Fleetwood Mac – Go Your Own Way

Beating His Guitar And Screaming While Stevie Wanted The Line Removed

Released in December 1976 as the first single from Rumours, “Go Your Own Way” peaked at number ten on the Billboard Hot 100 on March 12, 1977, holding that position for two weeks. The song became Fleetwood Mac’s first top ten American hit and spent 11 weeks in the top forty. Lindsey Buckingham wrote it at a rented house in Florida between tour legs, and producer Ken Caillat recalled Buckingham was beating his acoustic guitar as hard as he could and screaming his lungs out, thinking it sounded so non-musical. Stevie Nicks wanted Buckingham to remove the line about packing up and shacking up, insisting she never did that when they were together, but he refused. Every time those words came onstage, she wanted to go over and kill him.

The track helped launch Rumours to unprecedented success, with advance orders topping 800,000 copies, the largest in Warner Brothers history at that time. The album reached number one on April 2, 1977, and stayed there for 31 non-consecutive weeks, eventually selling over 40 million copies worldwide and earning 21 times platinum certification. In the UK, the single peaked at number 38 initially but has since been certified double platinum with over 1.2 million sales and streaming equivalents. The song won a Grammy nomination for Best Vocal Arrangement in 1978 but lost to Eagles’ “New Kid in Town”. Rolling Stone ranked it number 120 on their 2010 list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, later re-ranking it to number 401 in 2021, while also placing it second on their list of the 50 greatest Fleetwood Mac songs.

Buckingham conceived the song as a message to his bandmate and longtime girlfriend Stevie Nicks about their breakup, with Nicks later telling Q magazine it was certainly a message within a song and not a very nice one at that. The recording sessions for Rumours took place while both the Buckingham-Nicks relationship and the marriage of John and Christine McVie were ending, creating intense tension that producers Richard Dashut and Ken Caillat channeled into the music. Nicks got equal time on the album with “Dreams”, her response to Buckingham, telling him what would happen when she went her own way. Nicks told Mojo magazine they were twin songs, the same song written by two people about the same relationship. Buckingham wrote it first, presenting it as the initial track for the Rumours album sessions.

Recording took place across three separate studios between February and August 1976, starting at the Record Plant in Sausalito before moving to Wally Heider’s in Los Angeles, then to Sound City and Criteria Studios in Miami. None of the instruments were recorded live together, instead completed through overdubs over four months. Mick Fleetwood’s distinctive and complex drum pattern became one of the most challenging parts, with LA radio DJ B. Mitchel Reed telling listeners he didn’t know about that one and later informing Buckingham he had trouble finding beat one. Buckingham worked on guitar parts at Criteria, filling the last available track before wanting to redo something, creating additional studio tension. The final mixing took place at Producers Workshop on Hollywood Boulevard on a custom-built transformerless board, with more vocals added at Sound City and the Record Plant in LA.

“Go Your Own Way” appeared on Rumours, released February 4, 1977, which won Album of the Year at the 1978 Grammys and was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2003. The album was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry in 2017. The single was backed with “Silver Springs”, another Nicks composition about their relationship that became a fan favorite despite being left off the album. The song appeared alongside three other top ten hits from Rumours including “Dreams” at number one, “Don’t Stop” at number three, and “You Make Loving Fun” at number nine. Rumours sold ten million copies within its first month and remained on the Billboard 200 for 97 weeks, with 55 of those in the top forty.

The song has been covered extensively, with The Cranberries recording it for 2002’s The Complete Sessions, Wilson Phillips reaching number 13 on the Adult Contemporary chart with their 2004 version, and Lea Michele performing it on Glee’s 2011 Rumours episode, peaking at number 45 in the US. The track appeared in numerous films and commercials, experiencing renewed popularity when Rumours re-entered the Billboard 200 top ten in October 2020 after a viral TikTok video and again in May 2011 following the Glee episode. The song became a staple of Fleetwood Mac’s live shows for decades, with the band encouraging its transformation into a singalong stadium stomper with no hint of the resentment that fueled it.

“Go Your Own Way” remains Fleetwood Mac’s signature song and proof that devastation leads to writing good things. The track that started with Buckingham beating his guitar and screaming while Stevie wanted him to remove the offending line became the only Fleetwood Mac song on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll list. Nicks later acknowledged that every time she heard those words about packing up and shacking up, it was like Buckingham saying he would make her suffer for leaving him, and she did suffer. The song proved that sometimes the angriest messages wrapped in beautiful pop melodies and exquisite vocal harmonies become the most enduring, and that working through breakups while trapped in a band together can produce something that lasts far longer than the relationships that inspired it.