Mick Fleetwood’s favourite songs from Fleetwood Mac album ‘Rumours’
Today, most people remember Fleetwood Mac for their tumultuous yet highly successful spell in the late 1970s. With the recruitment of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks on New Year’s Eve 1974, the band migrated towards a country-infused soft-rock sound inspired by artists like Eagles and Jackson Browne. When Fleetwood Mac first formed in England under the leadership of guitarist Peter Green, they were a completely different entity.
Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac emerged at the height of the psychedelic rock era and brought a slick nuance to the burgeoning blues-rock phenomenon as championed by Eric Clapton, John Mayall and Jimi Hendrix. Latter peaks eclipsed this chapter for the band, yet many fans still attest to its superiority and indispensable role in later developments.
During part two of Peter Jackson’s 2021 documentary The Beatles: Get Back, John Lennon asked his bandmates if they had seen Fleetwood Mac on Late Night Live the night before. “They’re so sweet, man,” he said. “And their lead singer’s [Peter Green] great. You know, looks great, and he sort of sings quiet as well. He’s not a shouter.”
Paul McCartney agreed, saying they sounded like Canned Heat. “Yeah, but better than Canned Heat,” Lennon asserted.
Sadly, Green left Fleetwood Mac in 1970 amid an ongoing struggle with his mental health. Several years of transition lay ahead for the band as drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie sought a stable lineup with John’s wife Christine McVie as a new recruit on keyboards.
In a moment of providence, Fleetwood crossed paths with Buckingham in 1974 after hearing his work with Nicks in the short-lived duo Buckingham Nicks. The drummer asked Buckingham to join Fleetwood Mac in December 1974, but he would only shake hands if Nicks could also join. Admitting that another singer-songwriter couldn’t hurt, Fleetwood accepted the condition.
With the new five-piece Anglo-American lineup, the band honed its soft-rock tools in the successful eponymous album of 1975. The album contained several Buckingham contributions, but most importantly, Nicks consolidated her new position by contributing the album’s two most enduring tracks: ‘Landslide’ and ‘Rhiannon’.
Fleetwood Mac had barely hit the shelves as the band turned its attention to a follow-up. Although it would take a year and a half to complete, Rumours was a masterpiece that was well worth the time, blood, sweat and tears shed by all five members.
In a 2012 conversation with Music Radar, Mick Fleetwood struggled to name his overall favourite Fleetwood Mac song but settled on eight favourites, including classics from the Peter Green years to the 1979 album Tusk. Three of his selections came from Rumours, suggesting its position as Fleetwood’s overall favourite record.
He first picked out Buckingham’s songwriting contribution ‘Go Your Own Way’ as a favourite for its live appeal. “I love playing this song,” Fleetwood said. “It’s one of my favourites because I get to kick the hell out of my drums, and it’s got that wonderfully primal part. It’s a great ‘let loose’ stage song, in which I can revert to my old animal ways and not be quite so polite. Lindsey is a full-on rock ‘n’ roller on this song, and that I love.”
Next, Fleetwood chose ‘Dreams’, “a given” for his list that he described as “the most famous song that Stevie ever wrote.” He seemed particularly proud of his drumming work in the intro and hailed Nicks’s breezy lyricism.
Finally, he picked out ‘Oh Daddy’ as a song he’s a “sucker for” because of its appealing structure. As a drummer, he finds the song enjoyable to play and no doubt misses his jams with the late songwriter Christine McVie. “Basically, it’s me playing a slow blues with Christine,” he noted. “Sentimentally, I say this because I didn’t know it at the time, but I found out not too long afterwards that the song was actually written about me. At that point, I was the only daddy in the ranks of Fleetwood Mac. Christine is a sister of mine and truly a great musician – and a blues player.”