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Fleetwood Mac’s magnum opus Rumours featured songs about the real-life breakups of songwriters Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, and Christine McVie. The band was musically at the top of their game, but their personal lives were in flames, which the album reflected. For this reason, they faced some difficulties in the studio. There was one song Buckingham found particularly difficult to sing. But it wasn’t because he was mourning the breakdown of his relationship with Nicks.

Fleetwood Mac guitarist and singer Lindsey Buckingham plays the guitar.
Lindsey Buckingham | Ed Perlstein/Redferns/Getty Images

Lindsey Buckingham found a Fleetwood Mac breakup song particularly challenging to sing

Buckingham wrote the song “Never Going Back Again” about the end of his relationship with Nicks. The couple’s longtime romance broke down contentiously, and he expressed his desire to move on through song. The song was not easy to get through, however.

“The intro started. I added a little reverb to one of the guitars,” producer Ken Caillat wrote in Making Rumours: The Inside Story of the Classic Fleetwood Mac Album. “When we got to the first verse, Lindsey got as far as ‘She broke down …’ and he stopped. He sounded like Alfalfa in The Little Rascals with his voice cracking.”

Buckingham tried again but quickly broke off and started cursing. The song was in the wrong key; they had to re-record hours of work to fit it to his voice.

“The rest of us just looked at one another in the control room. We were stunned,” Caillat wrote. “It had never occurred to any of us that Lindsey could be playing one of his own songs in the wrong key for his voice. Not Lindsey! We were all blown away.”

Lindsey Buckingham’s guitar playing also made the Fleetwood Mac song a challenge

After spending a day working on the song, the wrong key revelation devastated them. In order to achieve the bright sound Buckingham desired in the song, they constantly replaced the strings on his guitar.

“He agreed to have the strings changed every time they started to fade,” Caillat wrote. “So there we went, looking for perfection. It took twenty minutes to change the strings, and we got only about thirty minutes of use out of each set of new strings. The day dragged out until finally we got the first pass of the primary guitar part about four hours later.”

Buckingham continued layering on guitar parts. By the time he tried singing the song, they had been working on it for over 10 hours. 

Buckingham struggled to sing the ‘Never Going Back’ lyrics in front of Nicks

Buckingham worked on “Never Going Back Again” without the rest of Fleetwood Mac in the studio. According to Caillat, he felt too embarrassed to sing the song in front of Nicks. 

A black and white picture of Fleetwood Mac's Stevie Nicks singing into a microphone and looking at Lindsey Buckingham, who plays guitar and sings.
Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham | Bob Riha, Jr./Getty Images
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“The lyric seems not very deep,” Buckingham said, per In Their Own Words: Songwriters Talk About the Creative Process by Bill DeMain, adding, “There is really nothing particularly definitive about it. You think about how naive that was and very much in the context of not particularly being about something that was even important. And maybe that’s why it’s sweet. It was just a frivolous little thing.”

While he said that the song was frivolous, the fact that Buckingham gave it the secretive working title “Brushes” and couldn’t sing it in front of Nicks hints that it meant more to him than he let on. The song was about moving on from a years-long relationship with his musical collaborator. Even if he believed it sounded frivolous, it carried emotional weight.

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