I had this scheduled to go up yesterday, but messed up the calendar and wound up scheduling it for *next* Monday. I just discovered that mistake. Oh well.
There has been enough written about Fleetwood Mac and the album Rumours that it almost feels cliche to write anything else about it.
However….
I have never heard Rumours in its entirety until yesterday. I have a couple of Fleetwood Mac albums, but surprisingly, none of them feature the “classic” lineup that everybody thinks of when the band is brought up. Amazingly, at least to me, I knew all but 3 of the songs on the album.
I was in Goodwill looking for a portable CD player for my wife’s classroom because hers died. Needing a CD to test on the machine to make sure it works I came across Rumours. Since I didn’t have it, I figured I would use it to try on the CD player and if it worked I would pick up both.
The CD player worked.
“The Chain”
Fleetwood Mac is one of those bands I sort of grew up hearing on the radio, and while I was always aware of them, even in their most popular era of the 80s, the band never really struck me as one that I would listen to for any length of time. It wasn’t until the 90s after the “classic” lineup had drifted apart that I got more into the band, but never in any significant way.
Whenever a Fleetwood Mac song would come on the radio I would enjoy it, and move on. I knew that Rumors was one of the biggest albums the band released so I was sure I was going to recognize several songs, but of the 11 presented here (it was an older pressing, not the newer remastered version) there were 8 that I have heard on the radio. I did not expect this at all.
“Never Going Back Again”
Apparently only 4 songs were released as singles. This means something when album tracks are played on the radio outside of being a single. This doesn’t happen a lot, and to have 4 other songs from the album getting air time over the years, it says something about the quality and popularity of the album.
I like Fleetwood Mac and am glad to have picked up (a used copy of) Rumours, but I don’t feel as if my record collection is complete by any sense of the imagination. It’s good, though there are a couple of songs I don’t really like, and the album doesn’t feature my favorite Fleetwood Mac song. Still, I was surprised to find out that I knew the majority of the songs. If you haven’t listened to the whole album, you might be surprised as well.