Rumours by Fleetwood Mac
Album #55: Rumours – Fleetwood Mac
"Loving you, isn’t the right thing to do”
It is astounding how heartbreak can sound so many ways when put to music. For some people the pain comes out with caustic indifference and sparse instrumentation, as in Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, while others put every instrument they can into intricate walls of sounds, like Brian Wilson in Pet Sounds; Fleetwood Mac’s heart pain often comes like a bird in flight to three-part harmonies.
Fleetwood Mac
This album tastes like chocolate cake by a master chef: Rich, layered, and almost cloyingly in its sweetness. 12-string guitars effortlessly glide like rainbows across sharp sexy electric guitars. Nicks, McVie and Buckingham have an almost disgusting sense of melody, as if they were dripped in honey.
It took a distressing number of listens to realize that this album is the product of a band in turmoil. The sounds, which are so pristine, neat, and saccharine, have none of the raw darkness I usually associate with heartbreak, divorce, and acrimony. If anything, the richness is only enhanced by this low-key darkness.
Against the backdrop of the McVie’s Divorce, Buckingham and Nick’s relationship trouble, and the eponymous Fleetwood’s own marital turmoil, you have to really listen for the fact that these guys are in pain. It is there, though.
Against the backdrop of the McVie’s Divorce, Buckingham and Nick’s relationship trouble, and the eponymous Fleetwood’s own marital turmoil, you have to really listen for the fact that these guys are in pain. It is there, though.
You can hear the strain and barely concealed desire to tear each other to pieces in the same room in songs like “The Chain” and “Go Your Own Way” between the obnoxiously catchy hooks, the gyrating synth-bass, and the majestic guitar work. You can feel them aggressively facing the microphones and struggling to keep it together. And that’s where the magic happens.
Glass is created by superheating sand to such a temperature that it melts and shapes. For Rumours, the music is the crucible against which the heat of the band’s rage can be vented and refined until it shines. Nicks has openly admitted that Fleetwood Mac’s best work is in the mire of their darkest personal struggles, and it’s hard to disagree.
I’ve never been an especially big fan of Fleetwood Mac. But I know that crucible. I know the intense rage-filled fire that turns the coarse sand of experience into the glass of art. It’s a powerful, if exhausting experience that often leaves one with lingering pain.
But when the result is this, who am I to complain?
Until I break the chain
