What is Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Dreams’ actually about?
In the history of music, there are countless albums made under immense pressure. Music, like all forms of art, is inescapably personal. It comes from a person’s mind, their heart. It comes from the deepest core of them, so it is impossible to separate from the emotional context it was born. But out of all those albums, few are born out of a tumultuous context that created Fleetwood Mac‘s Rumours and led to the writing of ‘Dreams’, Stevie Nicks’ opus.
The story of Rumours has been told time and time again, but it never seems to get less fascinating or less emotive. After Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham joined the band in 1974, the lineup was largely made of two couples; them and the married McVie’s. For one album, that was heaven as the duos, along with Mick Fleetwood on drums, found an incredible creative synergy.
But then, by the time the Rumours sessions of 1976 came around, it was hell. The McVie’s were divorcing, and Christine McVie was already moving on, forcing her husband to play on ‘You Make Loving Fun’, a song about an affair she’d had. Nicks and Buckingham were grappling with the breakup of a relationship they’d grown up in. After meeting in high school, moving away together to start music and building their careers together, their breakup was a devastating blow. Both situations were always going to be incredibly stressful and incredibly upsetting. But then add an album into the mix, force them all into the same room to hash out these feelings in song, and it became history-making emotional carnage that somehow delivered the band’s finest work.
Across the album, the battle between Nicks and Buckingham is heard vividly but in two very different ways. “It was the fairy and the gnome,” Nicks said. I was trying to be all philosophical. And he was just mad.”
Buckingham went first with his mad song. ‘Go Your Own Way’ lays it out straight and savagely and deeply enraged Nicks. “I very much resented him telling the world that ‘packing up, shacking up’ with different men was all I wanted to do. He knew it wasn’t true. It was just an angry thing that he said,” she told Rolling Stone as the song initially prompted her to storm out of the sessions.
But then she returned with her own response, a far more measured and emotional one, in the form of ‘Dreams’. While Buckingham uses plain speaking to express his feelings, Nicks’ version is her typically spiritual, metaphorical approach but realistically addresses the same issue.
What is ‘Dreams’ about?
‘Dreams’ is perhaps the ultimate example of a Stevie Nicks song as she weaves between imagery and laying it out. From hazy images of thunder, crystal visions and other loose metaphors, she then drops into straight shots like “players only love you when they’re playing”. That’s where the point of the song lies.
“We had to go through this elaborate exercise of denial, keeping our personal feelings in one corner of the room while trying to be professional in the other,” Buckingham said to Blender magazine about making this album. But after he’d let his emotions lead on ‘Go Your Own Way’, Nicks afforded herself the same freedom on ‘Dreams’. In the same way that Buckingham essentially says ‘go on then, leave, see if I care’, ‘Dreams’ says the same as she taught her ex-lover with the idea that he will always be haunted by “what you had / And what you lost”. She’s saying that Buckingham can leave, but he’ll never actually be free of her impact, similar to the hexing message of ‘Silver Springs’.
But when it comes to the titular lyric, meaning only in one verse, Nicks’ point seems to be more specific about their career. “It’s only me who wants to wrap around your dreams / And have you any dreams you’d like to sell? / Dreams of loneliness,” she sings. “I loved him before he was a millionaire. We were two kids out of Menlo-Atherton High School,” Nicks once said in a television interview, “I loved him for all the right reasons.” Having always been the person wrapped around or involved in his dreams as they collaborated together, the idea of her now being a vehicle to merely “sell” those dreams could potentially be a comment on the fact that they were now emotionally separated but financially and creatively linked as Nicks was now being asked to sing on songs like ‘Go Your Own Way’ and sells his dreams despite how they hurt her.
