Fleetwood Mac's story spans decades, from British Blues to California Rock, smooth sunshine, to haunting breakup bangers. They've done it all. Being the greatest soap opera is hard work. From their Sixties origins in the English blues-rock scene to their Seventies reinvention as California rock superstars, through their smooth Eighties hits and right up to today. Through it all, there’s been brutal romantic blowups and historic levels of drug use.
Despite the often unconventional nature of the band, their magic has always been in he songs. They began as a vehicle for the blues visions of tragic genius Peter Green, continued through fascinating, often overlooked, transitional records during the early Seventies with Jeremy Spencer, Danny Kirwan and Bob Welch, and hit an astonishing peak when songbird Christine McVie, mad drummer Mick Fleetwood and ultra-reliable bassman John McVie hooked up with the Southern California songwriting team of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks.
They are one of the world's most well-known and well-loved bands, with an arsenal of great songs. Here are my 10 favourites.
Released as the fourth single from the band's 1987 album 'Tango in the Night' and the band's final song to break the American Top 20. Written by Christine McVie, who also takes lead vocals on the song, it's one of the highlights and a highlight of the band's 80s output.
McVie had a real pop sensibility, where her bandmate Stevie Nicks would create these mystical, mythical affairs like 'Gold Dust Woman', McVie would write straight-forward pop bangers. 'Everywhere' is a straightforward love song, about the giddy nature of falling in love. Describing the feeling of acting percussively due to this newfound romance.
Everything about this song works; the melody is infectious, the chorus massive, and the song's theme universally relatable. It's so catchy and perfectly encapsulates the pop side of the band. Dare I say, I think it's underrated. Fleetwood Mac fans often don't give it the credit it deserves.
The song's recording was not as free and easy as the melody; it was fraught with tension. After an early session without Nicks, the band had a recording of 'Everywhere'. Nicks heard the talk and was less than impressed that she was not included. (She’d been largely absent from the Tango sessions due to her touring schedule and a stint in the Betty Ford Centre.) Her vocals were eventually added, and she’s since warmed to the tune. “It just shows you that Christine is the hit songwriter in Fleetwood Mac,” she said of 'Everywhere'.
Like so many of the great Fleetwood Mac siblings, Gypsy has its roots in the everlasting romance between Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham. Nicks said of the romance, “We write about each other, we have continually written about each other, and we’ll probably keep writing about each other until we’re dead.”
'Gypsy' looks back to the days when here and Buckingham were a pair of lovestruck, struggling songwriters in San Francisco. At this time, Nicks used to visit a downtown store called the Velvet Underground, where Janis Joplin and Grace Slick shopped, fantasising about being able to afford the clothes. She told herself, “I’m not buying clothes, but I’m sure as hell standing in the place where the great women have stood.” By 1982, she could afford to buy the whole damn store – but in 'Gypsy,' she looks back to the freedom of those early days.
As Nicks said in 1988, “In the song ‘Gypsy’ it says, ‘Going back to the Velvet Underground/Back to the floor.’ … which means my bed went back on the floor. … There’s a part of that [era] that there will never be again.”
It's a song that is one that still resonates with its writer all of these years later. A song about her start as a songwriter, the start of her time with Buckingham. Despite having met at school, they did not start a serious relationship with each other until college. Where they started the duo Buckingham Nicks. They barely got by with the income from Nick's work as a waitress and cleaning lady. They could not afford a bed frame, so they slept on a mattress directly on the floor. Nicks says the mattress was decorated in lace, with a vase and a flower at its side.
Nicks has said Whenever she feels her famous life getting to her, she goes 'back to her roots,' and takes her mattress off the frame and puts it 'back to the floor' and decorates it with 'some lace, and paper flowers."
One of Nick's most underrated classics. A brilliant song.
A song from the band's 1975 self-titled album, and the band's first American Top 10 Hit. Written by Nicks after reading the novel 'Triad' by Mary Bartlettt Leader, a book she had picked up in an airport just a few months before she and Lindsay Buckingham had joined Fleetwood Mac.
The book tells the story of a Welsh woman who believes she’s been possessed by another woman, named Rhiannon. “I wrote this song and made her into what I thought was an old Welsh witch,” Nicks said. “It’s just about a very mystical woman that finds it very, very hard to be tied down in any kind of way.” Envisioning a “Welsh country song,” Nicks began with stark, autumnal piano chords, around which Buckingham built a guitar part. “I tend to want to add rhythm and to rock it up,” he recalled. Nicks later learned that Rhiannon was a character from Welsh mythology,
The Welsh legend of Rhiannon is mentioned in the novel, but the characters in the novel bear little resemblance to their original Welsh namesake.
