The song so good it actually scared Christine McVie: “Jesus Christ!”
The drama of Fleetwood Mac‘s iconic album Rumours seemed to be unrelenting.
From the first track to the very last, this intra-band soap opera played out in its entirety, highlighting the lust, heartbreak and betrayal that existed within these five musical misfits, and while the musicality of the album holds up, rivalling anything from the rest of the 1970s, it was undeniably the goddamn drama of the record that captivated the audiences so much.
Stevie Nicks’ pop masterpiece ‘Dreams’ was lyrically reflective and bittersweet, in keeping with the atmospheric composition she had laid down. While her scorned ex-partner, Lindsey Buckingham, decided to sharpen his lyrical knife, to the sound of ‘Go Your Own Way’. That very conversational theme seemed to drag on throughout the record, making it a perfect album of musical tension.
While Buckingham and Nicks’ feud took centre stage on the record, Christine McVie and her ex-husband and bassist, John, quietly embarked on their own therapy. John laid down a truly brilliant bass line for ‘You Make Loving A Fun’, a song his ex-wife Christine had penned about her new lover and the band’s lighting technician, and so the pair fanned the flame of dramatic intrigue for the album.
But it was also Christine McVie who provided the record a much-needed sense of narrative rest. As Buckingham’s scorching hit ‘Go Your Own Way’ faded off into the ether, McVie’s stunning ballad ‘Songbird’ filled the void, providing an emotional segue for the record to step through and arguably contextualising all of the drama packed within it, as somewhat trivial.
For both Fleetwood Mac fans and McVie herself, it stands as perhaps the greatest ever track McVie contributed to the band. Unsurprisingly, a song as divine as ‘Songbird’ came to her in the middle of the night, amidst something of a musical fever dream.
“That was a strange little baby, that one,” she recalled. “I woke up in the middle of the night, and the song just came into my head, I got out of bed, played it on the little piano I have in my room, and sang it with no tape recorder… I sang it from beginning to end: everything. I can’t tell you quite how I felt; it was as if I’d been visited – it was a very spiritual thing. I was frightened to play it again in case I’d forgotten it.”
She continued, “I called a producer first thing the next day and said, ‘I’ve got to put this song down right now,’ I played it nervously, but I remembered it, everyone just sat there and stared at me… I think they were all smoking opium or something in the control room, I’ve never had that happen to me since… Just the one visitation, it’s weird.”
It rightly became an anthem for McVie, who was quietly regarded as the songbird of the band. And in this performance below, it’s clear just how moving her individual performance of that song truly is, and why everyone in the studio on that fateful day would have stood in awe.
