Go Your Own Way

Lindsey Buckingham wrote it about Stevie Nicks, and Stevie Nicks sang harmony on it.

They were still in the same band when he wrote it. Still sharing the stages, the studios, the long days of being professional while it came apart between them.

“Go Your Own Way” is Buckingham’s kiss-off to Nicks. He didn’t just want her gone. He wanted her voice on the chorus that said so. And her voice is on it. She showed up to the session and sang the harmonies on a song written to wound her, because that was the work and the work got done.

The song doesn’t sound soft, whatever shelf the record store filed it under. Buckingham’s guitar is aggressive in a way the band rarely reached for, those power chords pushing against Mick Fleetwood’s drums, building into a chorus that lands like something breaking loose. It is anger held inside a pop song, and the holding is what gives it the force.

Loving you isn’t the right thing to do.

That is the first line. It does not say I don’t love you anymore, and it does not say we aren’t right for each other. It says loving you is wrong. A verdict, handed down in the calm voice of a man who has already decided.

Rumours is the most successful album ever made about people who couldn’t stand each other. Every member of the band was inside a collapse of their own, and instead of hiding it they put all of it on the tape. “Go Your Own Way” is the angriest song there, the one where the surface drops and you see the actual damage.

Nicks hated the line about packing up and shacking up. She thought it was unfair, a cheap shot at her. She was right, and it didn’t matter.

He wrote it about her. She sang it back to him, in tune, in front of everyone.