Unlike the other songs on 'Fleetwood Mac', which generally only required five attempts or fewer to achieve a satisfactory take, 'Rhiannon' took longer to finalise. Keith Olsen, who produced the song, explained that "it was one of those songs that took over a day to get the basic track, and we're on analogue tape. The first pass was kind of magical, but had too many mistakes. The second pass was pretty good, but didn't have the magic, and from there it went downhill. But I kept those two". After the band returned to the studio the following afternoon, Olsen took some two-inch recording tape and looped certain sections, although this resulted in "mini scars" in some of the cymbal crashes. The best parts from the previous session were spliced together to create the final version that appeared on the album. Olsen reckoned that around 14 or 15 cuts were required to piece the song together.
When Nicks performed the song live, she often introduced it as "a song about an old Welsh witch." During 1975–1982, Fleetwood Mac's live performances of 'Rhiannon' took on a theatrical intensity not present on the FM-radio single. The song built to a climax in which Nicks's vocals were so impassioned that, as drummer and band co-founder Mick Fleetwood recalled, "her Rhiannon in those days was like an exorcism.
The song is one of the band's most well-loved songs. Alexis Petridis of The Guardian ranked the song number seven on his list of the 30 greatest Fleetwood Mac songs. He called the song's guitar riff "perfect" and thought that the rest of the music was both "coolly understated and atmospheric. Paste ranked the Rhiannon number six on its list of the 30 greatest Fleetwood Mac songs and described it as "the first career-defining song Fleetwood Mac ever assembled.
Courtney Love describes it best, though. She’s like your fairy-princess godmother, who lives in a magical kingdom somewhere and has, like, fabulous romances. It's the band's first classic, and would set up an an era-defining run.
Another Christine McVie classic and the B-side to arguably the band's most well-loved song, 'Dreams', 'Songbird' is the song that makes us all cry. Her former husband, John McVie, recalled that "When Christine played 'Songbird', grown men would weep. I did every night."
Written by McVie in half an hour around midnight, but didn't have anyone around to record it. To ensure she did not forget the chord structure and melody, McVie remained awake the entire night. The next day, McVie played the song for producer Ken Caillat at the Sausalito Record Plant.
“I woke up in the middle of the night, and the song just came into my head. “I got out of bed, played it on the little piano I have in my room, and sang it with no tape recorder. I sang it from beginning to end: everything.” She added, “I can’t tell you quite how I felt. It was as if I’d been visited. It was a very spiritual thing. I was frightened to play it again in case I’d forgotten it.”
”In his autobiography, Fleetwood said, “We wanted the song to sound like Chris was singing it at the end of the night, after a show to an empty house.”
On an album full of classics, 'Songbird' often gets overlooked or forgotten. I simply could not forget about this son; it's an outpouring of poor emotion that relates to us all.
“It doesn’t really relate to anybody in particular; it relates to everybody,” said McVie in a 2017 interview on the meaning of the song. “A lot of people play it at their weddings or at bar mitzvahs or at their dog’s funeral. It’s universal. It’s about you and nobody else. It’s about you and everybody else. That’s how I like to write songs.”
A song loved by fans and also the band that played it. The sessions for 'Rumours' were fraught with drugs, infighting and breakups; 'Songbird' sits at the focal point of the record. When McVie played the song for them, they all realised how much they loved one another.
Drummer Mick Fleetwood named the McVie classic as his funeral song. “I’d probably pick ‘Songbird’ by Christine McVie, to send me off fluttering.”
Written by Nicks just before she joined Fleetwood Mac, at the age of 27. It's a song that tackles the passing of time and growing old. With some of the finest lyrics ever put on a Fleetwood Mac record.
"Well, I've been fraid of changin'
'Cause I've built my life around you
But time makes you bolder
Even children get older
And I'm gettin' older, too"
Nicks has said she wrote the song while contemplating either going back to school or continuing orofessionally with guitarist Lindsey Buckingham. At the time, Nicks was financially supporting both herself and Buckingham by taking up jobs as both a waitress and a cleaning lady. Following the release of their debut album 'Buckingham Nicks', they had been dropped from their recording contract by Polydor Records before they could release a follow-up. Nicks wrote the song while visiting Aspen, Colorado, sitting in someone's living room, "looking out at the Rocky Mountains, pondering the avalanche of everything that had come crashing down on us ... At that moment, my life truly felt like a landslide in many ways.
