Remembering Christine McVie
The singer/songwriter was the connective tissue that tied Fleetwood Mac together.
Thank you for spending part of your day with Michael’s Record Collection. The news on Wednesday, Nov. 30, of the death of Christine McVie was like a punch to the gut. When I heard the iconic Fleetwood Mac star was gone, it was like having the wind knocked out of me. This was a death that affected me deeply, and it’s unsurprising, given the countless hours I’ve spent listening to Christine’s work with Fleetwood Mac, in her solo career, and her guest appearances with other artists.
I had a topic ready that will have to wait. I wanted to talk about Christine right away. Hers is a career that should be celebrated. Let’s get to it.
When I heard the news of Christine McVie’s passing yesterday afternoon, it was in the middle of a busy work day. I didn’t really have time to feel the depth of that tremendous loss to the music world, but it still gave me pause.
Although she was 79, it was still a shock. McVie and her bandmates have largely carried their age much better than most of their contemporaries to the point where it was often difficult to think of them as old. It was only upon reflection that it made sense for McVie to be that age after my initial reaction of, “Wait, she was 79?!”
People who knew McVie will write better eulogies than I ever could, but I still felt it was important to set aside other topics and focus on this one because so much of McVie’s music is a part of who I am.
I don’t really remember discovering Fleetwood Mac’s music. There wasn’t one single moment that stands out. I remember that they were always on the radio in the 1970s. I’m pretty sure the first song I heard from the band was “Hypnotized” off of 1973’s Mystery to Me album. It was not a Christine song, although she was on backing vocals. But when I was just a couple of months shy of my ninth birthday, Fleetwood Mac released the band’s self-titled “White Album,” and from that point on, the band has never not been on FM radio.
I had my own stereo as a kid, and there were so many songs being played from that record by various FM DJs — “Monday Morning,” “Rhiannon,” “Over My Head,” “Say You Love Me,” “Landslide,” “Crystal,” and “World Turning” were all songs I heard on the radio before anywhere else, although only three of those songs (“Over My Head,” “Rhiannon,” and “Say You Love Me” — two of the three being written and sung by McVie) were released as singles in the United States. I can still vividly recall those songs playing on the radio while I was working on projects during the summer arts and crafts program at my school in Heath, Ohio — Garfield Elementary.
Those songs were still in rotation when the band dropped its iconic Rumours album in 1977. I was a preteen and the songs from Fleetwood Mac were bleeding into the new Rumours tracks on the radio. I never even felt the need to ask my parents to buy me a Fleetwood Mac album, because any hour spent listening to the radio would result in hearing at least one of their songs.
Rumours came along at a time when I was listening to (and often taping) Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 on the weekends. “Go Your Own Way,” “Dreams,” “Don’t Stop,” and “You Make Loving Fun” were ubiquitous on the radio every day, but later in the evening — when the good DJs started their shifts — you might hear “Gold Dust Woman,” “Second Hand News,” or “The Chain.”
I didn’t start collecting Fleetwood Mac albums for my personal collection until I started abusing the Columbia and BMG music clubs, which sent double-digit numbers of cassettes to me via the U.S. Mail for a penny, as long as I promised to buy three more overpriced ones over the next couple of years — a promise that so many of us broke over and over again.
Fleetwood Mac went through many iterations and stylistic changes over the years, starting as a blues-rock band. Christine joined in 1970 after marrying bassist John McVie and having done some session work for Fleetwood Mac while she was a member of Chicken Shack. That band was on the same Blue Horizon Records label as Fleetwood Mac, so it was only natural that they crossed paths in the UK music scene. She had previously contributed backing vocals to Kiln House as well as artwork for that 1970 album. Her first record as a full member of the band was 1971’s Future Games.
The band obviously achieved its greatest success after Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joined the band and Fleetwood Mac was released in 1975. Those two new vocalists, as a result, often receive a great deal of the credit for the band’s success in the 1970s and 1980s, and they are the biggest “stars” in the band. However, it’s hard to imagine Fleetwood Mac achieving anything close to what it did without Christine McVie.
