'I wanted to go over and kill him.' The real stories behind Fleetwood Mac's biggest hits.

Many musicians sing songs about the people in their lives. 

A past lover who broke their heart, a friend who died before their time, a one-night stand who 'shook them all night long'. 

For most musicians, those people exist outside of the band. But not for Fleetwood Mac. 

The 1970s rock band is infamous for their tumultuous relationships, incestuous affairs, and pointed lyrics.

Band members have chopped and changed over the years, but the 'classic line-up' (i.e. the line-up who recorded Rumours) consisted of vocalist Stevie Nicks, guitarist and vocalist Lindsey Buckingham, drummer Mick Fleetwood, keyboard player and vocalist Christine McVie, and bass guitarist John McVie. 

Watch Fleetwood Mac perform 'Silver Springs'. Post continues below. 

Nicks and Buckingham were together for eight years and split just before they started working on Rumours. John and Christine McVie's marriage broke down around the same time. And Nicks and Mick Fleetwood became romantically involved while he was still married to model Jenny Boyd.  

All of these feelings were processed through the songs we sing along to in the supermarket on a rainy Tuesday afternoon. 

Here are the real stories behind some of the band's biggest hits:

Landslide

Nicks wrote 'Landslide' in 1974 in Aspen’s snow country, while Buckingham was on tour with Don Everly.

The song was about their relationship, their fledging music careers, and whether they would ever 'make it'. 

"So during that two months I made a decision to continue. 'Landslide' was the decision. [Sings] "When you see my reflection in the snow-covered hills" — it’s the only time in my life that I’ve lived in the snow. But looking up at those Rocky Mountains and going, 'Okay, we can do it. I’m sure we can do it,'" she told Performing Songwriter. 

"In one of my journal entries, it says, 'I took Lindsey and said, We’re going to the top!' And that’s what we did. Within a year, Mick Fleetwood called us, and we were in Fleetwood Mac making $800 a week apiece (laughs). Washing $100 bills through the laundry. It was hysterical. It was like we were rich overnight." 

Go Your Own Way

After their breakup, Buckingham wrote 'Go Your Own Way' about Nicks. 

She was particularly upset about the line: "Packing up, shacking up is all you want to do" and the insinuation that she just wanted to sleep with other guys. 

"I very much resented him telling the world that 'packing up, shacking up' with different men was all I wanted to do. He knew it wasn't true. It was just an angry thing he said," she told Rolling Stone. 

"Every time those words would come out onstage, I wanted to go over and kill him. He knew it, so he really pushed my buttons through that."

Dreams

In retaliation to 'Go Your Own Way', Nicks penned 'Dreams'. It's probably the band's biggest hit, and it only took her 10 minutes to write it.  

"One day when I wasn't required in the main studio," she told Blender magazine, "I took a Fender Rhodes piano and went into another studio that was said to belong to Sly Stone, of Sly and the Family Stone.

"It was a black-and-red room, with a sunken pit in the middle where there was a piano, and a big black-velvet bed with Victorian drapes.

"I sat down on the bed with my keyboard in front of me. I found a drum pattern, switched my little cassette player on and wrote 'Dreams' in about 10 minutes.

Nicks told Blender the song was about the end of their eight-year relationship and how they had to put their feelings aside and keep working together. 

"We had to go through this elaborate exercise of denial," Buckingham told the magazine, "keeping our personal feelings in one corner of the room while trying to be professional in the other."

The line, 'Players only love you when they're playing,' was directed at Buckingham.

"It was the fairy and the gnome. I was trying to be all philosophical. And he was just mad," she told Q magazine. 

The Chain

'The Chain' is the one song on Rumours to give songwriting credits to all five band members. The song contains bits and pieces of material the members had composed throughout the process of making the album. 

The lyrics, however, where all Nicks' creation. 

"Originally we had no words to it, and it really only became a song when Stevie wrote some. She walked in one day and said, ‘I’ve written some words that might be good for that thing you were doing in the studio the other day.’ So it was put together. Lindsey arranged and made a song out of all the bits and pieces that we were putting down onto tape," Mick Fleetwood explained to Lucky 98 FM. 

'The Chain' is about the invisible chain that holds two people together. You know, like Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. 

This is the chorus: 

And if you don’t love me now
You will never love me again
I can still hear you saying
You would never break the chain (Never break the chain)
And if you don’t love me now (You don’t love me now)
You will never love me again
I can still hear you saying (Still hear you saying)
You would never break the chain (Never break the chain). 

Silver Springs

Image: Getty. 

'Silver Springs' was Nicks' tribute to the fairytale ending that never was. The song was named after a town they passed through on tour. 

"It sounded like a pretty fabulous place to me," she said in the Classic Albums documentary about Rumours. "It’s a whole symbolic thing of what [Lindsey] could have been to me."

The album was nearly finished when Mick Fleetwood took Nicks out to the carpark and told her 'Silver Springs' was being cut because it was too long and "a lot of [other] reasons". 

"I started to scream bloody murder and probably said every horribly mean thing that you could possibly say to another human being and walked back in the studio completely flipped out," she recalled during a BBC Radio interview in 1991.

'Silver Springs' was delegated to the b-side of a single and performed by the band only a handful of times in the 1970s and 1980s, before it was mostly forgotten about. 

Then in 1997, Nicks finally got her 'Silver Springs' moment. 

While taping a Fleetwood Mac reunion show later released as The Dance, Nicks sang 'Silver Springs' to Buckingham the way it was intended.

Midway through the song, she turned and faced Buckingham as she sang the song's sorrowful bridge: 

"Time cast a spell on you, but you won’t forget me/I know I could have loved you but you would not let me."

The former flames looked into each other's eyes, as they sang: 

"I’ll follow you down 'til the sound of my voice will haunt you/You’ll never get away from the sound of the woman that loves you." 

Goosebumps. 

Don't Stop 

Christine and John McVie were married for eight years before splitting up around the time the band was working on Rumours. 

Originally called 'Yesterday's Gone', Christine wrote 'Don't Stop' as a positive affirmation for the former lovers, and an ode to leaving the past behind. 

For years, John didn't realise the song was about him. 

"I never put that together. I’ve been playing it for years and it wasn’t until somebody told me, 'Chris wrote that about you.' Oh, really?" he said in 2015. 

Keryn Donnelly is Mamamia's Pop Culture Editor. For her weekly TV, film and book recommendations and to see photos of her dog, follow her on Instagram and TikTok. 

Feature Image: Getty. 

TAKE SURVEY ➤