Fleetwood Mac's Rumours with Carolyn Kendrick

This week, we bring you a re-release from our bonus vault as Sarah tells Carolyn Kendrick about the making of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. We learn about the worlds of songwriting and production, how the music business has changed since the 1970’s, and of course all the interpersonal relationships that make us love to love this band.

We will be back next week with a new episode.

You can find Carolyn online here. 

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Transcript

Sarah: Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where sometimes we go behind the music. This is a bonus episode that we released back in December. It is me and Carolyn Kendrick, the producer and sometimes co-host of the show, who makes all things possible. And in this case, we talked about Fleetwood Mac's Rumours and the story behind it. And this was a really fun one to do. And you can't hear her, but Carolyn does agree with me. I was not holding her hostage. 

If you have been listening to this show for a while, Stevie Nicks is a recurring leitmotif for me, as is Fleetwood Mac. Stevie Nicks is the woman who taught your cold, English wife how to feel. And because we are all trying to have a little bit more fun than usual this summer, because life is short and summer is shorter, and you got to go swim in a lake when you can, we thought we would bring this episode out that a lot of you have not heard, and which seemed to bring people a lot of joy at the time, and inspire people to listen to more Fleetwood Mac. Which is always good, especially in July. Thank you so much for being here. Have a great summer, you guys. Carolyn says, “HAGS”.

Welcome to You're Wrong About After Dark, where we talk about new gossip, old gossip, and movies I like. And with me today to talk about old gossip, aka history, about Fleetwood Mac and the recording of Rumours is Carolyn Kendrick, who produces this show that you're listening to right now. 

Carolyn: Hello. 

Sarah: Hello. 

Carolyn: Hi, Sarah. I'm so happy to be here. 

Sarah: I'm so happy that you're here. And I'm so happy that we are talking in a way that other people get to enjoy, because I always love doing that with you. 

Carolyn: Oh my gosh. I always love doing it with you just so much. Anytime I get the opportunity, I will grab it.

Sarah: Me, too. And we are talking about Rumours today and the making of Rumours. And we're also talking about how music is produced, and then in a broader sense how audio is produced, which you have to do with You're Wrong About. 

And one of the things that I have loved about researching this is that as somebody who loves the album, Rumours, which even if you don't think you know what that album is, you probably do. You probably know a song from it that you've heard somewhere along the way. It's the album that Stevie Nicks’ Dreams comes from. It's the album that gave us Don't Stop, the anthem of the Clinton administration, for better and worse. And of course, Songbird. And the probably least played on the radio song from it, Oh Daddy, and a bunch of other ones. 

Carolyn: Sarah, just to do a little foreshadowing, at the end of the episode I would love to do a Fuck, Marry, Kill of each of these songs.

Sarah: Oh my God, I love that. And I love doing that with the songs rather than the people in the band. Because once you've heard this whole story you're like, oh, let's just stick to the songs.

Carolyn: You're like, Oh, Daddy. 

Sarah: Which song is the Oh, Daddy? It's fascinating to me how much effort and time and revising and sort of collage this album took. And how it took a solid year of effort. And one of the sources I used a lot in preparing for this is a book called, Making Rumours, by the album's producer. He started off as an engineer and was promoted to producer midway through, Ken Caillat, also known as Colbie Caillat’s dad. 

Carolyn: Oh my gosh. I just remembered that her big hit was, Bubbly. 

Sarah: Nice. And Ken is a very proud dad. Because we'll be deep in a story about people doing coke in 1976, and he’ll be like, “It reminds me of my daughter, Colbie.” And you're like, oh, this is a nice little break in the scheduled programming. 

Carolyn: Yeah. That's lovely. 

Sarah: But yeah, I also wanted to, within this episode, having you here because we love Fleetwood Mac but also because we make this show together, for you to talk about what it means to be the person who, ideally, if you do your job the best that you can, nobody will think you exist. 

