The song that made Christine McVie love Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham: “I couldn’t believe how great this was”
There was always going to be a bit of a dust-up whenever Fleetwood Mac brought in new members. Even though the band were one of the few acts that could swap out entire lineups and carry on as if nothing happened, bringing in a new vocalist or trying to manage an entire tonal shift would never be easy for any artist. And while Christine McVie was more than capable of making immaculate pop songs for the group, she had no idea what she was in for when Stevie Nicks was brought into the mix.
Then again, Nicks was only brought into the group on a technicality. The whole reason behind Lindsey Buckingham joining the band was down to his guitar skills, but since he and Nicks were still a couple, there was no way he was going to leave his singing partner high and dry once he started to hit the big time. And for all the turmoil Rumours brought with it, every piece of their self-titled White Album is all the proof fans needed that they were worth keeping around.
McVie was still incredibly dominant on most songs, but Buckingham had become a musical dynamo within a few weeks. While he would get a reputation for being too much of a perfectionist whenever he went into the studio, hearing him bring that relentless groove to ‘Monday Morning’ and keeping that initial spark to their version of ‘Blue Letter’ was a perfect balance to songs like ‘Over My Head.’
If anyone was looking at the group’s configuration, though, Nicks would have seemed like the weakest link. After all, she didn’t play an instrument onstage, and since she was surrounded by two more-than-capable lead singers, she needed to have something more to do than play the tambourine. But the minute she started singing in harmony with the rest of the group, McVie knew there was something different at work when she kicked into ‘Say You Love Me.’
Granted, the song itself would have already done the job on its own. McVie had been known for making these kinds of softer rock and roll tunes, but without the rest of the band singing with her, the whole thing sounded a bit dry. Everyone could bop along to it on the radio, but having the rest of the band come in with her in the rehearsal room made her hair stand on end when the song finished.
According to McVie, this was when she realised how important Nicks and Buckingham were to the band, saying, “When I reached the chorus, they started singing with me. I heard this incredible sound–our three voices–and said to myself, ‘Is this me singing?’ I couldn’t believe how great this three-voice harmony was. My skin turned to goose flesh, and I wondered how long this feeling was going to last.”
And looking at where the band went after Buckingham and Nicks’s debut, they would take advantage of those harmonies all the time. Even though Rumours is coated with harmony singing throughout many different songs, hearing the vocals layer on each other on later songs like ‘Little Lies’ is still one of the greatest examples of taking all their strengths and putting them under one roof.
Although there were bound to be more rocky moments throughout their career, calling one of their biggest songs ‘The Chain’ wasn’t done by accident. They had endured some of the biggest hurdles a band could face together over the years, and sometimes it was those harmonies that helped hold them in one piece.
