Rumours – Fleetwood Mac

Sausalito sessions, 1976-77

In February 1977, Fleetwood Mac released an album written in the middle of the breakups it describes. The songs came out polished enough that the anger is easier to hear on a second listen. Rumours opens on Second Hand News as if the day were ordinary. It is not. Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks are done. Christine McVie and John McVie are done. Mick Fleetwood’s marriage is done. The band is not done, which is the hard fact that kept the record going. They keep the rehearsal. They keep the tour. They write the argument down and then they have to sing it in the same room. Released on 4 February 1977, the record sounds, at first, like a bright California pop album. The brightness is part of the arrangement. It sits on songs about splits nobody in the band wanted made public.

The sessions sat mostly at the Record Plant in Sausalito through 1976, produced by the band with Ken Caillat and Richard Dashut. Mixing dragged. So did the nights. What survived the delay is a pop album whose parts are still easy to separate if you know the songs. Go Your Own Way is Buckingham’s side of the split, bright and unforgiving. Dreams, which Nicks has said she wrote in about ten minutes, is the reply: not a scream, a forecast of what comes next. Don’t Stop and You Make Loving Fun are Christine’s, one facing forward, one already about a new relationship. Gold Dust Woman is the slower version of the same story, less interested in being liked. Songbird was recorded for the sound of a real hall, a piano and a voice with the room left in. The Chain is the only song credited to all five. Separate pieces were pulled until they held, and the bass figure in the middle is the part nobody else wrote.

The harmony is the awkward fact and the thing that makes the record work. Voices that are no longer a couple still stack as if they were. That is the job. A band is a promise about showing up, not about romance, and this one kept the public promise while the private ones failed. Fleetwood’s drums keep time and do not take sides. John McVie’s bass does not comment. The songs comment enough. You do not need a biography to hear who is leaving. You need the biography only to know that everyone, in turn, was the one leaving.