The fear in the song is real: When Nicks wrote 'Landslide,' she and Buckingham had only been in L.A. for two years. She waitressed at a singles bar. “It makes me remember how beautiful and frightening it all was,” Nicks said. “Asking each other, ‘Now what? Should we go back to San Francisco? Should we quit?’ We were scared kids in this big, huge, flat city where we had no friends and no money. But we didn’t quit.” The world has been taking 'Landslide' to heart ever since.
The excess would come later, the drugs, the parties, the marriages, ultimately the breakups. However, there is a real human element to a lot of Fleetwood Mac songs. I guess that's why they are so well-loved.
The studio was a tense place when the band were recording 'Rumours', the whole band were experiencing emotional upheavals. Christine McVie and John McVie were separating, while Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks were ending their eight-year relationship. "We had to go through this elaborate exercise of denial," explained Buckingham to Blender magazine, "keeping our personal feelings in one corner of the room while trying to be professional in the other."
The songs on the album were the band exercising their thoughts and feelings. 'Dreams' is Stevie's version of events within the breakup of her and Buckingham. Writing the song in 1976 at Record Plant studio in Sausalito, California. "One day when I wasn't required in the main studio," Nicks told Blender magazine. "I took a Fender Rhodes piano and went into another studio that was said to belong to Sly Stone, of Sly and the Family Stone. It was a black-and-red room, with a sunken pit in the middle where there was a piano, and a big black-velvet bed with Victorian drapes.
"I sat down on the bed with my keyboard in front of me," continues Nicks. "I found a drum pattern, switched my little cassette player on and wrote 'Dreams' in about 10 minutes. Right away I liked the fact that I was doing something with a dance beat, because that made it a little unusual for me."
It's a drowsy, haze filled epic on the breakup of one of rocks most iconic relationships. The second part to the story, which plays out on 'Rumours'. Buckingham would relay his version of events on 'Go Your Own Way'. There is a bitterness there, but the anger is more dismissive turning her rancour and sadness into one of the most iconic pop songs of the 1970s. Saying of the song “In ‘Go Your Own Way’ Lindsey is saying go ahead and date other men and go live your crappy life, and I'm singing about the rain washing you clean. We were coming at it from opposite angles, but we were really saying the same exact thing.”
The song has gone on to become one of the bands most well loved songs. In the United States 'Dreams' reached the number-one spot on the Billboard Hot 100 chart on 18 June 1977, and held it for one week. On the Adult Contemporary chart, 'Dreams' peaked at number 11, making it the band's highest-charting single on that chart during the 1970s. On the UK Singles Chart, 'Dreams' went to number 24, staying in the top 40 for eight weeks.
'Dreams' was Nicks’ hazy, dreamlike version of events, but 'Go Your Own Way' is Buckingham’s angst-filled retort, written squarely about the collapse of his eight-year relationship with Stevie. He began sketching it out in 1976, before sessions for 'Rumours' officially started, during a period when the band were holed up together in Florida.
With its inverted, stomping drumbeat and taut, aggressive guitar lines, the track marked a hard-driving departure from the soft “California rock” label that had been pinned on Fleetwood Mac. Buckingham admitted he’d been inspired by the rhythmic energy of the Rolling Stones’ 'Street Fighting Man', but when Mick Fleetwood couldn’t quite replicate it, he created his own unique take, a syncopated, lopsided groove that ended up defining the song. Released as the first single from 'Rumours', 'Go Your Own Way' climbed into the Top Ten and quickly became a staple closer in the band’s live sets, its defiance ringing out as the final word.
The song, of course, wasn’t just a technical triumph—it was a lyrical dagger. Stevie Nicks bristled at the infamous line “packing up, shacking up’s all you wanna do.” “I very, very much resented him telling the world that was all I wanted to do,” she later told Rolling Stone. “He knew it wasn’t true. It was just an angry thing he said. Every time those words came out onstage, I wanted to go over and kill him.”
For Buckingham, the song captured both fury and vulnerability. He admitted that writing and recording it while trying to stay professionally linked to Nicks who had firmly ended things was agonizing. Yet that tension is exactly what powered 'Go Your Own Way' into becoming one of rock’s greatest breakup anthems.
If 'Dreams' is the dreamy haze of loss, 'Go Your Own Way' is the punch in the gut. The first installment in what might be the greatest breakup dialogue ever pressed to vinyl.
The Nicks and Buckingham situation is the one that people are drawn to with 'Rumours', but as mentioned earlier, the whole band was dealing with relationship turmoil at the time. 'You Make Loving Fun' was Christine McVie’s contribution to that storm, written about her affair with the band’s lighting director, Curry Grant. To keep the peace, she told her then-husband and bandmate, John McVie, that the song was actually about her dog. A rather bad lie, but one that shows just how tense things were inside Fleetwood Mac in 1976.
