Last week, Stevie Nicks broke the sad but perhaps inevitable news that, following the death of Christine McVie last year, Fleetwood Mac are unlikely to tour again.
“We really can’t go any further with this – there’s no reason to,” Nicks told Vulture, reflecting elsewhere on her happy memories of Fleetwood Mac’s 2018 reunion tour, which was only very loosely billed as a farewell tour. “We had a really great time and it was a huge tour. That was there in the realm of possibility. But when Christine died, I felt like you can’t replace her. You just can’t. Without her, what is it?” Nicks asked.
“She was like my soul mate, my musical soul mate, and my best friend that I spent more time with than any of my other best friends outside of Fleetwood Mac. Christine was my best friend. When I think about Taylor Swift’s song You’re on Your Own, Kid and the line ‘you always have been,’ it was like, that was Christine and I. We were on our own in that band. We always were. We protected each other.”
While it’s gutting that we’ll probably never get to see the spectacle of Fleetwood Mac on the Pyramid Stage, or one final live hurrah from their most famous line-up, Nicks’ position is understandable – and besides, there’s still the music. And what an exceptional back catalogue they have to dig into.
It goes without saying, Fleetwood Mac have a hell of a lot of hits; far too many to squeeze into a top ten ranking, and the reason why we’ve reluctantly had to omit honourable mentions such as Seven Wonders, Gypsy, Never Going Back Again, Albatross, and Tusk’s brilliantly bonkers title-track. Look, don’t blame me, blame the band for being too good to cram into such a small number of spots.
So, what did make the cut, if not those classics? Step this way for our rundown.
10. Don’t Stop
Despite finding a home on Fleetwood’s best-known and most pain-addled album, Rumours, the late Christine McVie conjures up a potent sense of hope in Don’t Stop, an upbeat, chugging pop song exploring her break-up with her bandmate and ex-husband John McVie. The pair were married for eight years, but split during the making of Rumours.
Despite this, there’s joy bursting out of Don’t Stop, from its yowling guitar solo and jaunty piano melodies, to McVie’s lyrics, which forget about the past and look towards brighter, bluer skies. “If your life was bad to you, just think what tomorrow will do.”
9. Sara
Stevie Nicks has called Sara her most personal song – and given how hard she goes in on Silver Springs, Frozen Love, or Blue Denim, that’s quite the emotional bar to set. A lush, gorgeous six minute epic, it charts various messy strands of love, lust, and heartbreak that tangled at the core of the group. As well as Nicks’ split with Lindsey Buckingham, it delves into her time dating the Eagles’ Don Henley, and the affair she had with bandmate Mick Fleetwood while Henley was on the road. Though she was never exclusive with Fleetwood, Nicks was still devastated when she discovered he was also dating her friend Sara Recor, whom he later married.
And so began Nicks’ artistic obsession with the name – she wrote this Tusk standout with the Sara in question. Henley also claimed in 1991 that Nicks got pregnant during their relationship, and had an abortion; Sara also serves as a kind of letter to the child they never had. It turns out the true inspiration is a mixture of the two situations. “Had I married Don and had that baby, and had she been a girl, I would have named her Sara,” Nicks confirmed to Billboard. “But there was another woman in my life named Sara, who shortly after that became Mick’s wife, Sara Fleetwood.”
8. Landslide
After a decade of shuffles, Buckingham and Nicks completed what is now remembered as the classic Fleetwood Mac line-up, and their 1975 self-titled record – technically, the band’s tenth studio album – propelled them to superstardom. Beforehand, though, Nicks worried about whether she would be able to sustain herself on art alone, and wrote Landslide about this dilemma while staying with a friend in Aspen.
“I did already feel old in a lot of ways,” she told New York Times. “I’d been working as a waitress and a cleaning lady for years. I was tired.” A love song to music itself, Landslide is about Nicks’ choice to pursue music, with her fingers crossed that the band would finally hit the big time. It’s safe to say she made the right call.
7. Go Your Own Way
Another banger of a meta break-up song (something of a key Fleetwood Mac theme) Buckingham wrote Go Your Own Way in a lonely hotel room following the release of 1975’s self-titled album. He and Nicks had finally ended their tumultuous, on-off relationship, and were drifting further apart. And inspired by the rock ‘n’ roll sound of bands like the Rolling Stones, Go Your Own Way was Buckingham’s sad, bittersweet, acceptance of their drifting apart. Though he grapples with his feelings elsewhere, it’s all there in the first line: “Loving you, isn’t the right thing to do”
All of this lends Go Your Own Way a symbolic importance, and it also paved the way for Fleetwood Mac’s sonic shake-up on Rumours. “The song became this symbol of independence for each of us and where we were heading as individuals,” Buckingham told The Wall Street Journal in 2021. “It also crystallised the band’s collective desire for a new creative direction on the album we were about to record.”
6. The Chain
Just a handful of Fleetwood Mac songs are credited to all of the band, and this is the only track to be credited to all five members of their classic 1977 line-up. Accordingly, The Chain – painstakingly assembled out of tape using a razor blade – was a real group effort.
Buckingham recycled the distinctive intro from his and Stevie Nicks’ 1973 duet Lola (My Love), Christine McVie donated the chord progression from her Rumours outtake Keep Me Here, and John McVie is behind the bassline. Buckingham and Fleetwood collaborated on the final section. Stevie Nicks meanwhile wrote the lyrics, which battle between rage, betrayal, and the irrational, tricky-to-break bonds of love that tie crumbling partnerships into knots when things begin to fall to pieces. Adding an extra meta layer to proceedings, this Bluesy stomper isn’t just sung by Buckingham and Nicks, it’s actually about their own breakup.
