The five best songs Christine McVie wrote for Fleetwood Mac
When you really think about it, Fleetwood Mac were a completely dysfunctional mob—full of bitchiness and betrayal—but to give them their dues, they could truly batter out a tune. Realistically, it was the drama as much as the music that made this soap opera-cum-rock band an essential part of the industry’s fabric. Fans clamoured for the latest inside scoop on their marriages, breakups, and ever-evolving love triangles just as much as they did for the music.
Of course, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham were the prime offenders when it came to this, but Christine McVie, alongside her then-husband John, also had no small role to play in the two Fleetwood Mac facets. Although McVie’s romantic exploits make much shorter reading than some of her counterparts in the band, there’s no denying that the backstories of her love life held a pivotal place in her discography, as more often than not, those thoughts would make it onto the page as songs for the stage.
In this sense, despite McVie being a somewhat quieter member of the band, her impact from a sonic perspective was arguably the most tangible in turning Fleetwood Mac into a hit-making factory. Across almost three decades and no less than 14 albums, the keyboardist was single-handedly responsible for churning out some of rock and roll’s biggest bangers, cementing herself by doing so as an icon of the airwaves.
Ultimately, this was what made her tragic death in 2022 all the more devastating as, in just one moment, the history of rock music had lost one of its brightest lights. It’s also a testament to her impact on Fleetwood Mac’s dynamic that Nicks saw no way for the band to continue again without her ever-guiding presence, and as such, McVie’s passing simultaneously marked a changing of the tides for music at large. Never forgetting that irreplicable sonic spirit, here we recount five of the best songs that McVie wrote for Fleetwood Mac – because if anything’s certain, she was the one who steered the ship into the land of legend.
Christine McVie’s five best Fleetwood Mac songs:
‘Songbird’
It seems only natural to begin with the song that McVie is rightly most celebrated for in an individual capacity apart from the rest of the band – which is, of course, ‘Songbird’. Where Fleetwood Mac could be brazen and brash and altogether booming, this was a rare antidote of disarming tenderness which captivated the souls of the listeners and all at once sent McVie soaring into the golden legion of essential songwriters for her generation.
It was a particular change of heart against the rest of Rumours, and especially compared to the other nods of prolific writing that McVie scored on the record, including ‘The Chain’ – where she was co-creator alongside the whole band – and ‘Don’t Stop’. After many a night full of raucous revelling, McVie would often drop the tempo of Fleetwood Mac gigs and close the show with ‘Songbird’, to which John McVie recalled: “When Christine played ‘Songbird’, grown men would weep. I did every night.”
The gorgeously heartbreaking ambience of the tune was only possible thanks to a sudden brainwave McVie had in the dead of night. Penning her vital hit in just half an hour and knowing she had struck gold, she refused to sleep through the remainder of the small hours until she could get to the studio the following day—out of sheer fear that she would forget the chord structure and melody. In many ways, it was the mark of the woman as an artist that she didn’t doze off—because if she had, we may never have been blessed with one of music’s most delicate and soul-wrenching ballads.
‘Everywhere’
On a resoundingly more upbeat note – and jumping ten years into the future – we can see that McVie’s impact was well and truly ‘Everywhere’ on the Fleetwood Mac back catalogue as it was she who also penned the seminal hit from 1987’s Tango in the Night. But this deceptive tune, simple as it may seem, turns into a treasure trove the more you delve into its depths, beginning with that shimmering shower of electric twinkling.
Sonically, this marked a transition for Fleetwood Mac in reflecting the world of musical trends at large because, complete with sparkling guitar riffs and a symphony of synthesisers, the classic rock band were surfing into the new wave with nonchalant ease. Combined with McVie’s straightforward but deeply intricate lyrics, the overall effect creates a smooth blend of easy listening that caressingly worms your mind and makes itself at home there.
Granted, this description makes it sound as if the whole song was produced on free-flowing rivers of liquid gold—but that was far from the case. In true Fleetwood Mac style, the development of ‘Everywhere’ and the album it hails from was fraught with tension, including an argument with Nicks over the use of her backing vocals on the track and Buckingham ultimately walking away from the band at the end of the project. It may have marked a new era, both sonically and personally, but if anyone was going to come in clutch, it was McVie.
‘You Make Loving Fun’
However, while the Nicks-Buckingham brawl may have dominated Fleetwood Mac’s romantic headlines, McVie wasn’t entirely innocent either. Although she split from John in 1976, it was during that notorious period for the band that another classic McVie hit was penned—though admittedly, not from the most moral of places.
‘You Make Loving Fun’ was famously written by McVie about her affair with the band’s lighting engineer, Curry Grant, raising the already burning heat that fuelled the process of Rumours to a blazing inferno. Sensing that the truth probably wouldn’t go down well, to say the least, McVie hilariously told John that the song was about her dog – but if he believed her feelings towards man’s best friend were so powerful as to warrant lyrics like: “Don’t, don’t break the spell/ It would be different and you know it will/ You, you make loving fun/ And I don’t have to tell you, but you’re the only one,” well, hell mend him.
Again, the key to the jackpot in McVie’s lyrics is their simplicity. There aren’t any contrived metaphors or flowery language within her walls – just pure and universal words that speak to everyone and don’t pretend to be above their station. It might be a basic technique, but there’s a lot to be learned in the fact that the best songs are the ones that strip things back. Certainly, in ‘You Make Loving Fun’, there’s little room for the imagination.
‘Hold Me’
‘Hold Me’ is a bit of a dark horse in the Fleetwood Mac canon, having a pretty mixed critical reception across the board, but McVie’s lyrics are the exception to that statement. Although breaking into the US top five for a then-record-setting seven consecutive weeks, the song failed to chart at all back over on British shores, representing the beginning of a particularly turbulent commercial chapter for the band, which only proved to tear them apart further.
Nevertheless, ‘Hold Me’ provides a refreshing tonic that is all at once original but also hails back to the past. Written about McVie’s failed luck with The Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson and performed as a duet between herself and Buckingham, it’s a tune with an up-tempo piano beat and soaring vocal wails somewhat akin to ‘Bennie and the Jets’.
Although rooted a decade apart in the different sonic eras of glam and pop rock, respectively, the two songs converge on a point of sonic bounciness that particularly sends ‘Hold Me’ into the stratosphere. It stands as a testament to McVie’s consistency as a writer that the track is still hailed as a standout from 1982’s Mirage in the hopes of putting bad flavour behind the band for a time and heading them down the right sonic track.
‘Little Lies’
Lastly, it could only be the synth sucker punch of ‘Little Lies’ that rounds out this list in epic style. In many ways, if any other artist had penned this classic tune, you can be sure they’d be dining out on it for all of eternity, but it turns out McVie was a bit less effusive when it came to recounting her process for any young wannabe writers who clamoured to learn from her mastery.
During a 2017 interview with Mojo, McVie was asked about the song and its possible influences from her marriage to fellow musician and songwriter Eddy Quintela, to which she wryly responded: “‘Little Lies’ was very much my song, and it’s not about me, and it’s not about Eddy. It’s just a song I wrote, lying out by my pool with a pad and paper and that’s what I came up with. Counter-vocals written across Lindsey’s tune and… I just kind of made it up.”
While you’d think someone with such a commanding way with words could come up with a better answer than essentially just plucking things out of thin air, this was unapologetically McVie’s style to a tee. No airs and graces, frills, or excessive extras, just lyrics laid bare that a band with such electric force had no issue in bringing to life. Maybe more than the deceit and the drama, that was Fleetwood Mac’s secret weapon – McVie was their unassuming wordsmith, with whose simple blueprint they could take the world by storm.
