![]() ![]() ![]() But, as musicians, we still respected each other.” What was going on between us was sad – we were couples who couldn’t make it through. Even though he was mad with me at the time, Lindsey played it and then looked up at me and smiled. “It was a rough take, just me singing solo and playing piano. “I walked in and handed a cassette of the song to Lindsey,” she told The Daily Mail in 2009. Why Fleetwood Mac's 'Rumours' Hits Home Right NowĪware she had something special on her hands, she returned to Fleetwood Mac’s workshop. I found a drum pattern, switched my little cassette player on and wrote ‘Dreams’ in about 10 minutes.” The simple repeated three-chord riff cast a hypnotic spell over an uncharacteristically dance-y groove. “I sat down on the bed with my keyboard in front of me. “It was a black-and-red room, with a sunken pit in the middle where there was a piano, and a big black-velvet bed with Victorian drapes,” she recalled in Blender. “I would take a electric piano with me, and my crocheting and my journals and my books and my art and I would just stay there until they needed me,” she remembered in the 1997 documentary Classic Albums: Rumours.īy all accounts it was quite an inspiring space, done up in full-tilt Seventies style. To keep the boredom at bay – and to keep friction with Buckingham to a minimum – she often sought refuge in an unused studio down the hall that had been built for funk renegade Sly Stone. Sessions at the Record Plant in Sausalito, California could be tedious affairs, with little for Nicks to do. Stevie Nicks wrote “Dreams” in Sly Stone’s bed. Lindsey arranged and made a song out of all the bits and pieces that we were putting down onto tape.” The song remains a centerpiece of the band’s live set, an apt metaphor for the ties that bind Fleetwood Mac despite decades of interpersonal turmoil.Ģ. She walked in one day and said, ‘I’ve written some words that might be good for that thing you were doing in the studio the other day.’ So it was put together. “And it really only became a song when Stevie wrote some. “Originally we had no words to it,” Fleetwood later told Lucky 98 FM radio. We ended up calling it ‘The Chain’ because it was a bunch of pieces.” “The ending was the only thing left from original track. For embroidery, he borrowed a folky guitar figure previously used on his own song “Lola (My Love),” recorded with Nicks for the 1973 pre-Fleetwood Mac album Buckingham Nicks. Working backwards from the bridge, Buckingham used Fleetwood’s kick drum as a simple metronome to keep time. So I wrote verses for that bridge, which was originally not in the song and edited those in.” Then we listened back and decided we liked the bridge, but didn’t like the rest of the song. ![]() ![]() “We didn’t get a vocal and left it for a long time in a bunch of pieces. They settled on an ominous 10-note bass passage played by John McVie over a slow crescendo of Fleetwood’s drums. “We decided it needed a bridge, so we cut a bridge and edited it into the rest of the song,” Buckingham told Rolling Stone in 1977. At its core is the Christine McVie composition “Keep Me There” (also known as “Butter Cookie”), a tense, keyboard-driven track that remained incomplete during the early album sessions in February 1976. Built from a handful of disparate musical fragments, “The Chain” has the distinction of being the only song credited to all five members of the late Seventies lineup. The second side of Rumours kicks off with Fleetwood Mac’s very own Frankenstein’s monster. The musicians’ personal lives permanently fused within the grooves, and all who listened to Rumours become a voyeur to the painful, glamorous mess. This inner turmoil surfaced in brutally honest lyrics, transforming the album into a tantalizing he-said-she-said romantic confessional. Meanwhile, Mick Fleetwood’s extra-band marriage was on the rocks, leading to an affair with Nicks before the year was out. The Rumours saga is one of rock’s most famous soap operas, but here’s a refresher course on the dramatis personae: Stevie Nicks had just split with her longtime lover and musical partner, Lindsey Buckingham, while Christine was in the midst of divorcing her husband, bassist John McVie. Sessions for Fleetwood Mac‘s masterwork have all the elements of a meticulously scripted theatrical romance – elaborate entanglements, enormous amounts of money and mountains of cocaine. Dra- ma,” was how Christine McVie described the recording of Rumours to Rolling Stone shortly after its release on February 4th, 1977. ![]()
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