Rumours is the eleventh studio album by the British-American rock band Fleetwood Mac, released on 4 February 1977 in the United States and on 11 February 1977 in the United Kingdom[3] 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 in the aftermath of several relationship breakups among the band members in addition to heavy drug use, both of which shaped the album's direction and lyrics.
Rumours was a commercial success, selling 13 million copies worldwide by 1980.[4] It garnered widespread acclaim from critics, with praise centred on its production quality and vocal harmonies, which frequently relied on the interplay among the band's three vocalists, and which has subsequently inspired the work of musical acts in various genres. It won Album of the Year at the 1978 Grammy Awards and received Diamond certifications in several countries, including the UK, Canada, Australia, and the US, in where it is certified 21 Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). As of February 2023, Rumours has sold over 40 million copies worldwide, making it the 5th best-selling album of the 1970s and the 9th best-selling album of all time.
Often considered Fleetwood Mac's magnum opus, Rumours has frequently been cited as one of the greatest albums of all time. It was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2003,[5] and in 2004, Rumours was remastered and reissued with the addition of "Silver Springs", which had been excluded from the original release, and a bonus CD of outtakes from the recording sessions. It was selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry in 2017, being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress.[6] In 2020, Rumours was ranked 7th in Rolling Stone's list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time".[7]
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 10th anniversary tour.[14] 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.[10] Fleetwood has noted the "tremendous emotional sacrifices" made by everyone just to attend studio work.[15] In early 1976, Fleetwood Mac crafted some new tracks in Florida.[16] Founding members Fleetwood and John McVie chose to dispense with the services of their previous 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.[17]
The record's working title in Sausalito was Yesterday's Gone.[21] Buckingham took charge of the studio sessions to make "a pop album".[22] According to Dashut, while Fleetwood and the McVies came from an improvisational blues-rock background, the guitarist understood "the craft of record making".[23] 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.[24] 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.[25] 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.[18]
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.[26][27] 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;[19][28] sleepless nights and the extensive use of cocaine marked much of the album's production.[15] 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".[29]
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,[17] 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".[18] A sell-out autumn tour of the US was cancelled to allow the completion of the album,[8] whose scheduled release date of September 1976 was pushed back.[34] A specialist was hired to rectify the Sausalito tapes using a vari-speed oscillator. Through a pair of headphones which 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.[18] 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".[35]
In autumn 1976, while still recording, Fleetwood Mac showcased tracks from Rumours at the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles.[8] John McVie suggested the album title to the band because he felt the members were writing "journals and diaries" about each other through music.[36] Warner Bros. confirmed the release details to the press in December and chose "Go Your Own Way" as a December 1976 promotional single.[37][38] 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.[39] At the time, the album's advance order of 800,000 copies was the largest in Warner Bros.' history.[40]
For their 2009 concert tour, the band proffered an expanded release of the album with "Silver Springs" included with the original album and an extra disk of "Roughs & Outtakes, Early Demos and Jam Sessions".[47][48] For the album's 35th anniversary in 2013, a deluxe edition of the album was released. In addition to "Silver Springs" and 2004's extra disk, this release added a disk of "More From The Recording Sessions", a 12-track disk of live songs from the Rumours Tour[a] and a DVD of The Rosebud Film, a 1977 documentary about the album.[49][50][51][52]
"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.[25] McVie's next track, "Songbird", features more introspective lyrics about "nobody and everybody" in the form of "a little prayer".[54] "Oh Daddy", the last McVie song on the album, was written about Fleetwood and his wife Jenny Boyd, who had just got back together.[55][56][57] The band's nickname for Fleetwood was "the Big Daddy".[25] McVie commented that the writing is slightly sarcastic and focuses on the drummer's direction for Fleetwood Mac, which always turned out to be right. Nicks provided the final lines "And I can't walk away from you, baby/If I tried". Her own song "Gold Dust Woman" is inspired by Los Angeles and the hardship encountered in such a city.[25] After struggling with the rock lifestyle, Nicks became addicted to cocaine; the lyrics address her belief in "keeping going".[58]
Featuring a soft rock and pop rock sound,[59][60] 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.[25] 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.[61][62] 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.[25]
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