Rumours is the eleventh studio album by the British-American rock band Fleetwood Mac, released on 4 February 1977, by Warner Bros. Records. Largely recorded in California in 1976, it was produced by the band with Ken Caillat and Richard Dashut. The recording sessions took place as the band members dealt with breakups and struggled with heavy drug use, both of which shaped the album’s direction and lyrics.

Recorded with the intention of making “a pop album” that would expand on the commercial success of the 1975 album Fleetwood Mac, Rumours contains a mix of electric and acoustic instrumentation, accented rhythms, guitars, and keyboards, with lyrics concerning personal and often troubled relationships. Its release was postponed by delays in the mixing process. The band promoted the album with a worldwide concert tour.

Rumours became the band’s first number-one album on the UK Albums Chart and also topped the US Billboard 200. It received multi-platinum certifications in Australia, Canada, Denmark, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. As of February 2023, Rumours had sold over 40 million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling albums of all time. All of its four singles—”Go Your Own Way”, “Dreams”, “Don’t Stop”, and “You Make Loving Fun”—reached the top 10 of the US Billboard Hot 100, with “Dreams” reaching number one. In 2004, Rumours was remastered and reissued, with the addition of the track “Silver Springs” and outtakes from the recording sessions.

The album garnered widespread acclaim from critics, who praised its production quality and the vocal harmonies of the band’s three singers, and won Album of the Year at the 1978 Grammy Awards. Often considered Fleetwood Mac’s magnum opus and one of the greatest albums of all time, Time magazine included it in its exclusive list of the All-TIME 100 Albums, a recognition of the “greatest and most influential musical compilations”.[1] It was inducted to the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2003 and was selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry in 2017 by the Library of Congress for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.[2] In 2020, Rumours was ranked seventh in Rolling Stone’s list of the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time”.

Background

Fleetwood Mac in 1977. From left to right: Mick Fleetwood, Christine McVie, John McVie, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham.
After guitarist Bob Welch left Fleetwood Mac in 1974, drummer Mick Fleetwood, keyboardist and vocalist Christine McVie, and bassist John McVie were joined by guitarist and singer Lindsey Buckingham and singer Stevie Nicks.[3] In July 1975, Fleetwood Mac released its eponymous tenth album to great commercial success, reaching No. 1 in the U.S. in 1976; the record’s singles “Over My Head”, “Rhiannon” and “Say You Love Me” all reached the Top 20 there.

The band’s success belied turmoil amongst its members; after six months of non-stop touring, the McVies divorced, ending eight years of marriage.[4][5] The couple stopped talking to each other socially and discussed only musical matters.[6] Buckingham and Nicks were having an on/off relationship that led them to fight often. The duo’s arguments stopped only when they worked on songs together.[7] Fleetwood faced domestic problems of his own after discovering that his wife Jenny, mother of his two children, was having an affair with his best friend.[8]

Press intrusions into the band members’ lives led to inaccurate stories. Christine McVie was reported to have been in the hospital with a serious illness, while Buckingham and Nicks were declared the parents of Fleetwood’s daughter Lucy after being photographed with her. The press also wrote about a rumoured return of original Fleetwood Mac members Peter Green, Danny Kirwan, and Jeremy Spencer for a tenth anniversary tour.[9] Despite false reports, the band did not change its lineup, although its members had no time to come to terms with the separations before recording for a new album began.[6] Fleetwood has noted the “tremendous emotional sacrifices” made by everyone just to attend studio work.[10] In early 1976, Fleetwood Mac crafted some new tracks in Florida.[11] Fleetwood and John McVie fired their producer Keith Olsen because he favoured a lower emphasis on the rhythm section. The duo formed a company called Seedy Management to represent the band’s interests.[12]

