Art usually shows its true importance as timepasses, the impact of something is often not felt in the moment and takes time to truly show how integral it is to either society or creative worlds or if lucky - both. One of my favorite thoughts given by Lester Bangs was his quote about the two faces of music: the one that looks at the present and the one that looks towards the future. Saying all this, Rumours by Fleetwood Mac passes not one of these tests. Rumours is at best a disjointed yet catchy definitive look into the turbulence that surrounded Fleetwood Mac at the time of recording and a messy, half baked step down for its creators at worst.
The album was created during the collapse of every integral relationship of every band member whilst a coke addiction fueled their paranoia and heartbreak. The three songwriters of the band - Lindsey Buckingham, Christine McVie, and Stevie Nicks - all write pieces pointed at each other and make their exes sing. Its drama is the most poignant part of the album, the only thing that truly keeps it afloat its sea of nonsense. Without the known bits and bops of the nuclear bands drama it’s hard to understand why exactly this album has become so revered when by all accounts 6 of its 10 songs feel like car-commercial-esque filler, and only about 2 are truly great. For the best album of the self defined greatest year of music, it fills absolutely no slot to what would make an album good or remarkable.
I love Stevie Nicks, I’ll get that out of the way right now. I like Fleetwood Mac just fine, neither here nor there with them, I’ll listen and think it’s good. I’m only ever really blown away by Stevie and her work to be 100% honest, as I feel like her work goes above and beyond what anyone else ever did for the band. It was her who made them go from no names to household with one song, and it was her that made this so successful, her song being the bands only number 1 hit. Saying all this, I do like Lindsey’s work on pieces like Tusk and Christine’s work from earlier releases, this album just isn’t showcasing everyone's best foot forward. It’s catchy, but nothing is necessarily exemplar reasoning why this album is apparently one of the best to ever exist.
Track One is a Lindsey piece, I Don’t Want To Know. It’s boring, to say the absolute least, which is all I want to do. Dreams is easily one of the best songs in the band’s catalog. John McVie’s driving bassline is one of the best in any popular song, and Stevie is just alluring on lead vocals. The song showcases what’s missing from so much of the album: genuine feeling. Stevie sounds like a woman processing a breakup, looking at the positives and sharing the magic in only a way she ever could. It’s not bitter, it’s not shallow, it’s not heartless. It’s Stevie penning her goodbye to Lindsey, that she wishes him well, that she wishes herself well. No one has written anything quite like it before or after, Dreams may just be the definitive song of breakup music. It’s hard to listen to this in context of the album and mourn what exactly we got from the band. This isn’t to say every song sounding similar is a good idea, the disjointed idea works to showcase the disconnect between all the parties, but damn this song really is a step above what pretty much anyone else was doing. Never Going Back Again is another acoustic Lindsey piece that would sound at home in a Airbnb commercial. It’s good, but coming off of such a strong piece as Dreams it falls flat. As an opener this song would’ve killed, it would’ve given what was needed. As it sits in Rumours, its filler. It’s worse than bad, it's forgettable - a fate held by so many songs on the album when it’s really looked at.
Don’t Stop will always just sound like political campaign nonsense to me due to its relation with Bill Clintion and the 1994 election at large. Outside of that connotation, it just feels off? It, like many other songs, feels like royalty free car commercial music. Christine and Lindsey sound great together, and this still doesn’t sound great. The collaboration between the two is actually one of the highlights of Fleetwood Mac to me, and yet still there feels like something is missing from this song. It sounds fine, but that’s all. It’s not good, it's not bad, it’s fine. To prove I don’t hate Lindsey, Go Your Own Way is truly one of the album's standouts. It has the emotions that feel to be lacking in his other pieces here. You sense this bitterness, this anger, it’s underlying and rooted. It’s anything but forgettable, it’s one of the classic bitter love songs so many could ever wish for. It’s the perfect counterpiece to something like Dreams, the duo of songs showcasing why the disjointed energy works on this album when done right. You see Stevies flowing piece, one about acceptance and forgiving in the face of impending heartbreak, and then Lindsey has a screeching guitar as he howls about his pain. It’s encapsulating a breakup and human emotion so raw it makes you mourn the loss of this on the rest of the album. As much as I love Christine, Songbird is boring. It’s Lindsey levels of forgettable on this album, which sucks because I truly believe in another piece of work that would truly be a classic. It feels tacked on here, it deserves a moment outside the shadow of such a messy album. Songbird is a song that’s good, yet is trapped by said excellence. It can’t reach the epic highs of a song like Dreams, nor the forgettably low lows of Never Going Back Again. It needs to be nothing more than it is, but where it’s placed and on what is what holds back the truly divine piece Christine penned. The tragedy of Rumours is that nothing can shine because so little does. Dreams and The Chain get all the praise because they are so far ahead of the game, yet it feels like other good songs on the album, albeit few and far between, get stuck in the crossfire.