Carolyn: Yes. It's like an editor in literature or in journalism or anything like that, right? You don't want to think about how the sausage gets made. You don't want to think about the process necessarily. You just want to be immersed in the actual art. The job of a producer and an editor, which I do both, is exactly like you just said. Just to make sure that you, Sarah Marshall, or whoever the artist is at that moment can express their ideas most concisely and profoundly.

Sarah: Yeah. And I feel like this gets into the sort of the human thing. Which Janet Malcolm writes about in The Journalist and the Murderer, that the advent of the tape recorder prompted this revelation that when we think we're speaking in very coherent, simple sentences, we're actually speaking in sort of one sentence worth of material that gets spread out in pieces over five sentences. And there's a lot of little digressions and language that kind of fills time or goes nowhere or adds a layer of confusion. I feel like if you're not used to hearing your recorded voice talking, it's easy to believe that you're making more sense than you are, unfortunately. 

Carolyn: Yeah, totally. I've learned a lot about speaking voices over the last couple of years as I've been working on this show and on You Are Good. And yeah, it turns out that we are processing what we're thinking in real time as we're going through. And even if you think you know what you're saying, you kind of don’t. You know what you feel you're going to say, but you don't always know what you're going to say.

Sarah: The sort of intimate quality of conversation is that you're experiencing someone figuring out what they think, potentially. 

Carolyn: Yeah, absolutely. People in movies do not speak the way that you normally speak when you're having a conversation with a friend, because when you're having a conversation with a friend, you're talking over each other all of the time, and you're in this, for lack of a better word, collage of dialogue, and it's like waves flowing over each other. In a movie, everything is person A speaks, person B speaks. It's a lot of work to make it seem natural, even though that's just not how we speak normally. And in podcasts, it's the same thing. So both myself and Miranda Zickler do editing on this show. Usually what will happen is I record my part of the audio. I'm on a Zoom call right now. Are you in Seattle or in Portland?

Sarah: I'm in a closet in Seattle. 

Carolyn: Yeah. And I'm in my guest room in California. So I'm on a zoom call, you're on a zoom call. I record my half of the audio you record yours. Then we put it in two separate tracks in a digital audio workstation, which in my case is usually Logic. Other people use other things as well. 

And then basically, what we do is I move every single bit of sound wave that happens so that nobody is ever talking over each other, even though we definitely talk over each other because that's just how people speak. I think of it like an essay so that an idea is said and then you have time to think about it and then the next idea is said, etc. 

So that's what kind of goes into the actual editing process for podcasts. Editing and producing in music is a little bit different and then producing in movies is a totally different thing because sometimes people think of producers as just the money. Like Rob Reiner is producing a movie and so he's like the one that's making it happen in that regard. 

Sarah: And I think I, and I assume many other people think, of it as you're the one who gets the Oscar if it wins best picture for some reason. That's how that works out. 

Carolyn: A producer in music, which I also produce music as well as podcasts, is more of like a sonic facilitator, in certain regards. For example, I'm a musician as well. So I will write a song by myself. Usually that takes anywhere from 30 minutes to, I don't know, 30 years.

Sarah: Somewhere in there. 

Carolyn: And then what you do is you bring your song to your band or you hire studio musicians, and you come into the studio. And depending on how much money you have, you either have the money to do just a couple , or in the case of Fleetwood Mac or people who are assigned to big labels, and especially in the seventies when there was actually money for music and people weren't having to like fund things independently, basically you would have producers that would be like, okay, so here's what the song sounds like. I can give suggestions about what is going to happen with the lyrics maybe. But overall, I'm being like, okay, I'm behind the recording board. I'm behind the soundboard in the booth and I'm going like, okay, that drum sounds maybe a little off, let's try a different drum sound. Or, Stevie, you're sounding a little tired, maybe you can take a break. 

And the job of the producer is to oversee the whole of the sonic landscape to make sure that it's sounding, hopefully, like how the artist wants it to sound. But often producers in big labels and stuff are thinking about how it can sound for it to be marketable. So there's sometimes a little bit of pull between what the artist wants and what can sell on the radio.