By that point, Christine had grown weary of John’s heavy drinking and their failing marriage, so she looked for happiness elsewhere and then channeled it into a song. What emerged was 'You Make Loving Fun', a buoyant, funk-tinged celebration of rediscovered joy and desire. It’s not just a love song, it’s a snapshot of Christine leaning into rock-star freedom at a time when the rest of her world was collapsing.
The irony, of course, is that John McVie plays bass on the track a man unknowingly anchoring the groove to his wife’s ode to another lover. That surreal dynamic was just part of the fabric of 'Rumours'. Co-producer Ken Caillat recalled the tension vividly: during sessions for 'You Make Loving Fun', he watched Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham launch into a vicious argument, only to instantly pull it together once the tape rolled. “They’d sing, ‘Yooooooou make loving fun,’ like two little angels,” he said. “The tape would stop, and they’d be back to hurling insults at each other. They didn’t miss a beat.”
Musically, the track is one of the most upbeat and shimmering moments on 'Rumours'. Christine’s warm, soulful vocals float over a steady groove, anchored by John’s bass and Mick Fleetwood’s tight drumming. There’s a subtle funk undercurrent to the rhythm, something that made it stand apart from the rest of the record’s folk-rock leanings. The use of the Fender Rhodes electric piano gives it that glowing, honeyed texture, a sound Christine was known for and which became one of the band’s signatures.
Released as the album’s fourth single in September 1977, 'You Make Loving Fun' climbed to number nine on the Billboard Hot 100, proving that Christine’s songs were just as essential to Fleetwood Mac’s success as the more dramatic, soap-opera material from Nicks and Buckingham. In fact, she contributed four songs to 'Rumours': 'Don’t Stop', 'Songbird', 'Oh Daddy', and 'You Make Loving Fun'.
Thematically, the track brings a rare sense of lightness to an otherwise turbulent album. Where so many of the songs on 'Rumours' wrestle with heartbreak, bitterness, and fractured trust, Christine’s ode to a new lover feels like a small victory, a reminder that joy can still surface in the wreckage. That contrast is part of what gives the album its emotional weight: for every 'Go Your Own Way' or 'Dreams', there’s a song like 'You Make Loving Fun' offering a counterpoint.
Hidden as the b-side to 'Go Your Own Way', 'Silver Springs' may be the finest song that Nicks brought to the table in Fleetwood Mac. Written in 1976 for 'Rumours' but ultimately not making the album due to time constraints. 'Dreams' had been her hazy, drowsy epic. 'Silver Springs' is her outpouring of emotion, she affects on 'Dreams' cracks, and jealousy, misery and dire imprecations gush forth, alongside a prescient warning to Buckingham: “The sound of my voice will haunt you.”
Inspired by a sign she saw whilst out on the road, she used it as the metaphor of what could have been of her relationship with Buckingham. I wrote "Silver Springs" about Lindsey. And we were in Maryland somewhere driving under a freeway sign that said Silver Springs. And I loved the name… Silver Springs sounded like a pretty fabulous place to me. And 'You could be my silver springs' – that's just a whole symbolic thing of what you could have been to me.
The band recorded the basic tracks for "Silver Springs" at the Record Plant in Sausalito on 11 February 1976 with drums, bass guitar, electric guitar, a Fender Rhodes electric piano, and a scratch vocal. Producer Ken Caillat has said this version had "a much harder feel" than the final mix. Two days later, the band recorded 19 more takes, but none were deemed satisfactory. On the 14th, the band played the song to a click track to keep time. Christine McVie switched from the Fender Rhodes to a grand piano, which was in an isolation room to prevent audio spill from the drums. Buckingham's guitars were fed through a guitar amplifier in one room and a Leslie speaker in another. Nicks sang her vocals into a directional microphone in a siphoned-off section of the studio with sound baffles on the walls. Take eight was deemed satisfactory and used for overdubs
The intention was the band to released on 'Rumours'. However, due to its length and relatively slow tempo, the song was excluded from Rumours over Nicks' strenuous and repeated objections. In his book Making Rumours, Caillat described 'Silver Springs' as "gorgeous", "powerful", and "a masterpiece". He added, "there was only one problem: I knew the song was too long to fit on the album. Caillat offered Nicks the option of replacing 'Gold Dust Woman', another of her slower compositions, with 'Silver Springs', but the idea was not pursued.
In a 1997 documentary on the making of Rumours, engineer and co-producer Richard Dashut called it "the best song that never made it to a record album".
