The Iconic Fleetwood Mac Lyric Stevie Nicks Said Lindsey Buckingham Took the Wrong Way
Even musicians as famous and successful as Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham deal with the all-too-ordinary problem of navigating misunderstandings during romantic rows, as one of the band’s iconic songs, “Dreams,” demonstrates. The career-defining track from Rumours was one of many songs on the album that pertained to relationships within the band, including Buckingham and Nicks’ tumultuous breakup.
Stevie Nicks Wrote This Song for Lindsey Buckingham
Fleetwood Mac’s entire post-1975 discography is an excellent example of transforming real-life scenarios and relationships into classic rock hits. Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham were both prolific writers who contributed nearly all of the songs on the band’s seminal 1977 album Rumours. (The former folk-rock duo’s first album with the band from 1975 was about half of Nicks’ and Buckingham’s compositions.)
Because Buckingham and Nicks were also going through a tempestuous breakup, many of the songs on Rumours have to do with interpersonal drama: “Dreams,” “Never Going Back Again,” “Go Your Own Way,” and “I Don’t Want to Know,” to name a few. Some songs ruffled feathers more than others. As Nicks explained in a late 1980s interview, “Well, ‘Dreams’ was written in the midst of Lindsey’s and my breakup. At the end of it, when it says, when the rain washes you clean, you’ll know, was very much meant to mean, ‘We will be okay. We’ll get through this.’”
Nicks wrote “Dreams” as a confirmation that, yes, she and Buckingham were breaking up. “I understand he doesn’t feel the same way about the way I feel about it. But that is what, in truth, it was written about. No matter what happens to Lindsey and I as a couple, this band will go on. We’ll see it through, and we’ll be all right. He seems to take it a different way.”
The Track Might’ve Been Fleetwood Mac’s Only Chance at Survival
Musicians have notoriously touchy egos, and breakups can exacerbate this acute sensitivity. While sharing songs with one another in Fleetwood Mac put Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham at risk of offending one another so badly that the band couldn’t continue, Nicks would later argue that the tracks were the only way the band could survive. “Dreams” was a response to Buckingham’s “Go Your Own Way,” which accused Nicks of shacking up with other people, much to the songwriter’s chagrin. But as she told the BBC in 1998, “As a songwriter, I have to respect that he’s gonna write about what’s happening to him. And so am I.”
“I could never say to him, you know, ‘Back off! Stop writing songs about me.’ That was his life then, and that’s when the best songs are written. It doesn’t really matter who breaks up with who at that point, that’s when everybody writes the best songs. And that’s what happened on Rumours. I mean, maybe we would have killed each other if we hadn’t have been able to write those songs, you know. If we hadn’t have been able to put that energy into the music and rise above it that way, then maybe we would have just gone totally freaked out on each other.”
