Go Your Own Way
by Fleetwood Mac
- 136
- BPM
- F major
- Key
- 7B
- Camelot
- 59
- Danceability
- 2
- Acousticness
Fleetwood Mac wanted a single out in the United States before Christmas 1976, even though Rumours was not due until February 1977. "Go Your Own Way" had just been mastered. It got the job. The move paid off for the album: pre-orders reached 800,000 copies, the largest advance sale in Warner Brothers history at the time. The single came out in the US on December 20, 1976 and in the UK on February 11, 1977, and it became the band's first top-ten hit in America.
Lindsey Buckingham wrote and sang it. It was about his breakup with bandmate Stevie Nicks. He wrote it at a house the band rented in Florida between legs of a tour. It was the first song he brought to the group for the album. Mick Fleetwood remembered the house as having a bad vibe, as if it were haunted. When Nicks heard the line about packing up and shacking up, she asked him to take it out. He kept it.
Producer Ken Caillat built the guitar solo from six lead guitar takes, pulling up and muting individual solos on the faders. None of the instruments were recorded live together. The track was finished through overdubs, in three studios, over four months.
Go Your Own Way runs at 136 BPM, the tempo of techno, trance and big-room dance. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.76 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 441 ms. It is in F major, Camelot 7B, which shares its notes with D minor and mixes cleanly with Bb major and C major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.