(Credits: Far Out / IMDB)
Sat 27 December 2025 10:10, UK
The personal dynamic within Fleetwood Mac was always on eggshells at the best of times.
Before the band even turned into the living soap opera that we know and love today, their willingness to drop members like a bad habit would become a foundational part of their sound, with founder Peter Green leaving in the 1970s and Bob Welch vacating the lead guitar spot before Lindsey Buckingham entered the fray.
While the band channelled most of their emotions into Rumours, one of the most biting songs they ever made came from one album later.
Looking to follow up on the enormous success of their musical masterpiece, the band settled into the studio with producers Richard Dashut and Ken Caillat to top themselves on Tusk. Even though everyone had come in with phenomenal material, it would be far from smooth sailing once everyone presented their new songs.
Not deciding which direction they should take the material, every band member seemed to treat their songs as individual solo tracks, practically using the rest of the group as a glorified backing band when working on their material. Even with the fractured studio environment, it did result in some of the band’s strongest singles, from Buckingham’s angry tone on the title track to Stevie Nicks lamenting the loss of her unborn child on ‘Sara’.
Although Buckingham and Nicks had been separated for a while, that didn’t mean those aggressions hadn’t gone away. Even though Buckingham would write songs meant to be attacks on Nicks, he was still expected to help her craft her songs into good enough shape, which would become a chore for him as the years went on.
Lindsey Buckingham on stage with his guitar. (Credits: Far Out / Steve Proctor)
Despite having to roll over and help Nicks, Buckingham got his revenge when writing the song ‘What Makes You Think You’re The One’. But while the track was certainly a pointed one, it was originated in a more docile fashion.
“That was just me and Mick, and we were really looking to get some kind of crazy drum sound,” Buckingham told Uncut. “That was back in the day when everybody had boomboxes, and we had an old cassette player with these really crappy Mics. But you could record on it, and the system had built-in compressors, and we took the output. We put that right in front of the drums, and I think we put another one overhead, too, as opposed to mic’ing the whole thing as you usually do. And we ran that cassette player into the console and it just made this really explosive, trashy sound.
“Mick was getting off on that drum sound so much,” he added. “I was playing the piano and he was playing the drums, and we cut that song late one night, just the two of us.”
While the tune boasts one of the more pop-friendly melodies on the record, Buckingham used every trick in his arsenal to mock Nicks’ approach to songwriting on the final track.
As Caillat explained in the book Get Tusked, Buckingham was still seething with anger on the song, recalling, “‘What Makes You Think You’re The One’ was rooted in the lyrics and performance that revisited Lindsey’s feelings toward Stevie and their past as a couple, a breakup that was only two years old at this point. If there was any doubt of who the song was about, Lindsey did his best to imitate Stevie’s distinctive vibrato, giving it a bleating, goatlike quality, and her rudimentary piano playing, which he knew made her self-conscious.”
Even though Nicks may have felt insecure working alongside Buckingham, she didn’t have to worry about relying on him for much longer. As the band made their way into the 1980s, Nicks would find a way to balance her time with The Mac with her solo career, earning massive hits with ‘The Edge of Seventeen’ and working with Tom Petty to create ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’.
Those lingering resentments never went away, though, leading to the pair getting into a physical altercation that ended their creative relationship for decades. Buckingham may have tried to choose his battles when he could, but ‘What Makes You Think You’re The One’ was one of the most unfiltered attacks on his writing partner.
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