Name: How Fleetwood Mac Makes A Song
Uploaded: 2026-03-08T17:25:57.000Z
Duration: 6 min 43 s
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It's hard to believe that 40 years ago Fleetwood Mac released its masterpiece Rumors, because the record still sounds as beautiful and pristine and new as it did in 1977.

It's a timeless album as far as I'm concerned.

And that's really the goal, isn't it, for anyone in the creative arts to make something that feels alive months and years and decades after its creation.

Well, there are of course, a lot of reasons.

The skills of the individual band members, the songwriting craft, the producers and engineers, and

And time that Fleetwood Mac got from Warner Brothers following the release of their self titled album, which was burning up the radio.

That money and time means a lot to a band like Fleetwood Mac, who, like the Beatles or Kanye west or Frank Ocean, shines brightest in the studio, where they can exercise minute control over every part of a song.

Each track is like a sonic painting, as co producer of Rumorist Ken Kalei once described it.

And if you're wondering what he means by that, just take a listen to the difference between the demo of Stevie Nick's classic song Dreams, which you're hearing right now, and

the final product, Thunder only happens when it's raining players.

This is how it worked with Fleetwood Mac.

In this case, Stevie Nicks wrote a beautiful piano melody and lyrics, and the band in particular.

Lindsay Buckingham spent the better part of a year adding and experimenting to create a rich, full bodied sonic experience.

At its core, Dreams is a pretty simple song that consists of only two chords, F and G, played over and over and over again.

Nick's presenters presented the song to the band on a Fender rhodes piano.

Buckingham added an acoustic guitar and Christine McVie played a Hammond B3 organ.

Then Mick Fleetwood added drums and John McPhee added bass guitar.

The bass just alternates between F and G with some variations.

And the standout part of the drums are these tapping hi hats which run over everything throughout the whole song.

That's the track Fleetwood Mac laid down at the recording session in Sausalito.

Buckingham and the producers weren't convinced that the drums were hypnotic enough, so they created a loop of 8 bar.

Callet also added a phaser to the hi hat so that they would have a swishy feel.

Stick out more Later, Buckingham recorded an electric guitar part, adding those soupy licks that float through the verse, then tighten up in the pre chorus and eventually give way to an equivalent acoustic guitar in the chorus itself.

Having build up and release and change across the sections of a pop song are what make it compelling to the listener.

Buckingham is a genius at filling in these kinds of colors and ideas usually spur on more ideas.

Kallet describes in his book on Rumors that when Nicks heard the new parts of the song, she had her own idea for background vocals.

In the pre chorus, she worked out the parts with Christine McVie.

They give the sad and dreamlike song an even more ghostly feel.

The song, of course, is about Lindsey Buckingham, and it literally feels like it's haunting him.

Stevie Nicks wrote it shortly after their breakup, and

as she says in the lyrics, she couldn't go on because Lindsay wanted his freedom well.

Now in loneliness, he has to dwell on what he had and what he lost.

It's a cruel twist of fate that the song became such a hit that Buckingham had to spend the next 40 years singing it in concert.

Anyway, at this point, the song was almost done.

Nicks, Buckingham and McVie created a tight three part vocal harmony for the chorus.

When the rain washes you clean your love.

And then they brightened up the prechoruses with a vibraphone and the second chorus with a conga drum.

Those are both touches that you can barely hear and certainly don't think about much when you listen, but

When Callet mixed the song, he was careful to put every instrument in its right place and have a wide range of sounds from bass to mid range to treble.

In the case of Dreams, Kallei pushed many of the instruments down to give them a little more bass so that the hi hat I talked about earlier would stand out as well as Nick's incredible lead vocal.

Also in the high end is Buckingham's whining guitar, a muddled, longing response to the sharp poetry of the lyrics.

On Rumors, Fleetwood Mac made perfect pop music.

It didn't reinvent the wheel, it dipped the wheel in liquid gold.

These are concise, gorgeous songs dressed up with multicolored sounds, but

built on foundations of real emotion and real heartbreak.

I think it's pretty safe to say that 40 years from now, we'll still be listening to Fleetwood Mac.

As John Keats once wrote, a thing of beauty is a joy forever.

Hey everybody, thank you so much for watching.

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Subtitles ListPlay Video

How Fleetwood Mac Makes A Song

process

rhythm

experiment

track