5. Storms
After the huge commercial success of Rumours – by far Fleetwood Mac’s most famous album – things got a little weird for Tusk, Fleetwood Mac’s experimental, vaguely post-punk influenced follow-up. Despite two big romantic splits within the line-up, and Nicks having a short affair with drummer Fleetwood, the band somehow stayed together anyway. Still, the drama continued.
Constructing their own personal HQ, Studio D, the creation of Tusk was as booze and cocaine-fuelled as Rumours, and heavily influenced by Buckingham’s growing obsession with new wave bands like Talking Heads, and the Beach Boys’ complicated vocal harmonies and cast-gold pop. It would eventually make history as the first ever album to cost more than $1million to make. “Somebody once said that with the money we spent on champagne on one night, they could have made an entire album,” Christine McVie told Uncut in 2015. “And it’s probably true.”
Fleetwood Mac partied and experimented musically in Studio D for about a year, with Buckingham behind many of their most bizarre moments; after demo-ing several songs at home in his bathroom, Buckingham demanded (and was given) an exact replica of the room to use for recording at the studio. On the title track, he and Fleetwood use Kleenex tissue boxes and lamb chops as instruments, and elsewhere he recorded vocal takes while doing push-ups over a microphone taped to a tiled floor. “We were all down with getting heavy, but Lindsey was really trying to make it weirder and heavier than any of us were able to comprehend,” Nicks later wrote in the liner notes for Tusk’s 2015 reissue. “But we went along. We followed him up that mountain!”
Written about Nicks and Fleetwood’s doomed fling, Storms is among the most beautiful songs on this brilliantly strange album – the achingly personal flipside to the brass band chaos of the title track. “So I try to say goodbye, my friend, I’d like to leave you with something warm,” Nicks sings. “But never have I been a blue calm sea, I have always been a storm.” Ouch!
4. Rhiannon
Now regarded as one of Nicks’ signature songs, this soft rock classic was originally inspired by a witchy paperback the musician picked up at random in 1974, featuring the occult tale of a woman called Brawen who is possessed by a spirit named Rhiannon. Nicks took the premise to the piano and ran with it, conjuring up the occult tale of a Welsh witch who soars like a skylark and “takes to the sky like a bird in flight”.
Nicks only found out years later, but Rhiannon is actually a figure from Welsh mythology. “I come to find out, after I’ve written the song, that in fact Rhiannon was the goddess of steeds, maker of birds,” Nicks explained. “Her three birds sang music, and when something was happening in war you would see Rhiannon come riding in on a horse.” It was clearly meant to be.
3. Silver Springs (1997 The Dance Version)
For years, Silver Springs – Fleetwood Mac’s lost break-up epic – never got its dues. Nicks, who wrote it for Rumours, and allocated all the publishing rights (and subsequent royalties) to her mum Barbara, was furious when it ended up getting cut from the final album at the last minute. The spellbinding, five-minute-plus outpouring of heartache came with a clear message for Buckingham. As Nicks put it to the Arizona Republic in 1997: “I’m so angry with you. You will listen to me on the radio for the rest of your life, and it will bug you. I hope it bugs you.”
Instead, Silver Springs was demoted to the b-side of Go Your Own Way – a far poppier cut which sees Buckingham largely blaming Nicks for their relationship breaking to pieces. After a handful of live airings, the song became a largely forgotten rarity until the release of 1997’s live album The Dance. It’s here that it finally got its rightful attention; "My beautiful song just disappeared,” Nicks says as more and more fans began falling in love with it. “For it to come back around like this has really been special to me".
2. Everywhere
The meeting point behind classic songwriting and cutting-edge experimentation, Fleetwood Mac arrived at Everywhere’s transcendent shimmer by drastically speeding up slow, languid guitars, and incorporating Buckingham’s new favourite gizmo, the Fairlight CMI synthesiser. While various members were barely speaking during the recording of 1987’s Tango in the Night, these tech flourishes were pulled off in such a warm way that they provided a strangely human touch.
And, nerdy facts about its creation aside, Everywhere just has that magical quality that all of the greatest pop songs do; when the chorus kicks in, it doesn’t just take off, it soars.
1. Dreams
When Nicks unearthed the bare bone of Dreams in just ten minutes – playing guitar alone in Sly Stone’s studio, and backed by a keyboard’s simple preloaded drum beat – Fleetwood Mac was falling to pieces. During the making of the band’s masterpiece Rumours – rightly regarded as one of the greatest albums of all time – personal tensions were high.
Christine and John McVie were in the middle of divorce, and wouldn’t speak to each other outside of the studio. Nicks’s relationship with Buckingham was rapidly crumbling. Adding to this tumultuous potion of heartbreak, Fleetwood was also mid-divorce, and embarked on his affair with Nicks during the Australian leg of the Rumours tour. Complicated, to say the least.
Despite the dramas swirling within the band, the studio was one place where they were able to grit their teeth and get on with it. It may have grown from a place of intense pain, but that’s ultimately what makes Rumours so rare and compelling, and Dreams is the record’s centrepiece, strangely unsettling in the way it conjures up a pocket of calm as agony still rips at the edges of Nicks’ raw vocal. “Thunder only happens when it’s rainin’, Players only love you when they’re playin’” she sings. Lyrical gold.
