Why an Almost 50-Year-Old Album Keeps Hooking New Generations

When I was a teenager, I made a cassette tape of songs I wanted to listen to but didn’t want to admit I owned. Recording off the radio or borrowing albums from friends, I compiled a collection of bouncy pop ditties and wrote out the title in red ink: “Music I Don’t Listen To (Really).” I’m not sure under what circumstances I expected to be caught listening to that tape, or who that really was intended to convince. But I understood that, as I devoted myself to mainlining the back catalogs of edgy guitar bands like Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine, there was something powerfully uncool about this other stuff.

One side of the cassette was essentially a mixtape, with songs by the Cars and the Go-Go’s. The other was devoted to a single album, secured from the public library and dubbed in its entirety: Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. I must have heard some of the songs on the radio, or perhaps caught a stray reference in a music magazine, enough to know that I had to consume the record as a whole. But I’d also acquired, who knows from where, the sense that there was something shameful about how enjoyable, how easy the music seemed to be. It was, to use a term that wouldn’t come along for a few more decades, basic.

Rumours is the 10^th-highest-selling album in history. Some 40 million copies have been sold since its release in February 1977, which is one way of saying that it has never not been popular. But there have definitely been times when it wasn’t cool. “Don’t Stop” was the anthem for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, and when it blasted from the TV as the balloons announcing Clinton’s nomination rained from the ceiling of Madison Square Garden, it felt like a cultural watershed, a sign that an optimistic, exuberant new generation was ready to take the reins. (George H.W. Bush, who campaigned to the plodding strains of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.,” didn’t stand a chance.) But that moment, seared into the nation’s memory, also yoked that song, and the album it came from, to the fortunes of the Clintons and boomers writ large. And as the boomers got older and more disappointing, so did Fleetwood Mac. The chorus of a 1989 British hit put it in even more starkly generational terms: “No heavy metal, rock ’n’ roll, music from the past/ I’d rather jack than Fleetwood Mac.”

By 2013, even Saturday Night Live was goofing on the band. In a sketch from that year, Paul Rudd and Vanessa Bayer play a married couple who meet at a restaurant to finalize their divorce. Tempers flare and accusations fly, but their acrimony keeps getting interrupted by the peppy strains of “I Don’t Want to Know,” which mysteriously starts playing every time their exchanges get particularly ugly. (It turns out one of their lawyers has it set as his ringtone.) No amount of spousal acrimony can withstand the song’s allure, which starts them dancing in their seats as if they’re out on the floor at their own wedding. In a comedy of remarriage, this would be the pivotal moment when the estranged lovers rediscover their enduring affection for each other. But on SNL, it’s pure cringe. Rudd mimes twirling a lasso and Bayer jerks her shoulders in time with his as their attorneys look on in bemused horror, cuing the audience’s intended reaction, a primal discomfort on the level of catching your parents furiously making out. You’re not rooting for these two to get back together. You just want it to stop.

Two years before that, Glee built an entire episode, called “Rumours,” around the album, but instead of making the songs relevant to a new generation, resituating them in the context of a modern high school just made them feel more like artifacts: bangers, sure, but only a step removed from show tunes. The band took another step toward camp when Stevie Nicks appeared as herself on American Horror Story in 2014. (Ryan Murphy, who co-created both AHS and Glee, is a fan.) As the unofficial godmother to a coven of witches, Nicks is greeted with awestruck reverence, but she comes off less as a living legend than as her own tribute act.

Somewhere in the past decade, though, Fleetwood Mac got cool again. Of course, there were always some artists who would rep for the group: Even as Fleetwood was being mocked on network TV, indie bands like Haim and MGMT (as well as Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo) came together for a tribute album in 2012, although it features more songs from Rumours’ famously chaotic follow-up, Tusk, than their biggest hit. But soon, even superstars were shouting the group’s praises from pop’s mountaintops. In 2015 the band’s drummer and demi-namesake, Mick Fleetwood, told the British tabloid the Mirror that he’d struck up a correspondence with Harry Styles (then still a member of One Direction), who had greeted Nicks with a birthday cake backstage at one of their shows. When Styles embarked on his first solo tour two years later, he worked Rumours’ “The Chain” into his set list, and even brought Nicks onstage during his Los Angeles stop, calling her his “queen of everything.” Nicks has also taken up a decadelong mutual admiration with Taylor Swift, who tapped the singer to pen a prefatory note to physical editions of The Tortured Poets Department and was rewarded with a name-drop on the album’s “Clara Bow.”

