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But Lindsey had lots of parts on the song, and each one sounded magnificent,” Caillat said. Restringing the guitar three times every hour was a bitch. Caillat noticed that Buckingham’s acoustic guitar strings didn’t sound quite as bright after just 20 minutes of playing and suggested a painstaking tactic: Change the strings every 20 minutes. He created the impression that there’s a thread running through the whole thing.”Īn inordinate amount of time was spent on “Never Going Back Again,” one of the last songs to be written for the album. “I thought, ‘This is really boring,’ but the Lindsey genius came into play and he fashioned three sections out of identical chords, making each section sound completely different. “It was just three chords and one note in the left hand,” Christine McVie said. Right away I liked the fact that I was doing something with a dance beat because that made it a little unusual for me.” When she brought it to the other band members, they were less than impressed. “I found a drum pattern, switched my little cassette player on and wrote ‘Dreams’ in about 10 minutes. “I sat down on the bed with my keyboard in front of me,” Nicks recalled to Blender in 2005.
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The Record Plant room included a sunken pit, Victorian drapes and a black velvet bed upon which Nicks set up shop with a portable electronic piano.
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Nicks had much free time during the recording of Rumours, which she spent alone in an empty studio down the hall built for Sly Stone. It became a my-way-or-the-highway thing with him, which he perfected on the Tusk album.” This was the start of him really calling the shots. Lindsey had a grand plan in his head, and he got his way. “It took him a while, but eventually, while John was on vacation, he put down his own bass line, one that was very simple, just quarter notes,” co-producer Ken Caillat told Music Radar in 2012. John McVie’s original bass part was also scrapped, replaced by a part Buckingham wrote himself. The guitarist was reportedly inspired by Bee Gees‘ “Jive Talkin’,” and, when Mick Fleetwood couldn’t nail the rhythm, Buckingham played the beat on an office chair to achieve the effect he was looking for. Not every song written by a scorned lover has to sound so sad. The upbeat opening track makes one thing clear: Lindsey Buckingham is doing just fine in the tall grass with women who aren’t Stevie Nicks. Dra- ma.” The band members channeled all that into one of music’s greatest triumphs.īelow we outline a track-by-track guide to Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. When asked at the time by Rolling Stone what the recording process was like, Christine McVie replied, “Drama. 1.īut dig deep into the work you’ll uncover a dire, mischievous and dramatic album – a musical soap opera featuring songs written in the aftermath of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham‘s breakup, Christine and John McVie‘s divorce, Mick Fleetwood‘s extramarital affairs and widespread drug use.
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All four of the LP’s singles – “Go Your Own Way,” “Dreams,” “Don’t Stop” and “You Make Loving Fun” – reached the Top 10 in the U.S. 4 – was an immediate hit, topping the Billboard 200, selling more than 10 million copies within just a few months of its release and winning an Album of the Year Grammy. Fleetwood Mac‘s 1977 album Rumours is synonymous with blockbuster.įollowing up an acclaimed self-titled 1975 album, Rumours – released on Feb.
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