Song Lyric of the Day (Fleetwood Mac, on Love’s Ire)

“Packing up, shacking up’s all you wanna do.”—“Go Your Own Way,” written by Lindsay Buckingham, performed by Fleetwood Mac, from their Rumours LP (1977)

This lyric isn't sung so much as spit out; more than an accusation, it’s an all-out, red-faced, vein-popping shout of rage. Stevie Nicks, whose turbulent romantic relationship with Lindsay Buckingham inspired the song, vented her own resentment to about her ex-lover‘s line every time she sang its backup vocals: “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," she told Rolling Stone.

“Go Your Own Way” was the first of four singles from Rumours, released 35 years ago this month. It had been two years since Fleetwood Mac’s prior, eponymous pop smash, during which time the two couples in the band—husband and wife John and Christine McVie, and POSSLQs Buckingham and Nicks—had split. (Complicating matters further, drummer Mick Fleetwood's marriage was crumbling, and sometime after the divorce he would take up with Nicks.)

If the album title acknowledged tumult, "Go Your Own Way" pointed fingers, found fault. Deal with it, it said. It reeked of disbelief (how could you do this when I loved you?), even as it unconsciously hinted why the relationship went awry ("maybe I'd give you my world"--then again, maybe not). It was the love song turned inside out--as a piece in The Daily Beast noted, one of the classic “F--K You Songs.”

It’s hard to believe that the members of the group have managed to live all this time since without killing themselves or each other. Indeed, with their drug abuse, their egos, their sexual roundelays, and the creative use they made of all this, Fleetwood Mac can be thought of as a Seventies counterpart to The Mamas and the Papas.

“Go Your Own Way,” though topping out lower than the other three Top 10 Rumours singles (“Dreams,” “Don’t Stop” and “You Make Loving Fun”), feels more powerfully at the center of the LP than this trio. In fact, it made the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s “500 Songs That Shaped Rock ‘n’ Roll"--the only Fleetwood Mac tune to make the cut.

For my money, no other tune on the LP (which went on to win the Grammy for Album of the Year and to go multiplatinum) surpasses it for sheer, unvarnished, blistering fun. In a way, it all starts with the opening chord—left unresolved throughout the rest of the song, like the relationship that Buckingham can't leave behind. You can practically feel the singer-songwriter, the studio mastermind behind this and the rest of the album, attack the guitar strings until his fingers bled.

Contrast this with the Wilson Phillips cover version, the centerpiece of their 2004 comeback album, California. All of these gorgeous harmonies have everything except what made the original great in the first place: love and pain and the whole damn thing.