EACH BAND'S TOP 10 SONGS ― FLEETWOOD MAC

FLEETWOOD MAC 

10. "Sara"
Tusk, 1979 

Released in December 1979, this somber, elegant ballad was Fleetwood Mac's first hit of the Eighties. Don Henley of the Eagles claimed the song was named for a baby Nicks was pregnant with and decided not to have during their brief late-Seventies affair. Thirty-five years later, she confirmed that he was partially correct. "Had I married Don and had that baby, and had she been a girl, I would have named her Sara," she said in 2014. "But there was another woman in my life named Sara, who shortly after that became Mick's wife, Sara Fleetwood."

9. "Dreams"
Rumours, 1977

One afternoon during the recording of Rumours, Nicks disappeared into a small studio in the Record Plant, which belonged to Sly 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," she said. "I sat down on the bed with my keyboard in front of me  ...  and wrote 'Dreams' in about 10 minutes." "Dreams" became Fleetwood Mac's only Number One single, Nicks' mystical assessment of her dying relationship with Buckingham: "[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."

8. "Landslide"
Fleetwood Mac, 1975

Nicks was still a young woman when she wrote the reflective ballad "Landslide" – but she already sounded like an old soul. "I was only 27 – I wrote that in 1973, a year before I joined Fleetwood Mac," she told Rolling Stone. "You can feel reallyold at 27." "Landslide" is Nicks' acoustic meditation on growing up and the passing of time, with her brooding, "I'm getting older too." A surprising sentiment on Seventies rock radio – yet "Landslide" became an AOR staple, and has only grown throughout the years, with the Dixie Chicks taking it to a new audience with their country version. 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.

7. "Tusk"
Tusk, 1979

A landmark of badass rock & roll bravado: The world's most popular group, after perfecting an L.A. rock formula that went megaplatinum around the world, decided to rip it up and start again. "Tusk" sounded like commercial suicide – yet it turned into one of the weirdest Top 10 hits any megastars ever dropped. Buckingham and co-producer Richard Dashut took a drum riff that Fleetwood devised to warm up before shows and looped it into an evil-sounding sex-and-drugs chant, with the singers practically whispering, "Why won't you tell me who's on the phone?" Halfway through, it explodes into a free-for-all rock jam. Not weird enough? They added the USC Marching Band, inspired by a brass band Fleetwood saw at a village festival in France. It was excess in every sense of the word. "There was blood floating around in the alcohol," Christine McVie later said. "Recording Tusk was quite absurd. ... The studio contract rider for refreshments was like a phone directory. Exotic food delivered to the studio, crates of Champagne."

6. "Gypsy"

Mirage, 1982

Like so many Mac classics, "Gypsy" has its roots in the ballad of Buckingham and Nicks. As Nicks told Rolling Stone in 2014, "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." Back when she and Buckingham were just another struggling pair of hungry songwriters in San Francisco, Nicks used to visit a downtown store called the Velvet Underground, where Janis Joplin and Grace Slick shopped, and fantasize 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."

5. "The Chain"
Rumours, 1977

Side Two of Rumours opens with a tortuously pastiched collaboration that remains the only song in the band's history on which all five members of Fleetwood Mac are credited as songwriters. Though the song was built from a handful of disparate musical fragments, at its core is the Christine McVie composition "Keep Me There" (also known as "Butter Cookie"), a tense, keyboard-driven track that remained incomplete during the early album sessions in February 1976. "We decided it needed a bridge, so we cut a bridge and edited it into the rest of the song," Buckingham told Rolling Stone in 1977. They settled on an ominous 10-note bass passage played by John McVie over Fleetwood's ascending drum pattern. "We didn't get a vocal and left it for a long time in a bunch of pieces," Buckingham said. "It almost went off the album. Then we listened back and decided we liked the bridge, but didn't like the rest of the song. So I wrote verses for that bridge, which was originally not in the song, and edited those in."

