‘The Dance’: The song that brought Fleetwood Mac back together
If a band fell out the way Fleetwood Mac did in the late 1980s, it would be understandable if none of them wanted to be in the same room together ever again. The fights that had been boiling over between Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks had gotten way out of hand, and the amount of tension in the room whenever the group got onstage could only work for so long after Tango in the Night. Although Buckingham left after completing the album and Nicks only stuck around for one more record, ‘Bleed to Love Her’ planted the seed for everyone coming back.
When Buckingham first started work on the song, this was not supposed to be something that everyone would be involved in. Buckingham was notoriously a perfectionist when it came to his own songs, and if it was being reserved to go on one of his albums, he wasn’t going to just give it away on a Fleetwood Mac project.
Nicks was also going through her fair share of turmoil as she entered the early 1990s as well. Behind the Mask had been far from the greatest thing that she had ever made with the band, and her follow-up album Street Angel saw her becoming more and more dependent on drugs, to the point where she wanted to forget almost everything about the record.
Sometime between working on his solo record, though, Buckingham ended up needing a drummer for ‘Bleed To Love Her’ and ended up asking Mick Fleetwood to come into the studio to lay down a backing track. What could have just been a casual jam session led to almost every member sans Nicks in the room bringing this song to life.
After the classic lineup briefly got together for the inauguration of US President Bill Clinton, Buckingham remembered being convinced to come back to the band for the first time in years for The Dance, saying, “We started, and it was going great. Then we got John McVie in to play some bass. Then somebody at Warner Bros said–and this was probably their agenda all along–’Do you want to do a live Fleetwood Mac album?’. I was like, ‘No–but okay.’”
Even though the band members still had their personal differences to work through, The Dance is among one of the finest performances they have ever put out. Although most of the night was a combination of the band’s greatest material from their classic lineup, they sound much more powerful over time, including a breathtaking version of Nicks’s ‘Landslide’.
And while it wasn’t technically a Fleetwood Mac song, ‘Bleed To Love Her’ actually went over surprisingly well at the show. Buckingham still took centre stage for most of the track, but hearing Nicks’ wonderful harmony vocals over top of the main melody feels like the duo discovered that magic they had lost somewhere when recording Tusk.
It would take a few more years to hear the full band version of the song on the album Say You Will, but ‘Bleed To Love Her’ feels more like a mission statement than a song. This was the kind of music that was meant to bring people together, and while Buckingham may have written it about something else, it’s hard not to see the song as an ode to the music he made with his old friends.