Sarah: I love the producer editor comparison because that does feel so true to my experience having things that I've written be edited for some kind of publication or in an academic context. And also editing myself, where so much of the job, in my opinion, is being like, what are you trying to do? What is your goal with this piece of writing? As opposed to, how do we beat this piece of gold with a hammer until we get it into some sort of preordained shape? But what is the artist trying to do? 

And I feel like part of that as well is the artist may think that they need to achieve their end by doing a particular thing, but that might actually be getting them farther away from it. And then they have to have someone who they're able to listen to about that.

Carolyn: It's interesting to hear that Ken, who we'll be learning about more, he was an engineer and then turned into a producer. And an engineer in the musical world is the one who's setting up the microphones and actually sending the sound through the board, and they're mixing things to make sure that the levels are right. And then sending off the tracks to make sure that they're mastered. Which in the podcast world, unfortunately, since we're not in the same place, you are acting as your own engineer because you're setting up your own microphone and everything. 

Sarah: Wow. I had no idea that I was an engineer. I should put that on my business card. “Accidental engineer. Not great.” 

Carolyn: And then Miranda edits it, and then I do extra editing passes, and then I mix it and then I master it. Which that's an aside. But it's interesting to hear that it's not always super common that somebody would be an engineer and then get promoted over the course of the musical project. 

So anyways, back to Fleetwood Mac. So can you introduce me to who's in Fleetwood Mac? What are their names? Where are they from? Who are these people? 

Sarah: Yeah, so the Rumors 5, as I've seen them referred to as if they're all co- defendants in a trial, who record this album and who are the iconic lineup of Fleetwood Mac are Mick Fleetwood on drums, John McVie on bass. Their names are what give the band its name. Christine McVie on keyboards and vocals, Stevie Nicks on vocals and bit of keyboards, sometimes a bit of guitar, and Lindsey Buckingham on guitar. 

And Fleetwood Mac going into Rumours, that to me, the two most interesting things about them are that Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks are a relatively recent addition. They joined the band together because they were already a musical duo who had just recorded an album called Buckingham Nicks, which is amazing. You should listen to it. And it flopped completely for whatever reason, even though they're both topless on the album. 

Carolyn: Really? 

Sarah: You can see everybody's front. Yeah. 

Carolyn: So these two, they were together when they made this. They were dating in addition to being a musical duo. 

Sarah: Yeah, they were a couple. They had been a couple for years. The first thing they ever sang together was a duet of California Dreaming. And they had been together for their adult lives, really. So yeah, they have joined the band as a couple. And the story that I feel like gets told about this is Mick Fleetwood wanted Lindsey Buckingham to join the band, and Lindsey was like, “My girlfriend has to join, too.” But she was also primarily, or at least as importantly, his musical partner. And I also think Lindsey Buckingham arguably hadn't found his sound yet without her. 

Carolyn: Well, that tracks in terms of how I know musical couples to go sometimes. 

Sarah: They're joining because, before Rumours, Fleetwood Mac has acquired a reputation as the band that wouldn't die. They began a decade earlier as an English blues outfit. The McVies and Mick Fleetwood are all English, and the band began its life as Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac. And it was led by a blues guitarist and vocalist named Peter Green. 

Carolyn: Yeah. Okay. So they're part of the 60s British invasion, I assume. And then have this blues element. 

Sarah: What's funny too, is that they're not super popular in the U.S. They're charting in the U.K. in the 60s and early 70s. And they're considered this fantastic English rock group. But Americans don't particularly care. 

Carolyn: Yeah, which I mean, arguably, if I were a person, they're like, there's this great English blues band, I'd be like, fuck off.

Sarah: I'm bringing into the mix Fleetwood Mac on Fleetwood Mac, edited by Sean Egan, which begins with the first news stories about the band. Which were about the blues incarnation of it. And so the first article we have in here is from 1967 and it's called, Peter Green, The Guitarist Who Won't Forsake the Blues. And either because they were calling it that or because the reporter misheard, the band is called Fleetwood Wing at this point. 

