Fleetwood Mac

100 Best Albums

Essential Albums

  • Tusk (Remastered)
    Tusk (Remastered)
    Tusk (Remastered)

    The myth of Tusk as a gloriously self-destructive failure on which the band’s excess got the better of them is at best partly true. Yes, Lindsey Buckingham felt challenged by the energy and innovation of punk rock. Yes, he recorded vocal takes in a push-up position on the tiled floor because he thought it’d make them sound more aggressive. And if you were one of the 10 million people who bought into the smoothness of Rumours, the geometric abrasions of ”The Ledge”, “What Makes You Think You’re the One” and “Tusk” might make your skin crawl. As Stevie Nicks puts it, Buckingham is the kind of person who would die on his cross to make a point. So when the band’s record company encouraged them to stay their extremely lucrative course, Buckingham not only declined, he went off-road. But to write off an album that had three Top 20 singles (“Tusk”, “Sara”, “Think About Me”) and sold several million copies says more about the band’s success than any perception of their failure. Buckingham’s contributions are amazing—a bridge between punk, art-rock and the highly constructed pop of early Brian Eno. But what makes Tusk remarkable as an album is hearing the band’s songwriters—Buckingham, Nicks and Christine McVie—push further into their differences without losing a shared centre. Where Fleetwood Mac and Rumours made them sound uniform and balanced, Tusk works like a prism, splitting their sound into its constituent parts: The mellow romanticism of McVie (“Over & Over”, “Brown Eyes”, “Honey Hi”), the ethereality of Nicks (“Sara”, “Sisters of the Moon”, “Beautiful Child”), the itchiness of Buckingham. If you’re coming from the underground, you could wonder whether Tusk holds its own with Talking Heads, The Clash, Wire or even Neil Young, whose Rust Never Sleeps incorporated punk in an even more direct way. But most people are listening to Tusk because it’s an album by Fleetwood Mac, and will leave with their expectations duly screwed up.

  • Rumours
    Rumours
    Rumours

    100 Best Albums To understand what made Rumours so impactful, you have to look at the music that came out around it. This was the era of the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt: artists who, like Fleetwood Mac, combined the intimacy of singer-songwriters with a softened take on rock ’n’ roll. But it was also the era of Boston, Foreigner, Pink Floyd and a wave of bands that scaled up the ambition of ’60s rock to blockbuster heights—stuff that parents who loved doo-wop and early Beatles records might not care about, but millions of teenagers would. Not to mention Barry Manilow and Neil Diamond, ABBA and the Bee Gees, and The Clash and Patti Smith—all of whom were totally different, but who collectively drove pop-rock to greater extremes of showmanship, polish and rebellion. And there, in the middle of the road, is Rumours. When they rock, they do it gently (“The Chain”), but with a bite that sets them apart from their adult-contemporary contemporaries (“Go Your Own Way”). And while they capture the carefree positivity of the good life (and the Baby Boomers living it), they don’t shy away from the pains it took to get there (“Don’t Stop”, “Dreams”). As beautifully as their musical personalities meld (the blues-raised rhythm section of Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, the romanticism of Christine McVie, pop perfectionism of Lindsey Buckingham and mysticism of Stevie Nicks), you can always hear them tugging gently on each other, an internal drama that’s all the more poignant given how restrained the final product is. Radical? No: In some ways, Rumours sounds like it doesn’t know the wilder developments of the late 1960s—psychedelia, experimental and progressive rock—even happened. But for an album that went on to sell more than 10 million copies, it’s tougher and more unsettling than it probably should be. The band has given plenty of interviews over the years attesting to how they strove to serve the song, no matter how painful or personal—which, in the context of Buckingham’s “Go You Own Way” or Nicks’ “Dreams”, must’ve been very, let alone John McVie backing up his newly ex-wife on a song about how fulfilled she is in her current relationship (“You Make Loving Fun”). Co-producer Ken Caillat remembers watching Buckingham and Nicks scream at each other during recordings, only to compose themselves just in time for the tape to start rolling. It’s a good metaphor: Even if you ignore the album’s soap opera (which included the implosion of three relationships, two of them between couples in the band), Rumours captures the pain of a band keeping it perfectly together while in the midst of falling apart.