Recording

Rumours was largely recorded in Sausalito’s Record Plant, a wooden structure with few windows, located at 2200 Marinship Way.
In February 1976, Fleetwood Mac convened at the Record Plant in Sausalito, California, with the engineers Ken Caillat and Richard Dashut. The three parties shared production duties, while the more technically adept Caillat was responsible for most of the engineering; he took a leave of absence from Wally Heider Studios in Los Angeles on the premise that Fleetwood Mac would eventually use their facilities.[13] The set-up in Sausalito included several small recording rooms in a large, windowless, wooden building. Most band members complained about the studio and wanted to record at their homes, but Fleetwood did not allow any moves.[14] Christine McVie and Nicks decided to live in two condominiums near the city’s harbour, while the male contingent stayed at the studio’s lodge in the adjacent hills.[15] Recording occurred in a six-by-nine-metre (20 by 30 ft) room equipped with a 3M 24-track tape machine, a range of high-quality microphones, and an API mixing console with 550A equalisers; the latter were used to control frequency differences or a track’s timbre. Although Caillat was impressed with the set-up, he felt that the room lacked ambience because of its “very dead speakers” and large amounts of soundproofing.[13]

The record’s working title in Sausalito was Yesterday’s Gone.[16] Buckingham took charge of the studio sessions to make “a pop album”.[17] According to Dashut, while Fleetwood and the McVies came from an improvisational blues rock background, the guitarist understood “the craft of record making”.[18] During the formative stages of compositions, Buckingham and Christine McVie played guitar and piano together to create the album’s basic structures. The latter was the only classically trained musician in Fleetwood Mac, but both shared a similar sense of musicality.[19] When the band jammed, Fleetwood often played his drum kit outside the studio’s partition screen to better gauge Caillat’s and Dashut’s reactions to the music’s groove.[20] Baffles were placed around the drums and around John McVie, who played his bass guitar facing Fleetwood. Buckingham performed close to the rhythm section, while Christine McVie’s keyboards were kept away from the drum kit. Caillat and Dashut spent about nine days working with a range of microphones and amplifiers to get a larger sound, before discovering they could adjust the sound effectively on the API mixing console.[13]

As the studio sessions progressed, the band members’ new intimate relationships that formed after various separations started to have a negative effect on Fleetwood Mac.[21][22] The musicians did not meet or socialise after their daily work at the Record Plant. At the time, the hippie movement still affected Sausalito’s culture and drugs were readily available. Open-ended budgets enabled the band and the engineers to become self-indulgent;[14][23] sleepless nights and the extensive use of cocaine marked much of the album’s production.[10] Chris Stone, one of the Record Plant’s owners, indicated in 1997 that Fleetwood Mac brought “excess at its most excessive” by taking over the studio for long and extremely expensive sessions; he stated, “The band would come in at 7 at night, have a big feast, party till 1 or 2 in the morning, and then when they were so whacked-out they couldn’t do anything, they’d start recording”.[24]

“Trauma, Trau-ma. The sessions were like a cocktail party every night—people everywhere. We ended up staying in these weird hospital rooms … and of course John and me were not exactly the best of friends.”[4]

—Christine McVie, on the emotional strain when making Rumours in Sausalito
Nicks has suggested that Fleetwood Mac created the best music when in the worst shape,[23] while, according to Buckingham, the tensions between band members formed the recording process and led to “the whole being more than the sum of the parts”.[22] The couple’s work became “bittersweet” after their final split, although Buckingham still had a skill for taking Nicks’ tracks and “making them beautiful”.[25] The vocal harmonies between the duo and Christine McVie worked well and were captured using the best microphones available.[13] Nicks’ lyrical focus allowed the instrumentals in the songs that she wrote to be looser and more abstract.[26] According to Dashut, all the recordings captured “emotion and feeling without a middle man … or tempering”.[8] John McVie tended to clash with Buckingham about the make-up of songs, but both admit to achieving good outcomes.[27] Christine McVie’s “Songbird”, which Caillat felt needed a concert hall’s ambience, was recorded during an all-night session at Zellerbach Auditorium in Berkeley, across San Francisco Bay from Sausalito.[28]

