then the three of us worked out just a triad. You can call it another lonely day Christine and Stevie were the other two voices. You can go your own way. That's Stevie's... You can call it another lonely day. And that's Christine. And we work that blend to our advantage almost every time. You can go your own way. Go your own way. The acoustic guitar part on Go Your Own Way almost didn't make it on the song.

14:31Lindsey Buckingham: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. If I could, baby, I'd give you my world Open up, everything's waiting for you It was clearly the missing part. It was also, ironically, a source of some disorientation for the sense of the beat of the song.

15:34Lindsey Buckingham:Cut to months later. I was back in L.A., and I was in my car. And there was a DJ in L.A. back then whose name was B. Mitchell Reed. KFWB time on the B. Mitchell Reed show. Four after the hour of six. KFWB temperature right now. 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 going to 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.

16:06Lindsey Buckingham:He comes back on, he goes, that was the new Fleetwood 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. I said, hey, B, this is Lindsey Buckingham here. 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.

16:48Lindsey Buckingham:I was proud of what I was hearing on the radio, and that's all that mattered.

16:58Lindsey Buckingham: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.

17:26Stevie Nicks:Coming up, you'll hear how all those ideas and elements came together in the final song.

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18:25Stevie Nicks:song exploder is sponsored by distro kit if you're an independent artist distro kit is a great way to get your music distributed you get unlimited uploads and you get to keep 100 of your royalties and earnings there are more than a million artists including me who've used distro kit to get their music into all the major streaming services spotify apple music tiktok everywhere the distro kit app is now available on ios and android go to the app or play store to download it now and for 10 off your first year's membership, go to distrokid.com slash VIP slash song exploder. This episode is brought to you by booking.com, where you can find lots of great options to stay when you travel.

19:05Stevie Nicks:When I was getting married, a lot of my friends weren't able to come out for either a bachelor party or the wedding because they were in big transitional life moments of their own. But a few years later, I lured them all out to meet each other at a house that I booked out in the Palm Desert. And now it's become a little bit of a tradition. And for me, the fun of it starts with the planning and finding a place for all of us to stay. A big house with a pool where we can hang out during the day and a big TV where we can watch movies at night. It's been a couple of years since our last get together, so I'm starting to daydream about it again.

19:36Stevie Nicks:And when I look on booking.com, there are all kinds of vacation homes available in the area, just a couple hours away from LA. I just put in the dates, the location, and set the search to places with more than five bedrooms, and I've got over 30 options right away. Once somewhere gets into your head, booking.com is a super easy way to get there. Go on, book that trip. It's easy. Booking.com, booking.ya. And now, here's Go Your Own Way by Fleetwood Mac in its entirety.

20:22Lindsey Buckingham:If I could, baby, I'd give you my word How can I, when you won't take it from me You can go your own way Go your own way You can call it another lonely day You can go your own way Go your own way Tell me why Everything turned around Packing up Shacking up's all you wanna do If I could Baby, I'd give you my world Open up, everything's waiting for you You can go your own way Go your own way You can call it another lonely day You can go your own way Go your own way

21:56guitar solo

22:17Lindsey Buckingham:Go your own way Go your own way You can call it another lonely day Not a lonely You can go your own way Go your own way You can call it another lonely day

22:48Thank you.

23:44Stevie Nicks:Visit songexploder.net for more on Lindsay Buckingham. and Fleetwood Mac, including a link to buy or stream Go Your Own Way. Lindsay Buckingham has a deluxe album spanning his career called Solo Anthology, The Best of Lindsay 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 Smith. The reissue of this episode was produced by me and Mary Dolan, with production assistance from Tiger Biscop. The episode artwork is by Carlos Lerma, and I made the show's theme music and logo.