How Fleetwood Mac had to rearrange one of Stevie Nicks’ biggest songs
There was only one Fleetwood Mac song that ever went to number one in America. The original version of the group fronted by guitar god Peter Green had landed a chart-topper in their home country of the UK with 1968’s dreamy guitar instrumental ‘Albatross’. But in America, it took a full decade, multiple lineup changes, and two dozen previous attempts before the Mac would flirt with the top of the pop charts.
When Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham joined the group in the mid-1970s, the group’s musical identity shifted closer to pop than ever before. Early tracks from the Buckingham-Nicks era like ‘Rihannon’ and ‘Say You Love Me’ just missed out on the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100, both peaking at number 11. The first single from the band’s massive 1977 album Rumours, ‘Go Your Own Way’, finally broke through, peaking at number 10. But it would be the second single that sent the group all the way to the top.
‘Dreams’ was a track that Stevie Nicks wrote during the album’s sessions. Taking a keyboard to a bedroom in the studio originally designed by Sly Stone, Nicks crafted the song around a minimal set of chords. “I sat down on the bed with my keyboard in front of me,” Nicks later told Blender. “I found a drum pattern, switched my little cassette player on and wrote ‘Dreams’ in about 10 minutes. Right away I liked the fact that I was doing something with a dance beat, because that made it a little unusual for me.”
Even though found the song in a sudden burst of creativity, the rest of the band weren’t taken with ‘Dreams’ at first. “They weren’t nuts about it,” Nicks recalled. “But I said ‘Please! Please record this song, at least try it.’ Because the way I play things sometimes… you really have to listen.”
“When Stevie first played it for me on the piano, it was just three chords and one note in the left hand,” Christine McVie remembered in the same Blender article. “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. He created the impression that there’s a thread running through the whole thing.”
“In order to take a song of hers, like ‘Dreams’, which needed so much construction around it to take those same two chords and make them evolve from section A to section B to section C,” Buckingham told Nile Rodgers in 2021. “And the love and the choice to do the right thing and to have the integrity to do that. It comes at a price sometimes, you know? It comes at the price of having your defences come up, and sometimes over a period of time, it’s hard to get those down.”
“It was most difficult for Lindsey because Stevie was the one who pulled away emotionally,” Mick Fleetwood would tell Blender. “He would say, ‘I’m doing this for her and making her music, but I can’t have closure.’”
