Songfacts®:

• "Big Love" is a showcase song for Fleetwood Mac guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, who described it as a "lustful mid-to-up tempo number featuring love grunts."
  
  These grunts, which get pretty aggressive at the end of the song, sound like they're coming from two different people, but they're both Buckingham. To simulate the female voice, he processed his vocals through a variable-speed oscillator. Many listeners assumed this was the voice of Stevie Nicks, his bandmate and ex-lover.
• Lindsey Buckingham planned to use "Big Love" on a solo album, but then Fleetwood Mac got back together. They parted ways in 1982 after their Mirage album, but Christine McVie pulled them back together in 1985 when she had Buckingham produce her cover of the Elvis Presley song "Can't Help Falling In Love" and also back her on the track along with two other Mac members, John McVie (her ex-husband... boy this band gets complicated) and Mick Fleetwood. This session went so well, Fleetwood and two McVies convinced Buckingham to turn the solo material he was working on - including "Big Love" - into Fleetwood Mac songs for a new album: Tango In The Night. He agreed, but considered it a last hurrah, figuring they'd make the album and be done.
  
  When the fifth member of the group, Stevie Nicks, joined the sessions, they got a lot more complicated. It took nearly a year and a half to finish the album, by which time Buckingham was approaching his boiling point. Tango In The Night was mostly the work of Buckingham and Christine McVie - they wrote most of the songs and Lindsey was a co-producer. It was released in April 1987 with "Big Love" as the first single. In May, the song went to #5, marking a triumphant return of the Mac. They announced a tour, but in August had a blow-up with Buckingham, who abruptly left the group. They went on the road in September with two guitarists taking his place: Billy Burnette and Rick Vito. (It wouldn't be the last time Buckingham was replaced by two guitarists: in 2018 Mike Campbell and Neil Finn took over for him.) "Big Love" was left out of the setlist.
• The music video was directed by Daniel Kleinman, known for his work on the title sequences to various James Bond movies. The video is filled with compositing and special effects that weren't easy to pull off in 1987. There's a clear homage to The Twilight Zone, with a window floating in space. Stevie Nicks, who had little to do with the song, gamely sashays in her signature style during her scenes.
  
  It was in the interest of their label, Warner Bros., to commission a big-budget video because for the first time in Fleetwood Mac history, VH1 was on the air, offering a more adult alternative to MTV. The band was right in the network's sweet spot and the video received lots of airplay.
• Fleetwood Mac didn't play this song live until 1997 when they reunited with Buckingham for The Dance tour. He performed a passionate, crowd-pleasing acoustic version on this tour.
• American producer Arthur Baker remixed "Big Love" in 1987. He counts it among his favorite remixes, though Lindsey Buckingham didn't feel the same way at first.
  
  "I'd met Lindsey Buckingham, and he actually handed me the multi-track and said, 'Do whatever you want,'" he recalled to Uncut magazine. "So I did, but I used a lot of Stevie Nicks' vocal. I hadn't realized that on the album version her voice wasn't used at all. When Lindsey heard it, he said, 'No, no, this is my song, not her song.' I had to take her out of the main vocal mix. He didn't mind that I'd changed the bassline, but he did mind Stevie singing on it."