4. "Don't Stop"
Rumours, 1977

"Don't Stop" was Christine McVie's sunny, optimistic advice to John McVie at the end of their marriage, doubling as a snapshot of her own happiness. (She was then dating the band's lighting director Curry Grant, creating another layer of tension within Fleetwood Mac's stormy working environment.) " 'Don't Stop' is Chris saying 'I love you, but I'm not in love with you' to John," Fleetwood later said. As Christine put it, " 'Don't Stop' was just a feeling. It seemed like a pleasant revelation to have. ...  It would make a great song for an insurance company, but I'm definitely not a pessimist. I'm basically a love-song writer." The song made it to Number Three on the Billboard charts, and took on an even wider resonance in 1992 when presidential candidate Bill Clinton used it as his campaign theme song. The members of Fleetwood Mac were barely communicating at the time, but they still got back together to play "Don't Stop" at Clinton's inaugural ball. When Christine rejoined her bandmates at a Dublin gig in 2013, after 17 years away, it was the first song they played.


3. "Gold Dust Woman"
Rumours, 1977

The chilling climax of Rumours is a seductive guitar ballad that doubles as a horror show. Nicks sings about a dark, sexual obsession and a drug rush as if they're the same addiction, taunting, "Did she make you cry?/Make you break down?/Shatter your illusions of love?" over woozy, phased guitars. According to engineer Chris Morris, the song took "20 or 30 takes" to get right, with Nicks recording her vocals late at night wrapped in a shawl and standing on a chair as someone slowly dimmed the lights in the recording booth. Nicks still performs "Gold Dust Woman" live, with an interpretive dance. "It's me being some of the drug addicts I knew, and probably being myself too – just being that girl lost on the streets, freaked out with no idea how to find her way," she told Rolling Stone. "When Christine saw it, she said, 'Wow, we've always known that "Gold Dust Woman" was about the serious drug days, but this really depicts how frightening it was for all of us and what we were willing to do for it.' We were dancing on the edge for years."

2. "Rhiannon"
Fleetwood Mac, 1975

Shortly before she and Buckingham joined Fleetwood Mac, Nicks picked up a novel called Triad at an airport. The book told 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. "My tendency is to want to add rhythm and to rock it up," he recalled. Nicks later learned that Rhiannon was a character from Welsh mythology, but the real myth she invented on Fleetwood Mac's first American Top 10 hit was her own – the shawl-wearing California enchantress who left crowds stunned by her smoldering, trancelike performances. "She's like your fairy-princess godmother," Courtney Love once said, "who lives in a magical kingdom somewhere and has, like, fabulous romances." 

1. "Go Your Own Way"
Rumours, 1977

In 1976, early in the recording process of what would come to be Fleetwood Mac's epochal album Rumours, they took some time off from touring and rented a house in Florida to work on new material. With the two relationships at the center of the band unraveling, it may not have been the best time for a family vacation: "Aside from the obvious unstated tension, I remember the house having a distinctly bad vibe to it, as if it was haunted, which did nothing to help matters," Mick Fleetwood wrote in his memoir. While there, Lindsey Buckingham wrote a bruising new song that channeled the darkening anger brought on by his impending breakup with Stevie Nicks. " 'Go Your Own Way' was filled with anger, it was filled with angst," he recalled. With an inverted stomping drumbeat and a taut, aggressive guitar part, it was also a hard-driving departure from the "light rock" with which Fleetwood Mac were being grouped. "I had this idea taken from 'Street Fighting Man,' by the Rolling Stones," Buckingham said of the song's rhythm. "And Mick couldn't quite get that, and he did his own thing." Released as the first single from Rumours, "Go Your Own Way" became a Top 10 hit as well as their tempestuous set-closer, reigniting the drama at the heart of the band's music every night. "I very, very much resented him telling the world that 'packing up, shacking up' with different men was all I wanted to do," Nicks told Rolling Stone in 1997. "He knew it wasn't true. It was just an angry thing that he said. Every time those words would come out onstage, I wanted to go over and kill him."

From Rolling Stone, Wikipedia and Google