The Chain is next and as stated it’s just a great song. Even if you were to hate Fleetwood Mac you can’t deny the sheer power of all them giving it their best on this singular track. Once more, John McVie and Mick Fleetwood kill it as one of rock’s greatest rhythm sections, and the harmonies from the three singers are haunting. There’s underlying emotions being thrown into the mix by everyone, the mix of sadness, fear, anger, and confusion swirling together against an impendingly dangerous instrumental. It’s the thesis of Rumours in a way: the chain will keep us together. It's not too out there to say that this song may just be why the album became so revered, it’s the angry collaboration on a song that culminates into one of the grandest moments in music history. For as overrated as I find this album, The Chain will never cease to be one of the greatest songs in history, if not the greatest moment on any breakup album.
The Chain performed live in it's year of release, 1977
You Make Loving Fun is Christine’s shining moment on this LP. It’s funky, it's fun, it's fresh to what happens through the rest of the album. It’s paired against Second Hand News, another downer from Lindsey, which actually works. Another Christine song, Oh, Daddy, follows it up in another forgettable run, before we lead to the closer Gold Dust Woman. Gold Dust Woman works, to me, due to its lack of relation to a single other piece on the album. It’s not about break ups, it's not about change, it's not a classic on a level like Dreams or The Chain, yet not as buried as Oh, Daddy or Songbird. It’s a great song that would’ve worked as a great single that had no connection to an album. It’s a glitzy, druggy adventure, something that seems so quintessentially Stevie it almost doesn’t make sense as a Fleetwood Mac song.
As it’s not “officially” on the album for an incompressible reason, it’s suffice to say that Silver Springs is the best song of Rumours. A melodic, introspective piece about pain and loss that is singularly more connected to the idea of this album than a single song actually featured on it. Stevie is one of the greats when it comes to the concise nature of a perfect pop song, one that shows you every emotion and a full story without having to break that 3 to 5 minute sweet spot and Silver Springs is a MASTERCLASS in this. It’s everything you expect from the synopsis of Rumours, and the exact reason why this album is so overrated. If your album can have its whole schtick be done in one song, it’s probably not the culturally defining piece it’s hailed as for some reason.
I suppose the nature of popularity is often that what’s most accessible will become the most popular, hence the status of icon this album receives. Fleetwood Mac has better albums: better concepts, better songwriting, better breakup pieces, better filler, Rumours is just the easiest for most to get behind because it does nothing that Fleetwood Mac can do. It drops the mysticism of their self titled effort the year before, one stacked with hits like Rhinannon and Crystal but also insanely good deep cuts like Lindsey’s I’m So Afraid, and it lacks the experimentation of 1979’s Tusk. It’s not as prolific as Stevie’s smash-hit solo album Bella Donna nor as expansive as Chrisine and Lindsey’s self titled release from 2017. Rumours is like if every songwriter of Fleetwood Mac put forth their safest group of songs forward, and boom: one of the best selling albums of all time. The album did a lot to establish the powerhouse creative that finds a home within Stevie Nicks, but past that there’s little to nothing to truly write home about. All that’s interesting truly rides on the back of the history, and I don’t think a history lesson should be necessary for a piece to be good: you must first make great art that inclines one to turn around and look into why.
Saying all that, Silver Springs doesn’t deserve a spot on this album. It’s much too good, and if it was on here we wouldn’t have the steller 1997 performance that has 20 years of rage coursing through Stevie. So I suppose it all happens for a reason.
Fleetwood Mac's magnum opus of both songwriting and performance, Silver Springs live in 1997
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