"Go Your Own Way"

Some songs get taken completely out of context and find themselves appropriated for totally inappropriate reasons. Think back to Bruce Springsteen's "Born In The USA" being used by Ronald Reagan for his re-election campaign in 1984: the collective glossing over of the song's subject matter is one of the great examples of society turning a blind eye to something so painfully obvious. Anyway, I digress. But "Go Your Own Way" must be right up there in the same list. It's a painful, bitter song about the break-up of a relationship: "Loving you/Isn’t the right thing to do/How can I ever change things/That I feel/If I could/Maybe I’d give you my world/How can I when you won't take it from me?" Heck, the whole of the "Rumours" album is about four musicians in relationships falling apart. It's a rare experiment in reality, if you like. Everyone wrote songs about each other, except Mick Fleetwood, who sat at the back behind the drums and kept the whole thing going. Even his drumming on this track is fantastic, solid without being flashy. What constantly amazes me is how so few people tend to listen to this song, this album, and not recognise or at least acknowledge what an immensely painful experience it must have been, and what an incredible achievement it was to even put a record out. Even the optimistic song(s) on the album is/are infused with the same bleakness. And remember Bill Clinton standing up in Little Rock in 1992 while they played "Don't Stop"? Full circle. I thank you.