In 1976, Lindsey Buckingham sat at a piano in a California studio and worked out the harmonies for “Dreams,” a song Stevie Nicks had written about the end of their relationship. A year later it was the only single Fleetwood Mac ever took to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Buckingham, meanwhile, had written his own song about the same breakup, “Go Your Own Way,” and Nicks sang harmony on it. For most of the next four decades, the two of them stood on the same stages and sang both.
Two people, one band, one breakup
Buckingham and Nicks had known each other since their high school days in the Bay Area. They joined Fleetwood Mac together at the end of 1974, and the band’s 1975 album turned them into stars almost overnight. By the time the group gathered at the Record Plant in Sausalito in February 1976 to begin Rumours, their eight-year relationship was over.
They were not the only ones. John and Christine McVie were separating, and Mick Fleetwood’s marriage was coming apart. Nobody left. They kept showing up to the same windowless studio and turning what was happening to them into songs.
Buckingham later described how they managed it.
We had to go through this elaborate exercise of denial.
Personal feelings, as he put it, were kept in one corner of the room so the work could go on in the rest of it.
The song he brought first
“Go Your Own Way” came before the Sausalito sessions. Buckingham wrote it in a house the band rented in Florida between legs of the tour behind their 1975 album. Mick Fleetwood remembered the place as having a bad feeling about it, as if it were haunted. Buckingham said the song came out as a stream of consciousness, with nothing thought out, and he sang placeholder notes where the words were not finished yet. It was the first song he presented for the new album.
Producer Ken Caillat was not sure about it at first. He recalled Buckingham pounding his acoustic guitar as hard as he could and singing at the top of his lungs. The track was built over about four months in three studios.
One line in the song suggested that Nicks was moving on with other men. She asked him to take it out. She said it was not true, and that he knew it. Buckingham refused. Fleetwood later remembered the argument in the studio, with Nicks feeling the line was unfair and Buckingham feeling strongly that it should stay. It stayed, and Nicks sang the harmony on the chorus with Christine McVie.
Warner Bros. released “Go Your Own Way” as the first single on December 20, 1976, ahead of the album. On the other side was “Silver Springs,” Nicks’s own song about Buckingham, which had been cut from Rumours. “Go Your Own Way” reached No. 10 on the Hot 100 in March 1977, the band’s first American top ten hit.
Ten minutes in Sly Stone’s room
Nicks wrote her answer in Sausalito, on a day she was not needed in the main studio. She carried a Fender Rhodes down the hall to a room that had been built for Sly Stone of Sly and the Family Stone. It was decorated in black and red, with a sunken pit in the middle and a big black velvet bed hung with drapes. She sat on the bed with the keyboard in front of her, found a drum pattern, switched on a small cassette player and wrote “Dreams” in about ten minutes.
The band was not excited. Christine McVie first described it as three chords and one note in the left hand, and called it boring. Nicks pleaded with them to record it, and they cut a basic track the next day. Two things from that first session survived onto the record: Fleetwood’s drum track and Nicks’s guide vocal. She recorded ten different lead vocals, but the band kept the original with a few lines patched in, because nothing else matched the feel.
The man who arranged her goodbye
The person who turned those three chords into a record was Buckingham. McVie credited him with building three distinct sections out of the same few chords, and that was what changed her mind about the song.
He also worked out the chorus harmonies. Buckingham played the notes on the piano while Nicks and McVie stood around it, then the three of them doubled their parts. His guitars were spread across the stereo field so they seemed to move from one side to the other.
“Dreams” was released in March 1977. On June 18, 1977, it reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and held the spot for one week. It became the band’s first gold single in America. No other Fleetwood Mac song, before or since, has reached the top of that chart.
Singing them every night
Then the band took Rumours on the road. On the 1977 tour, “Go Your Own Way” was played more than 100 times, with Nicks singing harmony on it night after night. In a 1997 interview with Rolling Stone, she was blunt about how that felt.
Every time those words would come onstage, I wanted to go over and kill him.
She said he knew it and pushed her buttons with it. Years later, she called “Dreams” and “Go Your Own Way” twin songs, the same relationship told by two different people.
Buckingham left the band in 1987 and returned in 1997, and both songs went back into the show. He was dismissed in 2018. After years apart, the two began speaking again around the 2025 reissue of their 1973 album, Buckingham Nicks, the record they made together before any of this began.