Andy Greene
View all posts by Andy Greene September 5, 2026
Fleetwood Mac in 1977. Richard Creamer/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images “This is a tune I wrote a couple of weeks ago,” Lindsey Buckingham told the crowd midway through Fleetwood Mac’s concert in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, on Nov. 20, 1975. “It’s going to be on our new album.”
He was talking about “Go Your Own Way,” one of the first songs written for Rumours, which wouldn’t come out until February 1977. The song is still in its embryonic state, and the entire second verse — which has enraged Stevie Nicks for the last 50 years — apparently hadn’t been written yet.
The heartbreak from his recent breakup with Nicks is still quite palpable (“Loving you isn’t the right thing to do/But I can’t ever change things that I feel/If I could, baby, I’d give you my world/But I can’t when you won’t take it from me”), even if he needed to slightly refine those words and significantly stretch out the guitar solo at the end into one of the greatest showcases of his talents.
When they headed into the studio the following year to cut Rumours, Nicks was horrified by the opening of the new verse: “Tell me why everything turned around/Packin’ up, shackin’ up’s all you wanna 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. Every time those words would come out onstage, I wanted to go over and kill him.”
Nicks had to endure those words onstage quite a bit, since “Go Your Own Way” essentially never left Fleetwood Mac’s setlist from the moment Rumours hit. There are 963 live versions according to setlist.fm, and that’s surely a somewhat conservative number since records are shoddy for many of their shows in the 1970s and 1980s. But Buckingham was nowhere near the stage for quite a few of those live versions, and during a crazy time in the mid-1990s, Stevie Nicks wasn’t there either. It meant two other singers had to play-act the real-life emotions that fueled the song.
To sort through five decades of “packin’ up and shackin’ up,” here’s a look at 24 renditions of “Go Your Own Way” by Fleetwood Mac, and Lindsey Buckingham solo, along with a handful of the more memorable covers.
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Fleetwood Mac — Early Studio Take (1976)
Image Credit: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images This fascinating early take from the Rumours sessions shows Buckingham wrestling with the lyrics (“You can go your own way/You can roll like thunder”), experimenting with a falsetto part he wisely dropped, and still not unveiling the “shackin’ up” line that would further inflame his rocky, post-breakup relationship with Nicks. The soaring electric guitar solo at the end is also absent. It was eventually pieced together from multiple takes by Rumours producer Ken Caillat while Buckingham was taking a break for Christmas in Lake Tahoe.
