The classic track Mick Fleetwood and Stevie Nicks agree was simple: “It’s lazy”
When Fleetwood Mac unwillingly hired Stevie Nicks as their new frontwoman, they quickly had all of their hesitations quashed.
She was the plus one for Lindsey Buckingham’s deal to join the band. While Mick Fleetwood and John McVie had their hearts set on the American frontman, they didn’t know that it was his partner who would deliver not only their greatest hits but would also inject a much-needed sense of character into their sonic make-up.
On her very first album with the band, their 1975 self-titled record, she brought ‘Rhiannon’ and ‘Landslide’ to the table and emphatically announced herself as a songwriting force: one who could craft a melody with relative ease, while penning lyrics that struck to the very heart of the listener.
With that in mind, it was no surprise that the biggest hit ‘Dreams’, on their biggest album, Rumours, came from Nicks, but for all of its sonic perfection, it wasn’t a track heavily laboured out of the depths of her mind in a bid to finally make her chart-topping masterpiece; no, instead, it was the product of creative simplicity.
“It was a black-and-red room, with a sunken pit in the middle where there was a piano, and a big black-velvet bed with Victorian drapes,” Nicks explained. “I sat down on the bed with my keyboard in front of me. I found a drum pattern, switched my little cassette player on and wrote ‘Dreams’ in about ten minutes.”
It is indeed in that rhythm section where the simple yet brilliant heart of this song exists. Nicks continued to explain how just that loop sparked something different inside of her that subsequently allowed the melody to be laid down: “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 it was time for that idea to be taken to the studio, Mick Fleetwood had to deliver it in real time, and his human touch elevated the drum pattern even further, resulting in the song becoming one of his all-time favourites.
“’Dreams’ is a given,” Fleetwood said, when asked what his favourite Fleetwood Mac song is, “I think it’s the most famous song that Stevie ever wrote. The intro, I think, is one of those stupidly simple things that came from the drummer who played with Al Green and The Staple Singers, so it’s from my love of what I call ‘greasy music’. It has a real feel, and it’s lazy, behind the beat: stupidly simple but well-thought-out.”
He continued praising the tempo of the song as something drummers are drawn to, and “I take that as a compliment. It’s something I took from great players who I love so much: Keep it greasy and stay in the slot. Gotta be in the slot!”
Ultimately, unlike the sonic structure of the song, the dynamics between the band that played it were anything but, producing a taut atmosphere that existed at the time of those recordings, which added an extra sprinkling of magic that meant simple ideas were elevated into something unparalleled.
