It’s a very tough trick.Įach and every listener, even if they are listening to the album in a social setting or in a crowd, hears it as if it was a story being told just to them. By creating this masterpiece of virtual non-ambience, on Rumours Fleetwood Mac makes the epic (those amazing arrangements, those amazing songs, those amazing performances) intimate and personal. Ambience telegraphs a great deal to the listener about how they are involved in the experience. This is virtually unique for a California-based mega-pop band of the 1970s (though more common to the punk records being made at this time in the U.K.).Īmbience-meaning, literal ambience, as in reverb, presence, and the listener’s awareness of the size of the room a band is performing in-is a vastly underrated and important quality. The sounds on Rumours are tight, closeted, and largely lacking in ambience. This, I believe, provides the context for all of its achievements. One of the defining aspects of Rumours is claustrophobia. 34).įinally, we arrive at Rumours, released a year and a half after Fleetwood Mac. 1 (to date, the best performing Mac album in America had been Heroes, which reached No. Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joined Fleetwood Mac at the very end of 1974, and their first album with the band, 1975’s Fleetwood Mac, reached No. The idea that Mac would be a band that mixed the simple, the soaring, the aching and the accomplished is very largely the gift of Christine McVie, and we see hints of this as early as 1970s Christine Perfectalbum. McVie’s alluring and affecting contributions to Heroes show that the Rumours-era Mac was already fairly well articulated before Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks even joined the band, and I don’t think she gets enough credit for this. This is largely thanks to Christine McVie, whose material combines British post-folk wistfulness with an easily graspable rhythmic and chordal structure that recalls All Things Must Pass-era George Harrison. The first Fleetwood Mac album unquestionably recognizable as a “modern” Mac album is 1974’s Heroes Are Hard to Find.
Even when they tell you a story you have heard 88 times, you find some new details, some new angle, some new twist or emphasis you never noticed before. Rumours is an old, sweet and complicated friend who gets more interesting every time you talk to them. Yet Rumours is not only the ninth-best-selling album of all time, it is an adamantine artistic accomplishment that deserves to be mentioned when we discuss The Greatest Albums Of All Time-and it merits being removed from all the silly cultural confetti usually thrown in its direction, and should be examined with great, loving detail.
Only two and a half years prior to its release, the group had been considered so commercially invisible that their manager attempted to send imposters on the road in their place. Their fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth albums hadn’t even charted in the U.K. How many bands attain that rare spot in the sweet and rapturous air of multi-platinum, record-breaking commercial Arcadia-much less achieve artistic transcendence!-on their 11th album? My God, it was their 11th studio album. Rumours was Fleetwood Mac’s 11th studio album, released nearly a decade after Fleetwood Mac’s debut.
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