Lindsey Buckingham wrote "Go Your Own Way" about Stevie Nicks, his former romantic partner and current bandmate, during the same Rumours sessions that produced Nicks's own answer song, "Dreams" — Nicks has called the two "twin songs," written by two people about the same relationship from opposite sides of it. Buckingham arrived at rehearsals with the song's arrangement already largely worked out, demoing its rhythmic idea, according to Mick Fleetwood, by hitting Kleenex boxes.

What you're hearing

The drum pattern is the song's engine — a constant, driving eighth-note bassline underneath, and tom fills that land in unusual, slightly off-center places rather than settling into a conventional rock backbeat. It doesn't groove the way most radio rock did in 1976; it lurches forward with a kind of barely-contained urgency that matches Buckingham's raw, half-shouted vocal delivery. Producer Ken Caillat has described the earliest version of the song, cut live in the room, as sounding so non-musical he genuinely wasn't sure anything usable would come from it.

A groove borrowed, then lost in translation

The specific inspiration traces to a car ride into the studio, where Buckingham and co-producer Richard Dashut got talking about how much they admired the syncopated tom fills Charlie Watts played on the Rolling Stones' "Street Fighting Man." Buckingham decided a similar feel would suit his new song and tried to explain it to Fleetwood directly, physically acting out air-drum fills in the control room while Caillat watched. Fleetwood has been characteristically self-deprecating about what happened next: "I'm dyslexically connected to drum parts," he told Q magazine, "meaning that I truly don't know how to repeat anything — my playing tends to be this funny random stuff that luckily people like." He wasn't able to precisely replicate Watts's pattern. What he played instead — his own "mutated interpretation," in his words — became the song's actual rhythmic identity.

The rest of the track was built up around that drum foundation over roughly four months, tracked across three different studios: the Record Plant in Sausalito, Wally Heider Studios in Los Angeles, and Criteria Studios in Miami. John McVie's original bassline leaned country in feel; Buckingham had him strip it down for the verses while allowing more into the choruses. The guitar solo gave the team the most trouble — after struggling to capture one satisfying take, Caillat ultimately assembled the solo that made the final record by piecing together phrases from six or more separate performances.

How it's done

Letting a borrowed idea mutate through an imperfect interpreter, componentized:

DESCRIBE THE FEEL, NOT THE EXACT PART: Buckingham didn't hand Fleetwood a transcription of Watts's drum part — he communicated an impression of it, physically and verbally, leaving room for Fleetwood's own instincts to fill the gap DON'T FORCE A CORRECTION WHEN THE "MISTAKE" STILL WORKS: once it was clear Fleetwood wasn't playing what Buckingham originally had in mind, nobody pushed to correct it back toward the Rolling Stones original — the divergence itself became the song's identity TREAT A ROUGH, "NON-MUSICAL" FIRST PASS AS RAW MATERIAL, NOT A FAILURE: Caillat's own initial reaction to the earliest take was genuine uncertainty — the production process that followed was about building the track UP from something unpolished, not fixing it ASSEMBLE THE HARDEST PART FROM MANY ATTEMPTS: rather than chasing one perfect guitar solo take, Caillat treated the solo as an editing problem — selecting and combining the strongest phrases from six-plus performances into one

The transferable lesson: handing a reference to a collaborator who can't exactly reproduce it isn't necessarily a loss — the specific way they get it "wrong" can become more distinctive and more memorable than a faithful copy ever would have been.

The Moment

Lindsey Buckingham beats out the song's rhythm on empty Kleenex boxes to demo it for the band — the crude, percussive sound of cardboard becoming, eventually, one of rock's most studied drum parts.

What it did

Released in December 1976 as the first single from Rumours, "Go Your Own Way" reached No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 — a strong showing, though it never matched "Dreams," which became Fleetwood Mac's only US No. 1 single. Decades later, Fleetwood has continued to name it as one of his favorites to perform live specifically for the physical release it gives him behind the kit — "I get to kick the hell out of my drums," he's said. A song built from a half-understood reference, translated through a self-described inability to repeat anything precisely, became one of the most recognizable rhythmic signatures in the entire Fleetwood Mac catalog.

Sources & further listening

  1. Mick Fleetwood's account of the drum part's origin, via Q magazine and American Songwriter.
  2. Producer Ken Caillat's memoir Making Rumours: The Inside Story of the Classic Fleetwood Mac Album.
  3. Core listening: "Go Your Own Way," "Dreams," "The Chain."