Following over two months in Sausalito, Fleetwood arranged a ten-day tour to give the band a break and get fan feedback. After the concerts, recording resumed at venues in Los Angeles,[12] including Wally Heider Studios. Christine McVie and Nicks did not attend most of the sessions and took time off until they were needed to record any remaining vocals. The rest of Fleetwood Mac, with Caillat and Dashut, struggled to finalise the overdubbing and mixing of Rumours after the Sausalito tapes were damaged by repeated use during recording; the kick and snare drum audio tracks sounded “lifeless”.[13] A sell-out autumn tour of the US was cancelled to allow the completion of the album,[4] whose scheduled release date of September 1976 was pushed back.[29] A specialist was hired to rectify the Sausalito tapes using a vari-speed oscillator. Through a pair of headphones that played the damaged tapes in his left ear and the safety master recordings in his right, he converged their respective speeds aided by the timings provided by the snare and hi-hat audio tracks.[13] Fleetwood Mac and their co-producers wanted a “no-filler” final product, in which every track seemed a potential single. After the final mastering stage and hearing the songs back-to-back, the band members sensed they had recorded something “pretty powerful”.[30]

Composition
Nicks and Buckingham (pictured in 2003) were integral to the songwriting on Fleetwood Mac and Rumours.
Fleetwood Mac’s main songwriters—Buckingham, Christine McVie, and Nicks—worked individually on songs but sometimes shared lyrics. “The Chain” is the only track on which all members, including Fleetwood and John McVie, collaborated. All songs on Rumours concern personal, often troubled relationships.[20] According to Christine McVie, the fact that the lyricists were focusing on the various separations became apparent to the band only in hindsight.[31] “You Make Loving Fun” is about her boyfriend, Fleetwood Mac’s lighting director, whom she dated after splitting from John.[21] Nicks’ “Dreams” details a breakup and has a hopeful message, while Buckingham’s similar effort in “Go Your Own Way” is more pessimistic.[32] After a short fling with a New England woman, he was inspired to write “Never Going Back Again”, a song about the illusion of thinking that sadness will never occur again once content with life.[20]

“Don’t Stop”
Duration: 20 seconds.0:20
The lyrics of “Don’t Stop” are about having an optimistic outlook on life. Inspired by the triple step, the song contains music from both normal and prepared pianos.[20]
Problems playing this file? See media help.
“Don’t Stop”, written by Christine McVie, is a song about optimism. She noted that Buckingham helped her craft the verses because their personal sensibilities overlapped.[20] McVie’s next track, “Songbird”, features more introspective lyrics about “nobody and everybody” in the form of “a little prayer”.[33] “Oh Daddy”, the last McVie song on the album, was written about Fleetwood and his wife Jenny Boyd, who had just got back together.[34][35][36] The band’s nickname for Fleetwood was “the Big Daddy”.[20] McVie commented that the writing is slightly sarcastic and focuses on the drummer’s direction for Fleetwood Mac, which according to her always turned out to be right. Nicks’ song “Gold Dust Woman” is inspired by Los Angeles and the hardship encountered in such a city.[20] After struggling with the rock lifestyle, Nicks became addicted to cocaine; the lyrics address her belief in “keeping going”.[37]