As mentioned previously, two of the band’s three singles on that 1975 self-titled record were Christine’s compositions and she sang lead vocals on them. She also wrote and sang the UK single “Warm Ways” along with deeper track “Sugar Daddy,” and co-wrote “World Turning.” Her keyboard and synthesizer work was essential to the band’s sound and her backing vocals helped flesh out the album’s songs.
Something magical happened when McVie, Nicks, and Buckingham all wove their voices together in harmony. The three voices became a new, unique, fourth voice that became an indelible part of the Fleetwood Mac sound.
On Rumours, as the band’s two couples famously struggled through the demises of their relationships and the fallout of working with their exes, McVie was the glue that held the album together. She wrote two of the album’s biggest hits — “Don’t Stop” and “You Make Loving Fun” herself, contributed to “The Chain,” and added deep cut “Oh Daddy” and her heartbreakingly beautiful signature track, “Songbird.” She also shared lead vocals with Buckingham on “Don’t Stop.” McVie, Nicks, and Buckingham blended their voices magnificently on the verses of their tempestuous masterpiece, “The Chain.”
McVie’s writing and singing offered some hope and light in what could have been a darker album. Rumours may have been largely a breakup album but she chose to focus on love and romance on “You Make Loving Fun,” albeit based on a post-John McVie relationship, while “Don’t Stop” is about looking ahead to better days/times.
Why not think about times to come?
And not about the things that you've done
If your life was bad to you
Just think what tomorrow will do
Don't stop thinking about tomorrow
Don't stop, it'll soon be here
It'll be better than before
Yesterday's gone, yesterday's gone
It wasn’t that McVie couldn’t explore darker lyrical areas, she simply didn’t allow those feelings to define her. It provided a good balance to some of the songs Nicks and Buckingham brought to the album, which is part of what makes Rumours such a great record.
For me, not being the biggest blues guy, the best run of Fleetwood Mac’s work is from the white self-titled album in 1975 through 1987’s Tango in the Night. Within that window, Rumours is the iconic and essential one, but I am also partial to Mirage (1982). On the heels of the somewhat bloated Tusk album in 1979, Mirage features some of my favorite Mac tracks, including two of my favorite McVie compositions — “Love in Store” and “Hold Me.” The former is the album’s opener and was co-written by Jim Recor, while the second was co-written by Robbie Patton, an opening act on the band’s Tusk tour.
Both “Love in Store” and “Hold Me” highlight McVie’s knack for writing about the human experiences of love and romance. As she sang in “Hold Me”:
You're the only one I ever felt
Could be special to me
You look at me and I just melt
I'm scared of feeling that way
Because the two songs received far less airplay than some of the Rumours songs, they seem fresher to me, despite having a decidedly 1980s-centric production. The album is better known for the Nicks hit “Gypsy,” and includes one of my favorite underrated Fleetwood Mac deeper cuts, “That’s Alright,” which is a Nicks country offering, but there are other McVie highlights as well — “Only Over You” and “Wish You Were Here.” The latter song closes Mirage with a beautiful, plaintive song about separation and longing.
There's distance between us
And you're on my mind
As I lay here in the darkness
I can find no peace inside
I wish you were here holding me tight
If I had you near, you'd make it alright
I wish you were here
'Cause I feel like a child tonight
The highlights for me on Tango in the Night are mostly McVie’s contributions, although the album itself is a bit inconsistent in quality. “Little Lies,” written by McVie and Eddy Quintela (a keyboardist/songwriter and McVie’s second husband), is the standout track to my ears, but she also shines on “Everywhere,” “Mystified” (co-written by Buckingham), and “Isn’t It Midnight” (a collaboration between McVie, Quintela, and Buckingham).
That isn’t to say the other singer/songwriters in the band don’t have their moments on Tango. “Seven Wonders” and “Welcome to the Room…Sara” are wonderful showpieces for Nicks, while the title track and “Big Love” are powerhouse contributions from Buckingham.