Here's an excerpt I wanted to know what you thought of. “Peter's guitar playing has made him into one of the most highly rated musicians in the country, but does Peter think that his very specialist form of music can be truly appreciated by the audiences? ‘No, no, only by a few. I think this is demonstrated by the applause I get when I play very fast. This is nothing. It doesn't mean a thing playing fast. It's something I used to do with John when things weren't going too well, but it isn't any good. I like to play slowly and feel every note. It comes from every part of my body and my heart and into my fingers. I have to really feel it. I make the guitar sing the blues. If you don't have a vocalist, then the guitar must sing.’” 

Carolyn: Okay, interesting. I feel like that's interesting to think about as the genesis or the beginning seed of this band, because I think of Fleetwood Mac as being a very feeling and singing-oriented band in a time where rock music was very fast and flashy. And so I can see that through line of the reason that they maybe stick out eventually in the long term once they get into their final form, they are using that principle of actually connecting to the slower and more meditative moments of a musicality rather than it being like, flashy, super-fast guitar riffs and all of that.

Sarah: Yeah, and not necessarily seeing speed as a superior form of playing, although Lindsey does love to shred as well. 

Carolyn: Yeah. Yeah, there's definitely elements of shreddiness in the music, but it's not their main mode of communication, which I think maybe also lends to its enduring emotion. We were talking a little bit earlier before we were recording about how one of the things that's maybe not always alluring about men's songwriting is that it's just one emotion at a time. And so when you're playing fast, that's just one emotion at a time. 

Sarah: I like that. And also this thing where the instrument gets to express emotions all by itself, which I think Fleetwood Mac does a lot. And it gives you a feeling without necessarily giving words to it. Yeah, I think there's also something about not being too ‘of the moment’, because then the moment will change, and you'll get left behind.  And maybe that's how you stay more timeless. 

Carolyn: Yeah, absolutely. 

Sarah: And Peter Green is guitarist and vocalist, who was the backbone of the band, and he left because he was later diagnosed with schizophrenia and at this time he decided that he couldn't be in a band anymore and he had to go live a godly life and do something like be a gravedigger, which he did for a while.

Carolyn: Wow, good for him. I'm glad that he listened to his needs.

Sarah: Yeah. And he got upset when the band kept sending him royalty money at some point. Okay. Yeah. So his life is a whole other story, and it seems like he had a rough road. But he left the band and then the following year in 1971, Jeremy Spencer, who also did guitar and vocals, the band was staying in LA. They were going to perform at the Whiskey-a-go-go. Which is also funny to me, thinking of them overlapping with the Doors, and then thinking of Stevie Nicks as like overlapping with Jim Morrison in some senses as a stage presence. 

But anyway, the current lineup of Fleetwood Mac was staying in LA and Jeremy Spencer went out to go to a bookstore and ran into some members of, I think they were called the Children of God at that time. It's that cult that River Phoenix grew up in. And he never came back. 

Carolyn: Oh, my god. 

Sarah: He just left to join a cult and was like, I can't play our gig tonight. I'm busy in this cult. 

Carolyn: Very California story so far.

Sarah: Yeah. And so they started off as this classic, English blues outfit. They lost their musical backbone. But Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, who had joined since the Peter Green Big Beat interviews that we heard, are keeping the party going. 

In 1974, we got this list of people who had joined the band by then, Danny Kirwan, Christine McVie, who also is married to John McVie. They had been married for a while before she joined the band, and she was previously in a blues band called, Chicken Shack.

Carolyn: Amazing. I can't wait to listen to Chicken Shack later. 

Sarah: Bob Welch, Dave Walker, and Bob Weston. And then Peter Green has left. Jeremy Spencer has left. Danny Kirwan leaves. He, I think, by the time they record Rumours, is the only member who's been fired. Everyone else has left by joining a cult or amicably.

Carolyn: The two options. 

Sarah: Bob Welch leaves to start another band and Dave Walker and Bob Weston leave. And then we got Buckingham and Nicks and then things came together, and they put out Fleetwood Mac, which they are calling the White Album, as well in the summer of 1975. 

