Friday I’m In Love: Song Exploder Episode #150 (Go Your Own Way)
Is Fleetwood Mac underrated?
I always love listening to the Song Exploder podcast. Mostly because it’s short (I desperately need more sub-30min podcasts in my life… and fewer 90min marathons), but also because I’ll never tire of listening to artists deconstruct a piece of finished work. Most of the episodes are about new songs—or recent songs. But for Episode #150, Lindsey Buckingham shows up and explains the origins of Go Your Own Way. Go ahead, listen to it.
It’s one thing to hear my BFF, Phoebe Bridgers, talk about Scott Street (a song I really really love). It’s quite another to hear LINDSEY BUCKINGHAM TALK ABOUT GO YOUR OWN WAY. It’s like listening to Leonardo DaVinci talk about how he applied layers of paint to the Mona Lisa. I’m serious about this. How many times have you heard Go Your Own Way? Hundreds? Thousands? Probably more than you can count? Definitely more than you remember? That song is everywhere, all the time—and then here’s Lindsey Buckingham calmly explaining how it started, playing a demo, sharing the isolated vocals.
Speaking of the vocals… Listen to this:
Did you ever hear the desperation in his voice? The hints of dismissal and anger? The subtle shoves and pushes and sharp elbows in the chorus? Man. I could listen to this on loop all day. So much of the nuance in Lindsey Buckingham’s voice gets swallowed by the harmonies that pile on as the song builds. But it’s all there. And it’s all incredible.
(I have to give a lot of credit to my brother-in-law Regan for sending the isolated vocals and this post. We had a long chat about the brilliance of this episode while our kids ate disgusting frozen yogurt concoctions last week. Kids have no fear of putting sour gummy worms on chocolate frozen yogurt. They’re lunatics.)
Anyway, I’ll be reading crazy stories about Fleetwood Mac and looking at photos of 1970s-era Stevie Nicks for the rest of the night while I pray for Dame and the Blazers to take a 2–1 lead over the Nuggets and Dadbod Legend Nikola Jokic. I’ll also spend the rest of forever wondering why Taylor Swift hasn’t just made a blissfully-stoned-Laurel-Canyon-Rumours album instead of Going Dark™ then bathing in pastels with a second-tier emo-pop dude (I’m not even going to mention the marching band incident). Taylor should be hanging out with Jenny Lewis… while channeling Stevie and Christine McVie—we all know that’s the best version of her, let’s just hope she figures it out sometime soon.
Every Friday I share something I love. Usually, it’s a new infatuation. Occasionally, it’s something else. We’ll see how it goes. Thanks for the theme song, Phoebe Bridgers!