While the band’s run of five albums from 1975 to 1987 represent my favorite era of Fleetwood Mac and my favorite Christine McVie songs from that period, I would be remiss if I didn’t bring up her stellar self-titled 1984 solo album. Her first solo album since 1970’s Christine Perfect (her name before taking John McVie’s last name at the time of their marriage), Christine McVie allowed her to take the spotlight that Nicks (in particular) was getting in the 1980s. The album only reached No. 26 on the Billboard 200 in the U.S. and merely made it to No. 58 in the UK, but it was like a lost Fleetwood Mac album to me. And it did feature contributions from Buckingham on five of the 10 songs and Mick Fleetwood’s drumming on “Ask Anybody,” but it also included contributions from rock legends such as Steve Winwood and Eric Clapton.
The album’s first single, “Got a Hold On Me,” was a Top 10 hit for McVie as a solo artist, although I preferred the more up-tempo second single, “Love Will Show Us How,” which only rose to No. 30 on the Billboard Hot 100. The hidden gem on the album is “Who’s Dreaming This Dream,” a song written by Todd Sharp and Daniel Douma and featuring backing vocals from Buckingham. Album closer “The Smile I Live For” is another highlight.
After some turbulence within Fleetwood Mac that saw Buckingham’s departure, the band reformed its classic lineup for the live album and DVD, The Dance. One of the finest live recordings — both audio and video — ever made, in my estimation, The Dance contains the band’s definitive version of “I’m So Afraid,” which Buckingham absolutely knocks out of the park, as well as fantastic versions of “Tusk” and “Don’t Stop,” featuring the USC Marching Band joining Fleetwood Mac for the big finale.
McVie went into semi-retirement for about 15 years not long after The Dance. She released her third solo album, In the Meantime, in September of 2004, but it didn’t do very well commercially. However, her 2017 collaboration with Buckingham, which was simply titled Lindsey Buckingham Christine McVie, did much better. Recorded over a five-year period between 2012 and 2017, the album was considered a critical and commercial success. It reached Top 20 status in the U.S. and debuted at No. 5 in the UK. It was her final album. I’m partial to two McVie-sung tracks from the album — “Red Sun” and “Carnival Begin.” The latter has one of Buckingham’s finest guitar solos. With John McVie on bass and Fleetwood on drums, it’s nearly a Fleetwood Mac album.
It’s impossible to simply summarize McVie’s contributions to Fleetwood Mac or to rock music in general. She was certainly never the flashiest musician or the most charismatic star, but everything she did served to make Fleetwood Mac’s music better. She was the band’s connective tissue musically, and perhaps was the band’s heart and soul over the course of its most successful period.
Much like when Rush drummer Neil Peart passed away, the world became somehow a dimmer place when McVie died, even though neither of those two musicians had been active for several years. Just knowing they existed in the world somehow made this plane of existence better.
At least we still have the music.
My 10 Favorite Christine McVie Songs (Album, Year)
10. Love Will Show Us How (Christine McVie, 1984)
9. Think About Me (Tusk, 1979)
8. Over My Head (Fleetwood Mac, 1975)
7. Love in Store (Mirage, 1982)
6. Say You Love Me (Fleetwood Mac, 1975)
5. You Make Loving Fun (Rumours, 1977)
4. Little Lies (Tango in the Night, 1987)
3. Hold Me (Mirage, 1982)
2. Who’s Dreaming This Dream (Christine McVie, 1984)
1. Songbird (Rumours, 1977)
To help me process the loss of Christine McVie, I enlisted the help of Playlist Wars Podcast host Brian Colburn, a repeat past guest of the show, a talented solo artist, and the leader of his own band, Colburn & Co. Brian was kind enough to join me on short notice for a spontaneous discussion of Christine’s place in Fleetwood Mac and some of her best work. Big thanks to Brian for jumping in without much warning (or any prep time). You can find out more about his music at BrianColburn.com.
Thanks again for your time. Please consider sharing this issue of the newsletter with the music lovers in your life via the first button below, or sharing Michael’s Record Collection (in general) with the second. And be sure to check out the podcast version of MRC at your favorite podcast dispensary. I invite you to visit my website at michaelsrecordcollection.com and to take a look at the membership levels on my Patreon site at patreon.com/michaelsrecordcollection to find out how you can support independent writing and podcasting for as little as $2 per month (that’s only 50 cents per week!).
Well done, as always, Michael.