Though Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham joined Fleetwood Mac as a couple, their messy breakup soon became the subject of much of the band’s music. Nicks and Buckingham had to perform songs their respective ex wrote about them. Sometimes, as with “Silver Springs,” this led to intense onstage moments. With other songs, though, it led to fury. Nicks said she struggled to get through one of Buckingham’s songs. 

Stevie Nicks hated a Lindsey Buckingham song

Nicks and Buckingham broke up in 1976. Their split fueled the creation of the band’s seminal Rumours. Though Nicks was writing songs about Buckingham, she said one of his songs felt like a low blow. In the song “Go Your Own Way,” Buckingham sings, “Packing up / Shacking up is all you want to do.” 

“I very, very much resented him telling the world that ‘packing up, shacking up’ with different men was all I wanted to do,” she told Rolling Stone in 1997. “He knew it wasn’t true. It was just an angry thing that he said.”

Nicks said she hated having to sing backup vocals on the song.

“Every time those words would come out onstage, I wanted to go over and kill him,” she said. “He knew it, so he really pushed my buttons through that. It was like, ‘I’ll make you suffer for leaving me.’ And I did. For years. Lindsey immediately got girlfriends. I never brought men around, because I wasn’t going to tick him off any more than I had already.”

After years of bad blood, though, Nicks and Buckingham have reconnected to release their 1973 album Buckingham Nicks.