Stevie Nicks named the songwriter who “wrote most of the hits” for Fleetwood Mac
There aren’t many bands who have had their sound change so drastically as Fleetwood Mac did during their prime. While many people try to switch things up whenever they go into the studio, it all came down to who was in the band that dictated what they were going to sound like, whether that the blues touch of Peter Green, the rootsy angle of Lindsey Buckingham, or the dollar-store country-rock they were making when Billy Burnette was steering them in the 1990s. While many people look at the Rumours era as their major pop breakthrough, Stevie Nicks always knew that was only half the story.
When you think about it, though, many qualifiers come with someone trying to make a “pop” song. Even though that, by definition, means that they want to make a song that’s popular, there’s never an easy way to pin down what that necessarily means without riding whatever trends happen to be on the charts at any particular moment.
And in the case of Nicks and Buckingham, it felt like the mainstream caught up with them by the time Fleetwood Mac asked them to join. No one was necessarily belting out folk-rock tunes with as much gusto as Led Zeppelin were in their prime, but since the tide had been turning towards softer rock in the late 1970s, it wasn’t that much of a jump for someone to put a copy of Rumours right next to their Eagles and Tom Petty records on the shelf.
It also helps that every member of the band was a seasoned veteran of songwriting. While Buckingham had always been a perfectionist when it came to getting his parts right, there was always a mystical quality to Nicks’s songs that were never easy to conjure out of the air, which no doubt pissed him off to no end when he spent hours trying to match what she did naturally. But for all of their volatile moments, Christine McVie gets overshadowed far too often.
Outside of her phenomenal keyboard lines, Christine McVie was the one steering the ship for a while before the duo signed on, and that meant her songs like ‘Over My Head’ sounded a lot more lived-in by the time ‘Landslide’ and ‘Rhiannon.’ And when all the lights came down every night during her performance of ‘Songbird,’ she had practically developed a mathematical way of leaving no dry eye in the crowd by the time she was finished.
Although she might not have the recognition that Nicks and Buckingham did, Nicks felt that Christine was the true force behind their hits, saying, “Christine wrote most of the hits for the group – she was the major pop songwriter, not Lindsey or me. It’s hard to do that. I can’t sit down and write a hit single and plan it, and no amount of listening to other people’s records or music is going to make you a different songwriter.”
This is strange because Christine McVie started life as one of the best blues keyboardists in the scene before the band turned a corner. But even if traces of blues were still in their sound, hearing her play songs like ‘Little Lies’ and ‘You Make Loving Fun’ are always the highlight of watching any of those shows filmed during their prime or even their reunion concert The Dance.
And given how much she left the band with, it’s understandable why Nicks thought they couldn’t continue without her following her death. She may have been the connective tissue that connected them back to their bluesy roots, but Christine learned a long time ago that the blues is something that’s defined by the emotion in the music rather than the chords you play or the inflexions you put on every note.