Music
Featuring a soft rock and pop rock sound,[38][39] Rumours is built around a mix of acoustic and electric instrumentation. Buckingham’s guitar work and Christine McVie’s use of Fender Rhodes piano or Hammond B-3 organ are present on all but two tracks. The record often includes stressed drum sounds and distinctive percussion such as congas and maracas. It opens with “Second Hand News”, originally an acoustic demo titled “Strummer”. After hearing Bee Gees’ “Jive Talkin'”, Buckingham and co-producer Dashut built up the song with four audio tracks of electric guitar and the use of chair percussion to evoke Celtic rock. “Dreams” includes “ethereal spaces” and a recurring two note pattern on the bass guitar.[20] Nicks wrote the song in an afternoon and led the vocals, while the band played around her. The third track on Rumours, “Never Going Back Again”, began as “Brushes”, a simple acoustic guitar tune played by Buckingham, with snare rolls by Fleetwood using brushes; the band added vocals and further instrumental audio tracks to make it more layered.[40][41] Inspired by triple step dancing patterns, “Don’t Stop” includes both conventional acoustic and tack piano. In the latter instrument, nails are placed on the points where the hammers hit the strings, producing a more percussive sound. “Go Your Own Way” is more guitar-oriented and has a four-to-the-floor dance beat influenced by the Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man”. The album’s pace slows down with “Songbird”, conceived solely by Christine McVie using a nine-foot Steinway piano.[20]

“Gold Dust Woman”
Duration: 30 seconds.0:30
“Gold Dust Woman” is influenced by jazz and features a dobro.[20] The song’s lyrics focus on Nicks’ struggle with cocaine addiction.[37]
Side two of Rumours begins with “The Chain”, one of the record’s most complicated compositions. A Christine McVie demo, “Keep Me There”,[20] and a Nicks song were re-cut in the studio and were heavily edited to form parts of the track.[42] The whole of the band crafted the rest using an approach akin to creating a film score; John McVie provided a prominent solo using a fretless bass guitar, which marked a speeding up in tempo and the start of the song’s final third. Inspired by R&B, “You Make Loving Fun” has a simpler composition and features a clavinet, a special type of keyboard instrument, while the rhythm section plays interlocking notes and beats. The ninth track on Rumours, “I Don’t Want to Know”, makes use of a twelve string guitar and harmonised vocals. Influenced by the music of Buddy Holly, Buckingham and Nicks created it in 1974 before they were in Fleetwood Mac. “Oh Daddy” was crafted spontaneously and includes improvised bass guitar patterns from John McVie and keyboard blips from Christine McVie. The album ends with “Gold Dust Woman”, a song inspired by free jazz, which has music from a harpsichord, a Fender Stratocaster guitar, and a dobro, an acoustic guitar whose sound is produced by one or more metal cones.[20]

Promotion and release

Trade ad for Rumours
In Autumn 1976, while still recording, Fleetwood Mac showcased tracks from Rumours at the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles.[4] John McVie suggested the album title to the band because he felt the members were writing “journals and diaries” about each other through music.[31] Warner Bros. confirmed the release details to the press in December and chose “Go Your Own Way” as a December 1976 promotional single.[43][44] The label’s aggressive marketing of 1975’s Fleetwood Mac, in which links with dozens of FM and AM radio stations were formed across America, aided the promotion of Rumours.[45] At the time, the album’s advance order of 800,000 copies was the largest in Warner Bros.’ history.[46]

Rumours was released on 4 February 1977 in the US, and a week later in the UK.[47][48] On 28 February 1977, after rehearsing at SIR Studios in Los Angeles, Fleetwood Mac embarked on the Rumours Tour, which visited North America, Europe, Oceania and Asia.[47] Nicks has noted that, after performing mostly Rumours songs during gigs, the band initially encountered poor reception from fans who were not accustomed to the new material.[49] A one-off March performance at a benefit concert for United States Senator Birch Bayh in Indiana was followed by a short tour of the UK, the Netherlands, France, and Germany in April.[4][50] Nigel Williamson of Uncut called Fleetwood Mac’s performances “rock’s greatest soap opera”.[51] “Dreams”, released in March 1977, became the band’s only number one on the US Billboard Hot 100 that June.[52]

Artwork
The front cover art features a stylised shot of Fleetwood with his foot raised on a stool, and Nicks dressed in her “Rhiannon” stage persona, while the back has a montage of band portraits; all the photographs were taken by Herbert Worthington.[20] Fleetwood sports a pair of lavatory chains with wooden balls hanging down between his legs, and holds a crystal ball in his left hand.[53]