The “beautiful” 1982 song Christine McVie called one of Fleetwood Mac’s best
In the grand story of Fleetwood Mac, it’s easy to forget about what Christine McVie brought to the table.
She was their anchor in a lot of ways, and while everyone is usually going to be looking at Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham when combing through old footage of the band playing, Christine was the one everyone could depend on to make some of the prettiest songs of their career. But she also knew when one of her bandmates came up with something well beyond what she could do.
Then again, it’s not really fair to hold that against her when she first joined the group. Having to be in a band with someone like Peter Green usually meant competing for second place in any band, and even when he left, Bob Welch joining the band was a worthy competitor as well. Christine may have had the closest thing to pop hits around that time, but ‘Sentimental Lady’ is the kind of song that is just perfect all around.
But before Buckingham and Nicks even joined the band, Christine was going to have to be the deciding factor in the group. She could have carried the band all on her own if she wanted to, and if they had more people coming into the band, it was probably a good idea to have someone that she would have approved of. When you come in with the harmonies on a song like ‘Say You Love Me’, though, there was no way that she was going to pass up the opportunity.
What made all of them great was how well they worked off each other, and it was easy for Christine not to step on either of their toes when they joined. Buckingham had the perfectionist mindset that was completely different from what she was doing, but Nicks seemed to bottle up little bits of emotion every single time she played and air it out into the back of the room whenever ‘Rhiannon’ came up in the setlist.
The honeymoon period pretty much died the minute that they finished off Rumours, but it wasn’t like the good times were over. Nicks’s solo career did put a pause on any consistent material from them, but even if the 1980s weren’t necessarily the best era of the band, it did result in some of their best songs. ‘Little Lies’ and ‘Everywhere’ are some of the finest tunes that Christine had ever done, but she felt that nothing could compete with what Nicks did on ‘Gypsy’.
The whole song was dedicated to one of her friends that she lost, and hearing the ‘Gold Dust Woman’ and Buckingham put together this beautiful thing was heaven for Christine, saying, “I think ‘Gypsy’ stands out clearly as the best track on [that] album. Without a doubt. I just think the whole song came together in a very cohesive way. It’s very musical. Very melodic. All the parts are right. It’s just a very beautiful record.”
The pleasantries didn’t always extend to everything else going on with the making of the record, but this was a case of them slowly getting back into the swing of things. Nicks never was going to break up the band to try out a solo career, and if she could exist with one foot in both camps, it was well worth it knowing that we would be getting tunes like this every time she made a Fleetwood Mac project.
Because aside from having the best melody of any of Nicks’s songs, the key part of the song is that it touches on a nerve. Ever since Rumours, all that Fleetwood Mac was about was uncovering emotions, and you could hear that she was trying to capture the spirit of her friend every time she sang it.
