7. Fleetwood Mac, "Rumours"
When I hear the songs on Rumours, the sun is always shining; the memories are washed-out and shaky, like they were shot on an 8 mm home movie camera; and there is infinite promise stretched out in front of me. Recorded in turmoil, it's paradoxically one of the brightest-sounding records ever made.
The story behind the record's production - largely in the windowless rooms of the Record Plant in Sausalito - are now legendary. The band would convene around 7 pm, and then after a feast of food and wine and endless supplies of cocaine, they would begin recording and go all night. The last song, "Gold Dust Woman," directly references the damaging power of the drug ("Rock on, gold dust woman/Take your silver spoon, dig your grave"), but no one was complaining at the time.
The resulting record - at over 40 million copies, one of the best-selling albums of all time - somewhow combines existential turmoil with some of the most beautiful and beautifully-constructed songs ever made. But let's back up; why is everyone so mad? Well, bassist John McVie (the "Mac" in Fleetwood Mac) and his wife, keyboardist and singer Christine McVie, had just divorced and were no longer speaking. Meanwhile, guitarist/singer Lindsey Buckingham and singer Stevie Nicks were in and on-again off-again relationship that the word "tumultuous" barely does justice to, and broke up for good during the recording process.
The first song, "Second Hand News," gallops in on a rolling beat (partially made by hitting a naugahyde chair) and sets the tone for the album with its first lines, "I know there's nothing to say/Someone has taken my place." As you might imagine, it's about a rebound relationship. Imagine being Stevie Nicks in the studio while Buckingham is singing about getting over you with someone else and you'll start to get a sense of how this album was made.
Stevie gets her turn on the next song, "Dreams," which she says she wrote in about 10 minutes with a keyboard in a small bedroom that had been built in the studio specifically for Sly Stone. It's pretty clearly directed at Buckingham:
Well, who am I to keep you down?
It's only right that you should play the way you feel it
But listen carefully to the sound of your loneliness
Like a heartbeat drives you mad
In the stillness of remembering what you had
And what you lost
If you can read these lyrics and not hear the song in your head, congratulations on being born in Antarctica and never being exposed to mainstream culture in any way. Hell, pretty much same for any song on this album. Anyway, "Dreams" has that incredible chorus "Oh, thunder only happens when it's raining/Players only love you when they're playing" and of course recently enjoyed a resurgence in pop culture after a video of a guy skateboarding while listening to it went viral for some reason.
The counterpoint to "Dreams" is Buckingham's "Go Your Own Way," a song that made Nicks furious for years because of what she said was Buckingham's false allegations about her just wanting to "shack up":
Packing up, shacking up's all you wanna do
If I could, baby, I'd give you my world
Open up, everything's waiting for you
It's definitely one of the harder-rocking songs on the album, with an odd, syncopated drum pattern alternating between toms and snare on the verses, and a pure 70s semi-fuzzed guitar solo that really drives the back half of the song. I say "harder rocking" because even though this could pass for soft-rock today, the album is mostly pretty quiet and contemplative. The song right after "Go Your Own Way," for example, is "Songbird," which is just Christine McVie and a piano, a ballad that could reportedly reduce grown men in the audience to tears.
Christine also sings "You Make Loving Fun," about her new boyfriend, the band's lighting guy, for fuck's sake. One of the problems with this gang is that they couldn't find strangers to fuck. I wonder what kind of lighting John got on that tour. It's also upbeat, almost disco-y.
"Don't Stop," another one of the peppier songs, is a straightforward exhortation to optimism, to look forward to a better future. It got its own resurgence when Bill Clinton used it as his unofficial campaign anthem in 1992, I mean what a perfect fucking Boomer move.
There's only one song on this album I really can't stand, and that's "Oh Daddy," a lifeless ballad that's apparently also about the lighting guy. But instead of the exuberant fun of "You Make Loving Fun," now we're on to the "ughhhhh I'm stuck in this relationship" phase. Again, people: stop fishing off the company pier.
Despite that one rough patch, I have grown to love this album. Of course I've heard it all my life, but my appreciation for it has grown in the last 20 years or so once I grew up and stopped worrying about whether what I was listening to was cool or not, because for most of the 80s and 90s, this album was extremely uncool, at least in my Gen X circles. Since then, it's undergone something of a rennaisance and has been discovered by Millennials and Gen Z. I don't know if it's Harry Styles' friendship with Nicks (and his cover of "The Chain") or the band's widespread use on TikTok or what, but you know what? Good for them. Now they can mine it for breakup songs, just like their grandparents did.
Is this album in my personal Top 100? Indeed it is.
As a songwriter, I find it very strange that a songwriter could get angry about the words to a song. All my songs are about mean girlfriends. They are NOT about my lovely wife. Most of my word choices are driven by syllable pattern or rhyme scheme. So the idea that there could be lingering resentment over "packing up, shacking up" is WILD to me. If I were Lindsey, I'd just tell Stevie, "it sounded good."
ReplyDeleteNary a mention of my favorite song on this album, “Never Going Back Again,”!
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