Rumours (album)

Did You Know?

• After guitarist Bob Welch left Fleetwood Mac in 1974, the band was joined by Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks.
• The McVies divorced after eight years of marriage, and Buckingham and Nicks had an on/off relationship that led to frequent arguments.
• Mick Fleetwood discovered his wife Jenny was having an affair with his best friend.

Recording

In February 1976, Fleetwood Mac gathered at the Record Plant in Sausalito, California, with engineers Ken Caillat and Richard Dashut. The band and the two engineers split production duties, though Caillat, who had more technical skill, did most of the engineering. He took a leave from Wally Heider Studios in Los Angeles after promising that Fleetwood Mac would later work there. The studio was a large, windowless wooden building with several small recording rooms. Most band members disliked it and wanted to record at home, but Mick Fleetwood refused to allow any moves. Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks lived in two condos near the harbor, while the men stayed at the studio’s lodge in the nearby hills. Recording happened in a room measuring 6 by 9 metres, fitted with a 3M 24-track tape machine, high-quality microphones, and an API mixing console with 550A equalizers. Caillat liked the gear but thought the room lacked ambience because of its very dead speakers and heavy soundproofing. The working title in Sausalito was Yesterday’s Gone. Lindsey Buckingham took charge of the sessions, aiming to make a pop album. During early songwriting, Buckingham and Christine McVie played guitar and piano together to build the album’s basic structures. Fleetwood often set up his drum kit outside the studio’s partition screen so he could better see Caillat’s and Dashut’s reactions to the groove. Baffles were placed around the drums and around John McVie, who played his bass facing Fleetwood. Buckingham stayed close to the rhythm section, while Christine McVie’s keyboards were kept away from the drums. Caillat and Dashut spent about nine days experimenting with microphones and amplifiers to get a bigger sound, then realized they could adjust the sound effectively on the API console.

Composition

The album's songs were written individually by Fleetwood Mac's three main songwriters—Lindsey Buckingham, Christine McVie, and Stevie Nicks—though they occasionally traded lyrics. "The Chain" stands out as the only track where every band member, including Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, contributed. Every song on the record deals with personal, often messy relationships. Christine McVie later said the band only realized in hindsight how much the lyrics revolved around their various breakups. Her track "You Make Loving Fun" is about her new boyfriend, the band's lighting director, whom she started seeing after leaving John. Nicks' "Dreams" describes a breakup with a hopeful tone, while Buckingham's "Go Your Own Way" takes a more pessimistic view. After a brief romance with a woman from New England, he wrote "Never Going Back Again," which explores the false belief that once you're happy, sadness won't return. Christine McVie's "Don't Stop" is an optimistic song, and she noted that Buckingham helped shape its verses because their creative instincts overlapped. Her "Songbird" offers introspective lyrics meant as "a little prayer" for "nobody and everybody." "Oh Daddy," her final track on the album, is a slightly sarcastic piece about Mick Fleetwood and his wife Jenny Boyd, who had just reconciled; the band called Fleetwood "the Big Daddy," and the song focuses on his leadership, which McVie said always proved correct. Nicks' "Gold Dust Woman" was inspired by Los Angeles and its harshness; after struggling with the rock lifestyle and developing a cocaine addiction, her lyrics convey a determination to keep going.

Promotion and release

In the fall of 1976, Fleetwood Mac was still in the middle of recording when they played songs from the upcoming album at the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles. John McVie came up with the title Rumours, explaining that the band members were essentially writing personal journals and diaries about one another through their music. Warner Bros. officially announced the release to the press that December and picked "Go Your Own Way" as a promotional single for the same month. The label had already built strong relationships with dozens of FM and AM radio stations across the country while pushing the band's 1975 album, and that groundwork helped boost Rumours. The advance orders hit 800,000 copies, setting a new record for Warner Bros. at the time.

The album came out on February 4, 1977, in the United States, and a week later in the United Kingdom. After rehearsing at SIR Studios in Los Angeles on February 28, the band kicked off the Rumours Tour, which took them through North America, Europe, Oceania, and Asia. Stevie Nicks later recalled that audiences were initially slow to warm up to the new songs, since the setlists leaned heavily on Rumours material. A one-off show in March for Senator Birch Bayh's benefit in Indiana was followed by a short April tour covering the UK, the Netherlands, France, and Germany. Nigel Williamson of Uncut described the band's live shows as "rock's greatest soap opera." The single "Dreams," released in March 1977, became Fleetwood Mac's only number one on the US Billboard Hot 100 that June.

The front cover shows a stylized image of Mick Fleetwood with one foot on a stool and Nicks in her "Rhiannon" stage look. The back cover is a montage of band portraits. All photos were taken by Herbert Worthington. In the shot, Fleetwood wears lavatory chains with wooden balls hanging between his legs and holds a crystal ball in his left hand.

Legacy

Mick Fleetwood has described Rumours as the band’s most significant album, noting that its commercial triumph gave Fleetwood Mac the financial stability to keep making music for many years. Pop culture commentator Chuck Klosterman attributes the record’s high sales to its “really likable songs,” but argues that those songs alone don’t inherently prove the album’s greatness. In 1997, The Guardian asked critics, musicians, and radio DJs to rank the best albums ever, and they placed Rumours at number 78. A year later, Fleetwood himself produced Legacy: A Tribute to Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, a collection featuring one cover of each track by artists influenced by the album, such as Tonic, Matchbox 20, the Goo Goo Dolls, the Corrs, the Cranberries, Elton John, Duncan Sheik, and Jewel. Other musicians who have cited Rumours as an influence include Tori Amos, the hard rock band Saliva, the indie rock group Death Cab for Cutie, and the art pop singer Lorde, who called it a “perfect record.”

The album has long been regarded as one of the greatest ever made. It entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2003. In 1998, Q magazine ranked it third on its list of the 50 Best Albums of the 70s, behind The Clash’s London Calling and Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. The following year, Vibe included it among 100 Essential Albums of the 20th Century. In 2001, VH1 placed it at number 16 in its 100 Greatest Albums countdown, and Slant listed it among 50 Essential Pop Albums. That same year, USA Today put it at number 23 on its Top 40 Albums list, while Rolling Stone ranked it number 25 in its 2003 edition of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time—the highest spot for any Fleetwood Mac record—then number 26 in a 2012 update, and number 7 in both the 2020 and 2023 versions. In 2000, it came in at number 31 in Colin Larkin’s All Time Top 1000 Albums. Time magazine added it to its All-TIME 100 Albums shortlist in 2006, and Mojo featured it in its unnumbered list of 70 from the 1970s: Decade’s Greatest Albums. The record also appears in The Guardian’s 1000 Albums to Hear Before You Die and the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. For the 2013 reissue, Pitchfork’s Jessica Hopper awarded the album a rare score of 10 out of 10, giving it a “best new reissue” designation.