  • Fleetwood Mac
    Fleetwood Mac
    Fleetwood Mac

    When Mick Fleetwood walked into Sound City studios in 1974, he wasn’t just looking for a place to record, he was looking for a place to start over. The band had lost four vocalists in as many years, and were on the wane both critically and commercially. So when producer Ken Olsen played Fleetwood an album by a middling folk-rock duo called Buckingham Nicks (just to test the sound), and Fleetwood liked the guitar playing, he figured, why not? Even when Buckingham said he and Nicks were a package deal, Fleetwood was unfazed: After all, they’d met, gotten along, and figured it might be interesting to have two female singer-songwriters in a band, not to mention two couples. Why does Fleetwood Mac work so well? Balance. Fleetwood and John McVie—the band’s rhythm section—came from blues, but never quite crossed the threshold into hard rock, and they took to their new pop material without friction. Buckingham the chippy perfectionist (“Monday Morning”) is a foil for Nicks the mystic (“Rhiannon”), and Nicks the West Coast Earth mama (“Landslide”) a foil for Christine McVie the sophisticate (“Warm Ways”). Together they resolve the oxymoron not just of ”soft rock”, but of “folk pop”, creating, as though through spontaneous combustion, a sound commercial enough to sell millions, and personal enough to make those millions feel like the music is whispering something secret about their own lives. On being reminded by John McVie that they were supposed to be a blues band, Olsen famously assured him that what they were doing now was a much faster way to the bank. But the beauty of the album’s creation is that nobody in the band seemed to expect it, and everyone shared in it equally. As Mick Fleetwood later put it, Buckingham Nicks didn’t join Fleetwood Mac—the two bands became one.

  • Then Play On (Expanded Edition) [2013 Remaster]
    Then Play On (Expanded Edition) [2013 Remaster]
    Then Play On (Expanded Edition) [2013 Remaster]

    Mick Fleetwood says that when people ask about his favourite Fleetwood Mac album, he always mentions two: 1979’s Tusk and 1969’s Then Play On. It’s an unusual pair, but a poetic one: Not only did both come after commercial breakthroughs (Tusk after Rumours; Then Play On after the two albums that made up their 1968 debut), but they marked crucibles in the band’s creative development—or, as Fleetwood puts it in his memoir, moments when the band played with their back against the wall. With Then Play On, the pressure was strongest from Peter Green, a lead singer so averse to fame and the stagnancy he feared came with it that he started giving his royalty money to charity. Listen to the album alongside not only Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath but the Beatles’ White Album, and you hear a band facing, gracefully, in two directions: On the one hand, toward the homey conservatism of English blues (“Fighting For Madge”, “Show-Biz Blues”), but also toward hybrids of folk and psychedelia that capture the beginning of art and progressive rock (“Coming Your Way”, “When You Say”). To Fleetwood’s point, Then Play On tells you as much about the ’70s as Tusk tells you about the vacuum-sealed pop of the ’80s. But if you want a song that nobody had written before and nobody has quite written since, listen to “Oh Well”, which both Fleetwood and Christine McVie thought was so sad that they bet Green it wouldn’t even chart. It made it to No. 2. Green left the band six months later.

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About Fleetwood Mac

Tension can be a great motivator for a band, and no group has put that maxim to the test quite like Fleetwood Mac, a ’60s British blues-rock outfit that—through a series of lineup changes, stylistic shifts and rocky internal romances—became the paragons of ‘70s Californian pop. Since the band’s formation in London in 1967, drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie have served as both the rhythmic and spiritual anchors for a group that has hosted a revolving-door procession of outsized personalities, starting with Peter Green, the budding guitar god responsible for early hits like “Black Magic Woman” (famously covered by Santana) and the tranquil instrumental “Albatross” (which The Beatles admittedly aped on their Abbey Road track “Sun King”). After Green quit in 1970, the band cycled through different frontmen—Danny Kirwan and Bob Welch among them—while their keyboardist, McVie’s wife Christine, emerged as a female vocal foil. After a relocation to L.A., they welcomed singer/songwriter Lindsey Buckingham and his musical/romantic partner Stevie Nicks into the fold, heralding Fleetwood Mac’s transition into soft-rock hitmakers on their 1975 self-titled effort. But Nicks’ star turns on “Rhiannon” and “Landslide” revealed a darker mystique at the core of their easygoing sound and, as sudden success caused the long-term relationships within the band to disintegrate, their next release effectively invented a new genre: rock album as couples therapy. On 1977’s Rumours, Fleetwood Mac dressed up the bitterest break-up songs in the smoothest, sultriest arrangements to the tune of over 40 million copies sold; the album’s appeal is so universal that it’s been both cited by Courtney Love as an influence and used to soundtrack Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign. But the band were eager to play against pop-star type—1979’s double-album colossus Tusk betrayed Buckingham’s affinity for post-punk, and though it was deemed a commercial disappointment at the time, it has since been embraced as a cult classic by discerning indie rockers. And even as more streamlined ‘80s efforts like Mirage and Tango in the Night reasserted their pop panache, Fleetwood Mac have remained a cauldron of drama and intra-band acrimony, the principal members seemingly coming and going without warning. In the wake of Buckingham’s departure in 2018, the group enlisted Crowded House singer Neil Finn and Tom Petty sideman Mike Campbell. Christine McVie, who wrote some of the band’s biggest songs, including “Don’t Stop”, “You Make Lovin' Fun” and “Over My Head”, died in November 2022 at the age of 79.

ORIGIN
London, England
FORMED
July 1967
GENRE
Rock

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