(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still / Press)
Thu 4 December 2025 20:59, UK
If you know one thing about Fleetwood Mac, you know about their tempestuous inter-band relationships.
The group are renowned not just for their crumbling romantic relationships, with Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks and the McVies all enduring hideous breakups during the band’s lifespan, but also for the enjoyment of those bandmates writing songs about each other. It left some of the more sensitive members of the band with a bitter taste in their mouths.
Lindsey Buckingham always seemed to have two sides of himself whenever he played with Fleetwood Mac. He may have had a tense relationship with Stevie Nicks every time they played songs written about each other, but he also felt like he had an artistic obligation to help her with her pieces even if he was being told off in them.
The group were seemingly happy to share their thoughts on each other in song. Buckingham was just as ready as the rest of them to partake in the festivities. There was a limit, and when Nicks showed up with ‘Smile At You’, Buckingham put his foot down.
If Buckingham hadn’t had Nicks to balance him out, though, Fleetwood Mac wouldn’t have been as good as they were in their prime. He may have been able to play his ass off without a pick whenever he performed, but bringing Nicks into the band with him led to some of their biggest hits, from his picking part on ‘Landslide’ to the intensity of his strumming on ‘Go Your Own Way’.
Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. (Credits: Jimmy Kimmell Live / Raph Pour-Hashemi)
The band even found a way to be somewhat cordial on their first record with the rock duo, turning songs into major hits like ‘Say You Love Me’ and ‘Over My Head’. Whereas those works could have been written about anyone, almost every piece on Rumours had a face behind the melody, which was far from glowing most of the time.
Since Buckingham and Nicks were breaking up, hearing them bicker and argue in the song is intense and intriguing, as if you’re right there in the room as they hash out their differences. While Buckingham was known to be the hothead who would lash out in anger at the drop of a hat, Nicks was always the more level-headed one, penning ‘Dreams’ and sounding like she was bottling up her anger and trying to see the positive side of things.
Nicks always relied on having upbeat songs, but ‘Smile At You’ was one step too far over the line. The pair had been long separated at this stage in recording, but Buckingham was not happy to hear a track co-written with someone else yet.
In the book Making Rumours, engineer Ken Callait remembers the session turning cold really quick when the band started rehearsing the tune, saying, “When we finally got rolling on ‘Smile At You’, Lindsey suddenly didn’t want to play the song anymore. He was annoyed when he learned that Stevie had developed it with [session bassist] Tom Moncrief. The more we worked on the song, the less enthusiastic Lindsey seemed to be about it.”
Then again, writing with outside songwriters wasn’t anything new for ‘The Mac’. They had already interpolated other people’s material on a work like ‘Blue Letter’, but the fact that Buckingham was so bitter as to completely stop working on the tune is a level of pettiness that gives most daytime soap operas a run for their money.
Even though the song was a perfectly fine tune to be included in Rumours, that animosity remained for almost three decades. By the time the classic lineup finally reunited for their comeback album Say You Will, Buckingham finally let it go and worked the piece into good shape. If they had taken that version of the track and placed it at the tail end of Rumours, though, maybe fans would have another upbeat tune to break up the various shady attacks going on in every other song.
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