Years later, after Fleetwood Mac's 1990 Behind the Mask Tour, Nicks left the group over a dispute with Mick Fleetwood: the drummer would not allow her to release "Silver Springs" on her 1991 album 'Timespace The Best of Stevie Nicks' because he planned to include it on a forthcoming Fleetwood Mac box set.
A live version of 'Silver Springs' appeared on 'The Dance', Fleetwood Mac's 1997 reunion album "for posterity" according to Nicks. The Dance was recorded across three performances at Warner Bros. Studios. I never thought that 'Silver Springs' would ever be performed onstage again," Nicks reflected during a 1997 MTV interview. "My beautiful song just disappeared. For it to come back around like this has really been special to me."
The live concert footage for 'Silver Springs' was filmed on a sound stage in Burbank, California, on Friday May 23, 1997. Fred Schruers of Rolling Stone observed this performance and noted that Nicks "ripped the mike and turned toward her ex-lover with every semblance of smoldering anger and hurt", particularly on the lines 'You’ll never get away from the sound of the woman that loved you' and 'Was I just a fool?'
Twenty years after it's release one of Nick's masterworks finally got the recognition that it deserved.
Fleetwood Mac's greatest moments often happened in a year ending in 7. 'Rumours' in 1977, 'Tango in the Night' in 1987 and 'The Dance' in 1997. Despite not having the cultural impact of 'Rumours', 'Tango in the Night' contains some of the bands most well loved work. The previously mentioned everywhere, 'Little Lies', 'Big Love' and the exceptional 'Seven Wonders'.
Written Stevie Nicks and Sandy Stewart. In the song, the singer remembers a love affair from her past. She sings that even if she should live to see the Seven Wonders of the World, doing so would not compare to the beauty of that romance. The song was released in June 1987, by Warner Bros. Records, as the second single from Tango in the Night. The single became the second of four US Top 20 hits from the album, peaking at number 19 on the US Billboard Hot 100 on 15 August 1987.
Nicks delivered the demo tape of 'Seven Wonders' to Fleetwood Mac at a Halloween party; it was the first song that she submitted to the band for the 'Tango in the Night' album
The song is one of the most underrated songs from their career. Not bad for Nick's who was barley around in the sessions for this record due to being in and out of rehab.
The only song in the band’s history to credit all five members as writers, 'The Chain' is the sound of Fleetwood Mac stitching chaos into unity. It wasn’t written in one go; instead, it was created from scraps of previously rejected material, painstakingly assembled sometimes by literally splicing tape with a razor blade, at the Record Plant in Sausalito, with engineers Ken Caillat and Richard Dashut guiding the process.
According to interviews, the song’s final section the thunderous bass-led break came from John McVie and Mick Fleetwood. The roots of the track stretch back even further: it began life as a Christine McVie composition called 'Keep Me There', the very first track the band attempted for 'Rumours'. That early version, tracked on 2 February 1976, featured Fleetwood on drums, John on an Alembic bass, Christine on organ, and Buckingham playing a Fender Stratocaster.
Over time, the band reshaped it completely. They stripped away the blues-style motif from Christine’s original verses but kept its chord progression. Lindsey Buckingham then pulled in a fragment from an old duet with Stevie Nicks 'Lola (My Love)' from their 1973 Buckingham Nicks album to form the song’s new intro.
The lyrics came from Nicks, who donated a set she’d written separately for another song. Her words “If you don’t love me now, you will never love me again” gave the track its haunted backbone, a sharp reflection of the band’s collapsing relationships. She and Christine then worked together to refine the verses, weaving a shared voice of betrayal and defiance.
Because of its cut-and-paste construction, most of the instruments were tracked in isolation, with only Fleetwood’s drums and Buckingham’s guitar recorded live together. Yet the end result feels startlingly cohesive. That famous bass progression, thundering into the outro, ties the disparate parts together and turns the song into a dramatic climax.
Live, 'The Chain' took on an even bigger life, often swelling into a sprawling jam with Buckingham’s searing guitar solos and McVie’s bass rumble shaking the stage. Over time, it became one of the band’s most iconic songs a anthem born from fragments of rejects, a reminder that even in their most fractured state, Fleetwood Mac could still create something exceptional.
This had to be my Number One, there is no other Fleetwood Mac song that comes close to this one for me. For many in the UK the song is known as the Formula One theme tune. First used as the theme from 1978 until 1996 and again from 2009 to 2015.
The song is much more personal to me, it's a song i associate with a particular couple of people and a very specific time in my life. We all have those songs we carry with us through good times and bad, this song is one of mine. A defining statement by one of the world biggest bands and a song that I'll continue to take with me, wherever I go next.
Thank you for reading
Jack