The band who moved Christine McVie “to tears”
Fleetwood Mac gifted music with some of the most beloved songs of all time, from the sparkling ‘Everywhere’ to the sprawling ‘The Chain’, but their music wasn’t all riffs and soft rock. Inspired by the heartache the band members caused one another, they also created their fair share of tear-jerkers, perhaps most notably on 1977’s ‘Songbird’.
Amidst lyrical digs at one another’s love lives delivered over pop-rock soundscapes, Christine McVie graced Rumours with a devastating piano track that even John McVie once suggested could make grown men weep. Somehow, in just half an hour of songwriting time, McVie penned devastating lines like, “And I wish you all the love in the world, but most of all, I wish it from myself.”
Over four decades on, the gorgeous song still retains its ability to move listeners to tears, infused with impossible emotion. But while McVie was making others cry with her own lyrical laments for Fleetwood Mac, she found herself often moved to tears by another rock staple: The Beatles.
During a conversation with Rolling Stone, McVie shared her love for some of Fleetwood Mac’s peers and predecessors – cult favourites Steely Dan, pop pioneers the Beach Boys, and super-group Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young – but she declared the Fab Four her favourite band, “of course”.
“Some of their songs move me to tears,” she admitted at the time. It’s an effect that the band have had on many others. From the lyrical longings of ‘Yesterday’ to the moving ‘Blackbird’, the Beatles were more than capable of moving listeners to tears with gorgeous melodies and thoughtful lyrics, and McVie was no exception.
Though they remain the biggest band of all time for their mammoth impact on the music industry, their contributions to production, and their more rocking tracks, they also retain that position through the pure emotion in their songs. Decades on from the heyday of Beatlemania, their music still has the ability to move people to tears and to dancefloors in equal measure.
McVie once shared her favourite Beatles track on an episode of BBC’s Desert Island Discs, picking out their cover of Chuck Berry’s ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ from With the Beatles. Discovering it when she was around 19 or 20, she recalled playing the record “until there was nothing left of it.”
“It was all about the melodies, the songs, the harmonies,” she enthused, “The voices were so upfront and crystal clear. I think their use of space was so crucial.” Though McVie also loved their musical melancholy, her favourite track is certainly a song that’s more likely to be deemed a toe-tapper than a tear-jerker.
Revisit ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ below.