Meanwhile, Rumours has become a bestseller again. In the locked-down fall of 2020, a viral TikTok of a man breezily skateboarding to the sound of “Dreams” spurred a surge in streams and sales, and when Swift and Styles topped 2022’s year-end album charts, Rumours was only a few places behind them, selling nearly a quarter of a million copies on LP alone. On the one hand, asking why so many people are still listening to Rumours is like asking why they still eat chocolate ice cream. But although mid-’70s contemporaries like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and the Eagles’ Greatest Hits may rank higher in all-time sales, they haven’t experienced a similar resurgence, let alone anything like its renewed cultural currency. When I asked my teenage daughter, whose tastes run to Billie Eilish and Ariana Grande, if she knew anything about Fleetwood Mac, she looked at me as if I’d quizzed her on the name of Taylor Swift’s current boyfriend. “Of course I know who Fleetwood Mac is.”

What’s kept Rumours alive isn’t the music alone. If the album has become part of the unofficial starter pack for a budding vinyl collection, it arrives with a supplementary info packet detailing the chaotic drama of its creation, which has become central to its longevity. Recorded at multiple studios over the course of nearly a year when every one of Fleetwood Mac’s five members was in the midst of a painful breakup—including the end of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks’ long-term relationship and singer Christine McVie’s divorce from bassist John McVie—the album overflows with heartbreak and bitterness, although the songs’ sleek surfaces belie their turbulent undercurrents. Nearly 50 years after its initial release, it feels tailor-made for an environment in which listeners have been trained to decode every oblique reference and lyrical tease, when the story behind a song sometimes overshadows the song itself. (Just ask Stevie’s pal Taylor.) “I really think there came a time when the sales of Rumours became less about the music and started being more about the phenomenon and the musical soap opera of it all,” Buckingham said in an interview for the album’s deluxe 2013 reissue. But even he had to admit he understood the appeal. “It was voyeuristic in the best way possible.”

The fascination with the behind-the-scenes drama has managed to outgrow Rumours itself. Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novel Daisy Jones & the Six, which focuses on the relationship between a controlling, perfectionist male guitarist and a free-spirited female rock star, sold 2 million copies after its publication in 2019 and was adapted as an Amazon series last year. And the buzziest play in this year’s crowded Broadway season is David Adjmi’s Stereophonic, which gives its audience prime seats behind the mixing board as a 1970s rock band struggles to record a new album, unsure whether each bare-knuckle dispute is bringing the group closer to genius or implosion.

The making of Rumours yielded plenty of gossipy tidbits: According to co-producer Ken Caillat, Christine McVie would sneak her new lover, Curry Grant, the band’s lighting tech, into the studio for make-out sessions while her soon-to-be-ex-husband was in an isolation booth laying down his bass parts. (John was, needless to say, displeased when he figured out the subject of Christine’s “You Make Loving Fun.”) But it has its ugly side too. Buckingham, recording his second album with the band, was already trying to seize control, and multiple accounts suggest he could be both verbally and physically abusive. Caillat alleged that Buckingham wrapped his hands around his throat after Caillat followed his instructions to tape over a previously recorded guitar part, and Carol Ann Harris, whose six-year relationship with Buckingham started during the Rumours sessions, wrote a memoir describing a long history of domestic violence. Although Nicks’ “Rhiannon,” released on Fleetwood Mac’s previous, self-titled album, became the group’s biggest hit ever in the middle of the Rumours sessions, she still had to fight for equal footing, having been admitted to the band in the first place only because it had needed a guitar player and Buckingham said he and Nicks were a package deal.

The retold versions of the Rumours story sand off some of its rougher edges: Stereophonic restages Buckingham’s quarrel with Caillat, but the Buckingham character, named Peter, knocks the Caillat figure to the ground before he can get his thumbs on his windpipe. But they also shift its center, foregrounding the conflict between Buckingham and Nicks and reducing the rest of the band to supporting roles. The result is a clash between a difficult male genius and a female visionary extricating herself from his oppressive influence, a spin that makes Rumours feel both more timely and more triumphant.

Daisy Jones remixes the original story more aggressively, turning its Nicks analog into an up-and-coming solo artist whose partnership with Billy Dunne, the domineering leader of a rock band called the Six, is largely platonic. Reid, however, made no secret of her inspiration, pegging it to a televised performance of “Landslide” she saw as a child, watching Buckingham watch Nicks sing, and thinking, Oh, they’re in love with each other.

In the novel, Daisy and Billy feud for years, over matters large and small, before they come to the realization that Reid had before she started: These two are deeply in love. Along the way, Daisy has to deal with a heap of 1970s record-industry sexism, including resentment from some of the band’s male members that she is making their sound too “soft,” as well as her own penchant for self-destructive behavior and substance abuse. But it’s all worth it because of the music she and Billy make together, the songs that, like the numbers in a musical, channel the feelings they’re unable to speak out loud.

