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Fleetwood Mac · S5 E5
Think About Me
Christine keeps writing radio hits while chaos swirls around her. The steady hand the band always needs
The studio is full of cocaine, arguments, and one woman sitting at a piano writing a pop song that sounds like sunshine. Christine McVie writes "Think About Me" while her bandmates spend weeks fighting over tape hiss and marching bands.
"As Long as You Follow" (Fleetwood Mac, official music video, 1988). Christine McVie wrote this about devotion, about staying when everyone else leaves. It captures everything she was to this band: the one who always showed up, always delivered, and never needed the spotlight to know her worth.
The Anchor
Every great band has a center of gravity, and in Fleetwood Mac it was always Christine. While Lindsey pushed boundaries and Stevie chased visions, Christine wrote songs that sounded effortless and stuck in your head for weeks. Her Tusk contributions kept the album tethered to something the audience could hold onto. Without her tracks, the record would have been a brilliant art experiment that nobody played twice.
Sources
Fleetwood, Mick and Bozza, Anthony. "Play On: Now, Then, and Fleetwood Mac." Little, Brown, 2014.
TAP TO REVEAL: Which Beach Boy did Christine McVie date during the Tusk sessions?
As Long as You Follow, Fleetwood Mac (1988)
"As Long as You Follow" was written by Christine McVie and Eddy Quintela, and it sounds like a letter to the band itself. The production is warm and unhurried, built around Christine's piano and a vocal performance that radiates quiet certainty. Listen for how the arrangement never competes with her voice. Everything else, the guitars, the drums, the backing harmonies, stays below her, holding her up rather than fighting for attention. That's the Christine McVie philosophy in a single mix decision.
Sources
Fleetwood, Mick. "Play On: Now, Then, and Fleetwood Mac." Little, Brown, 2014.
The Professional
While Lindsey could spend days perfecting a single guitar overdub, Christine's approach was simpler: write the song, record it, move on. She once called the Tusk sessions' excess "quite absurd," noting that the studio contract rider for refreshments alone was "like a telephone directory." But she showed up, played her parts, and delivered finished songs while the chaos swirled around her. Her steadiness was so quiet it was almost invisible, which is exactly why it took decades for people to appreciate how much she was carrying.
Sources
Fleetwood, Mick. "Play On: Now, Then, and Fleetwood Mac." Little, Brown, 2014.
Christine on Tusk
Never Make Me Cry, Fleetwood Mac (1979)
"Never Make Me Cry" is Christine at her most bare: a slow ballad with almost no production, just her voice and a piano carrying a lyric about trust and vulnerability. It's the kind of song that gets lost on a twenty-track double album but stays with you if you find it. This is what Christine did better than anyone else in Fleetwood Mac: she made simplicity feel profound.
Never Make Me Cry, Fleetwood Mac (1979)
"If you ever leave me, I won't be the one to cry." Christine's lyrics are direct where Stevie's are cryptic. There are no Welsh witches or unnamed Saras here. Just a woman looking at someone and saying: don't break this. The simplicity is what makes it devastating. Every word means exactly what it says, and that clarity, on an album full of riddles and experiments, hits different.
Which of these Tusk tracks was written by Christine McVie?
Twenty tracks, two LPs, over a million dollars in studio costs. The album is finished, and now someone has to convince Warner Bros. to release a double album as the follow-up to the best-selling record in their catalog. Next: the gamble, the backlash, and the question that haunted everyone involved: was Tusk a masterpiece or a mistake?
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