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Fleetwood Mac · S4 E2
Record Plant, Sausalito
Cocaine until dawn, arguments in the hallways, and five people channeling heartbreak directly into tape
February 1976, Record Plant Studios, Sausalito. The studio sits on the waterfront of the San Francisco Bay, and for the next seven months it will function as a recording studio, a battlefield, and a very expensive group therapy session.
Fleetwood Mac, Oh Daddy (Rumours, 1977). Christine McVie's quiet plea to Mick Fleetwood, the "daddy" who held the band together while everything else fell apart. A studio ballad that only exists because of what was happening in these sessions.
TAP TO REVEAL: What did a typical night at the Rumours sessions actually look like?
Oh Daddy, Fleetwood Mac (1977)
Christine wrote this about Mick Fleetwood, the band's unofficial patriarch who kept showing up and insisting they keep working. The production is spacious and restrained: a warm piano, a gentle bass line from John playing on his ex-wife's song about another man, and Buckingham adding a guitar part that shimmers without pushing forward. This is the sound of Christine looking at the one person in the room who is not falling apart and asking him to keep holding it together.
“There were times when half the band wasn't talking to the other half. You'd have to go through the engineers to pass messages. "Tell Lindsey I think the take was good." It was absurd.”
— Ken Caillat, Making Rumours: The Inside Story of the Classic Fleetwood Mac Album, 2012
Record Plant Studios, Sausalito
The studio where five people who could barely speak to each other spent seven months making the best-selling album of the 1970s. Caillat and Dashut recorded the sessions on a custom-modified API console, often running sixteen-hour days fueled by cocaine and stubbornness.
Who effectively served as the producer of Rumours, despite not receiving sole production credit?
I Don't Want to Know, Fleetwood Mac
The most overlooked track on Rumours, a Stevie Nicks composition that sounds like sunshine and heartbreak colliding at full speed. The folk-pop arrangement, with its bright acoustic strumming and layered harmonies, makes it one of the most purely enjoyable songs on the record. In the context of these sessions, its lightness feels almost defiant.
I Don't Want to Know, Fleetwood Mac (1977)
Read the lyrics while you listen. Stevie writing sunshine pop about heartbreak, her lightness feeling almost defiant in the context of these sessions.
Somewhere in the building, Stevie Nicks sits down at a Fender Rhodes piano she does not know how to play and writes an entire song in ten minutes. Next: "Dreams," and the ten minutes that produced the only number-one single of Fleetwood Mac's career.
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