(Credits: Far Out / Press)
Thu 23 October 2025 18:32, UK
When discussing Fleetwood Mac‘s finest albums, the spotlight invariably falls on their 1977 masterpiece, Rumours. The album is rightly considered one of their best and, arguably, could be in for one of the best of the decade.
Despite hosting some of their most exceptional tracks, the album’s creation appeared as a turbulent sequence of frustrations and conflicts. Each song emerged as a weaponised expression of emotions derived directly from the internal tensions plaguing the group at the time.
Lindsey Buckingham stood out as the most assertive among the band members, particularly channelling his sentiments about his relationship with Stevie Nicks into tracks like ‘Go Your Own Way’. Despite the seemingly mellow lyrical content in ‘Never Going Back Again’, Buckingham’s intricate guitar work from the onset can leave fellow guitarists pleasantly surprised.
Buckingham’s songwriting is so widely applauded that it often overshadows his incredible ability with the guitar. Here, Buckingham not only gets to do his best work, offering a technicality and musical prowess often overlooked, but also gets to go back in time as he works his way up and down the fretboard in a tribute to yesteryear. The song was apparently inspired by a woman Buckingham had met on the road, shortly after breaking up with Nicks.
As the enduring romance between Buckingham and Nicks faced a contentious breakdown, he felt compelled to articulate his yearning for a fresh start through music. However, navigating the song proved to be an emotionally challenging journey. “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.”
Fleetwood Mac in all their glory. (Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Buckingham made another attempt but swiftly halted, expressing frustration. The song had been recorded in a difficult key, necessitating hours of re-recording to align with his vocal range. “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.”
After discovering the wrong key issue, Buckingham attempted to resolve it by replacing his guitar strings. “He agreed to have the strings changed every time they started to fade,” Caillat wrote. “So there we went, looking for perfection. It took 20 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.”
Recording assistant Cris Morris revealed that, thanks to the vocal issues, the song took a long time to record: “It was Lindsey’s pet project, just two guitar tracks, but he did it over and over again. In the end, his vocal didn’t quite match the guitar tracks so we had to slow them down a little.”
Although Buckingham poured his heart out in ‘Never Going Back Again’, he felt too embarrassed to sing the song in front of Nicks. At the same time, he enjoys that it doesn’t seem too reflective of the depth of his feelings towards his fellow band member. “The lyric seems not very deep,” Buckingham said. “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 the extensive hours working on the song proved demanding, they yielded one of the most remarkable pop-rock songs of the 1970s. This period pitted each songwriter against their significant others, resulting in absolute magic encapsulated within one album. Although Buckingham’s confidence might have wavered in the recording of ‘Never Going Back Again’, the rendition on Rumours stands as a testament to the sheer purity of his songwriting prowess.
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