The Fleetwood Mac album Christine McVie never showed up for: “Watching it all fall apart”
No Fleetwood Mac recording session has necessarily screamed fun from the get-go. Although it’s nice when things are going well, when they were bad, things tended to go south quickly, either because of band members fighting or getting so blitzed on substances that they couldn’t get the tracks down. Christine McVie may have had a higher tolerance for bullshit throughout every album, but she finally had to step off by the time they worked on the album Time.
Then again, it would take something strong for McVie to give up for good. Considering she had continued to work with her husband, John McVie, throughout the Rumours despite his massive blowups in the studio, it felt like there wasn’t much drama that she hadn’t faced in the studio.
Maybe half the reason why it worked is that she put all of her emotions into the songs. Even though she may have been hurting from her recent separation and trying to move on, you would hardly think that anything was wrong half the time when listening to tracks like ‘Don’t Stop’ and ‘Songbird’.
While the 1980s threw the band for a loop with Lindsey Buckingham’s departure, it wasn’t like they weren’t in steady hands. By the time Stevie Nicks left in the 1990s, it looked like the group had become a husk of itself, with Bekka Bramlett, Dave Mason, and Billy Burnette not having nearly the same presence as their predecessors.
It doesn’t help that the album itself is a bit of a slog. Outside of a few token McVie songs and Mick Fleetwood singing for the first time on record, the entire album sounds completely flat. Fleetwood Mac always had a countryside to their sound, but this feels like the kind of album that you find in a bargain bin of a particularly run-down record store.
McVie couldn’t even be bothered to show up, either, telling Mojo, “I thought the music was suffering… Emotionally not there, physically not here. I just didn’t show up… I couldn’t bear watching it all fall apart. And I couldn’t keep peace with Dave Mason, I’m afraid. It was very acrimonious with him, and I just bailed.”
For as much production magic as they tried to work out, it’s easy to hear that too. Compared to the Mason and Bramlett songs, McVie’s pieces, such as ‘I Do’ and ‘Hollywood’, sound like they were recorded in a completely different space and sent to the others to add their spin to it to make it sound like a Fleetwood Mac project.
The darkness of this period wasn’t just limited to Fleetwood Mac, either. After getting out of rehab, Stevie Nicks rebuilt most of her career, trying to get back on her feet as a solo star before returning to the band with Lindsey Buckingham for the comeback live album The Dance.
If anything, their decision to reform the classic lineup shortly after this album dropped tells you everything you need to know about how they felt about it. Compared to artists who like to go down with the ship when it comes to failure, Time seems like one of the few albums where none of the classic lineup wants to acknowledge its existence.
