The song Lindsey Buckingham said best defined Stevie Nicks: “Coming together”
There was never a set formula for how Fleetwood Mac were going to work when Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks came on board. Both of them were more than capable artists who could turn anything into gold, but given that the band had been working as a blues outfit and pivoted towards pop earlier in their career, how would the rest of the world react to them going to the polar opposite of the blues on songs like ‘Landslide’? It was never going to be an easy fit, but Buckingham felt that the right song could make anyone understand their appeal within a few seconds.
Then again, it was never going to be easy to create that kind of magic in the studio. The entire history of making Rumours isn’t something anyone would wish upon their worst enemy, and yet the band managed to hunker down and create the kind of album that anyone could fall in love with when they heard it. It was solid radio-rock gold from front to back, but it’s not like Buckingham also didn’t have a little bitterness about the whole thing.
To put it bluntly, Buckingham was taking a lot of his anger out on whoever got in his way, and given how close he came to strangling one of the engineers during the recording, it’s not like he was willing to roll over and accept criticism all the time. But whereas the guitarist led with anger first, Nicks was the one who brought a sense of compassion to everything.
Whereas Green was the one making more fantastical concepts with his songs, Nicks took the basis of her witchy persona and spread it out through her entire career. Not everything that she did had to tie into her own lore about her persona, but when listening to a song like ‘Gold Dust Woman’ or even her solo hits like ‘The Edge of Seventeen’, it’s easy to sense that kind of spectral lady that would one day capture someone’s soul.
But that witch did have a heart of gold, and even Buckingham could recognise that when listening to ‘Dreams’, saying, “We were all writing about each other on Rumours, but that song also represents a sort of a quintessential marriage of what Stevie brought to the table and what I brought to the table for her. It speaks to the quintessential essence of what we could be together, in terms of her and me coming together and adding our own things to make something greater than the sum of its parts.”
While it might be harsh to say that about a song that was all about Nicks leaving Buckingham behind, but you’d hardly notice that if you didn’t know the context. The fallout of their breakup got more than a little bit ugly, but even when they fought it out in the studio, you can hear that Nicks still has a fondness for that time and is more than happy to remember those days while the rain washes them clean.
Although ‘Silver Springs’ might do a better job at painting the picture of their fallout, ‘Dreams’ is still a core piece of Fleetwood Mac’s history because of how much the rest of the band brings to it. Outside of ‘The Chain’, this might be the most important song on the record for the rest of the band, from Buckingham’s subtle guitar touches to John McVie giving them the perfect pulse behind everything.
The entire road to making Rumours may have spelt disaster for any other band, but the power of Nicks has always been her unwavering dedication to the muse before anything else. The world could have been on fire as she was playing, but if she knew she was on the verge of magic, none of that mattered.
