In Don't Stop the music journalist analyzes the continued popularity of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours.
What inspired you to research this album’s relevance?
When my son was in high school, I noticed all of his friends seemed to have some relationship to Rumours that they didn’t with any of the album’s contemporaries. That struck me as interesting, so I took a preliminary look at streaming data and saw that this is not just anecdotal—Rumours sells way more than any of these other classic rock albums. I also started to think about the ways that it kept reappearing in culture: the all-Rumours episode of Glee, Daisy Jones & the Six. This album holds a unique place in popular culture, and I wanted to figure out why. I didn’t want to hear from those of us who grew up with the record. I wanted to hear from people growing up with it now.
How does the presence of two women band members, Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie, keep the sound fresh?
That’s practically the first thing most of my interview subjects talked about. Rumours has three different singers, three different songwriters, and therefore three different perspectives. It’s more of a playlist than an album of one guy singing at you for 45 minutes. It’s also the biggest-selling album in American history with a majority of female singing voices. Bigger records are by the Eagles, Michael Jackson, AC/DC, and Led Zeppelin, and there isn’t a girl to be found. Rumours also has two women rather than one woman singer, which is a more familiar construct. For kids who have grown up with a different sense of diversity in voices, the construction of four or five guys with long hair playing guitars and drums is very much their parents’ version of a band.
What did you learn about how pop music ages?
On the one hand, Rumours is an exception. If you sat down in 1979 and said, “Fifty years from now, which one of the decade’s albums will be the most important one?” nobody would have said Rumours. They’d have said Born to Run, Led Zeppelin IV, or Dark Side of the Moon. While those are important, they’re using the album as a format to tell a story about America or dystopia, and they feel old. Rumours deals with the cycle of relationships. One girl said, “This is why we still read Jane Austen.” There are always going to be kids going through relationship ups and downs who turn to the album for a sense of understanding. This is not to discourage artists from making political or topical music—big statements about a time. But a high school kid right now is not going to react to those themes from decades ago in the same way. The spectrum of emotions can have an extended afterlife, remaining significant and timely in ways we don’t often think pop music can.