Daisy Jones’ Billy is, to quote his brother and bandmate, “a jerk,” but he’s also a married father who’s trying to stay sober and monogamous, which accounts for at least a little of his prickliness. Not so for Stereophonic’s Peter, a petty tyrant who takes his frustrations out on anyone in eyesight. He’s particularly brutal to Diana, his lover and musical partner (and a clear Nicks stand-in), whom he resents more intensely the further she steps out of his shadow. After the band lays down a take of her new song, called “Bright,” she is overcome with how great it sounds, the fleshed-out realization of something that’s previously existed only in her head. But Peter cuts her down to size, over an open microphone that rings out from every corner of the theater. “It’s good, but there’s only so much I can do if you’re not gonna cut the verses down,” he scolds her. “You need to decide if you’re gonna be a mediocre songwriter or push it to the next level.”

The reference to Diana’s needing to pare back the song’s verses will make anyone familiar with the production of Rumours spring to attention. Stereophonic borrows so many elements of Fleetwood Mac’s real story—the drummer’s habit of endlessly retuning his kit, the struggle to get the band’s virtuoso bassist to play simple parts more befitting of pop songs—that at times it’s hard to fathom why the play even bothers to change the names. But the resonance is keenest when it comes to “Bright,” because it evokes the song that, perhaps more than any other, has been critical to maintaining Rumours’ appeal, especially to new generations of fans—a surprising choice, given that it’s not even on the album.

That song, as anyone who has followed Rumours’ recent resurgence knows, is “Silver Springs.” The haunting ballad is indisputably one of Nicks’ best, a brokenhearted account of the end of a love affair that finds strength in the singer’s willingness to admit her own defeat. It’s also, at nearly five minutes, longer than any song that ended up on the album, and that’s after Nicks trimmed several stanzas under protest. The stated rationale for the omission of “Silver Springs” was that the song simply wouldn’t fit on either side of a 44-minute LP. But it’s also clear Buckingham knew that the song was directed at him, and he wasn’t crazy about it. Although Nicks was ostensibly a full-fledged member of Fleetwood Mac, she wasn’t involved in the decision to take the song off the album. Mick Fleetwood simply took her out to the studio parking lot and told her the deed was done.

Of all Nicks’ compositions, “Silver Springs” is especially close to her heart—close enough that, when Fleetwood refused her request to include the song on her solo greatest hits album Timespace, she quit the band in protest. Although it was released as the B side to Buckingham’s recriminatory “Go Your Own Way”—effectively making the single a “he said, she said” account of their breakup—leaving the song off Rumours consigned a masterpiece to undeserved obscurity for decades. (Nicks had also made a gift of the song’s publishing royalties to her mother, a gesture greatly diminished by its absence from the LP.)

Nicks played the long game, though. And in 1997, she and “Silver Springs” got their chance. By then, Nicks and Buckingham had both left Fleetwood Mac, but they returned for The Dance, a live concert that was released both as an album and on the then-new medium of DVD. Over six weeks of rehearsal and several warmup shows, Nicks slow-walked her way through the song, lulling an unsuspecting Buckingham into a false sense of security. But on the final night, with the cameras rolling, she stared him down as she dug into decades of unresolved hurt. (As Reid put it, she was “holding that microphone like a weapon.”) Watching the two of them onstage, you can feel the connection that brought them together as well as the discord that drove them apart, and Nicks’ determination to make sure her former partner remembers them both. “I know I could have loved you, but you would not let me,” she sings, as Buckingham’s eyes grow wide. “You’ll never get away from the sound of the woman that loves you.”

A self-conscious act of songwriting as romantic revenge, “Silver Springs” now seems like a precursor to the Taylor Swift era, where those who’ve wronged her are held up for ridicule every time she steps on a stage. “I’m so angry with you,” Nicks said in an interview for The Dance explaining the song’s subtext. “You will listen to me on the radio for the rest of your life, and it will bug you. I hope it bugs you.” That’s a feeling that Swift’s exes know all too well.

The video of Nicks singing “Silver Springs” has become a phenomenon in its own right. Search for Fleetwood Mac and Rumours on TikTok and you’ll have to scroll through pages of clips from The Dance before you get to any other song. Unofficially restoring it to the album is a way not just of rescuing a classic but of righting a wrong, restoring a balance. No longer does the controlling Buckingham get the last word. It’s Nicks who comes out on top, pinning him to the stage with her spotlight.

In Daisy Jones’ version of the story, the song—called “Regret Me,” written by Daisy after Billy spurns her advances—makes it on to the album after all, voted on by the rest of the band over its target’s objections. But Stereophonic’s Diana isn’t so fortunate. She’s stuck in the real 1970s, not the fan-fiction iteration of the decade, and there’s only so far she can push. Her happy ending will have to wait.