And to me, the weird thing about Fleetwood Mac by today's standards, which is the album that gives us Rhiannon and Over My Head and a lot of other great songs, is that it takes a really long time to become a hit. And it actually becomes a hit album while Fleetwood Mac is recording Rumours, but initially it's doing all right. 

Carolyn: So this band thus far has had trouble hitting its stride from what I understand, because when you have that kind of turnover, you can't really develop a sound because it takes a long time to develop a sound. I'm sure they also are not feeling settled as a band because they don't have the same lineup ever. And so what is this? We're in 1975 now. We've got the Rumours 5. But they're not famous by the time that they're creating Rumours. 

Sarah: And then it's as they're recording Rumours, their previous album is climbing in the charts and doing better and better. And then they're touring to support it in 1976, they're recording Rumours all through that year. And then by the time Rumours came out, they'd built this foundation for it to become huge. 

Another issue that Fleetwood Mac has had is that in 1974, their former manager, Clifford Davis, has decided that he owns the rights to Fleetwood Mac and has set up a fake Fleetwood Mac that then he sends on tour. So there's a fake Fleetwood Mac in the mix. 

Carolyn: What? So this is like a totally different band of people that is also called Fleetwood Mac?

Sarah: Yeah, he puts together a band and he's like, you're Fleetwood Mac. 

Carolyn: Wow, I'm dumbfounded by that. I feel like managers and music industry personnel of this era especially, but also just throughout the 20th century and the 21st century, are just never good people. But this is exceptionally weird and exceptionally terrible. 

Sarah: Yeah, and so we get one of our early press accounts of the wonder that is Stevie Nicks. “Stevie sits in an outdoor lounge chair, spooning her way through a cup of low-cal apricot flavored yogurt as she talks. Her voice, even at conversational level, is throaty and resonant. ‘It's not like I just go on stage and sing every night’, she begins. ‘I scream and crash tambourine on my leg and dance around a lot. It's almost an athletic trip for me because I've never been very strong. In fact, I'm like a snake all day, just grooving along slowly. Then for two hours on stage, I have all that energy. Afterwards, I'm a basket case. I've got to be practically carried away immediately.’” 

Then we got some background on her. She says, “I feel a lot older than when I joined this band. I'm 28 now and no breaks.” And Stevie is making a living by cleaning houses and waitressing. Then they joined Fleetwood Mac. Because Mick Fleetwood is recording one day in a studio and the engineer is, “Hey, do you want to hear these other musicians who are recording here as well?” And he goes and watches Lindsey Buckingham play guitar. And the use of Lindsey Buckingham's guitar playing in my life is, it's like if Stevie Nicks and the way she sings and the lyrics that she has are a reminder that we can feel so many things at once. And we are capacious enough to meet our feelings as they come to us, and we can even articulate these seemingly contradictory emotions that are coexisting inside of us. I feel like Lindsey Buckingham's playing reminds me of how overwhelming it is to feel even a single thing.

Carolyn: Totally. That's great. It feels like the cup's running over. There's a lot going on there. 

Sarah: So here are just a couple of descriptions of Stevie Nicks, which I had to share with another human being. “If the Buckingham Nicks' addition to Fleetwood Mac was a natural, so was Stevie Nicks’ emergence as the new Flash Fox in Rock. One senses she hasn't deliberately created that identity, at least as a primary concern.” And I feel like the thing that you know about Rumours, if a) you know that it's an album or a good album, then the second thing you know is that everybody was breaking up while it was going on. 

And what I find interesting as a point of clarification, if we're willing to believe Colbie Caillat’s dad - and I am - it's that Christine broke up with John, and that Stevie Nicks broke up with Lindsey Buckingham. And that these were in both cases breakups where the woman in the relationship was like, I still love you, but this is just not going to work out. I have to put the brakes on this. 

And what Christine McVie said about this at the time as well was that she really, she did an interview with Cameron Crowe - who of course was working for Rolling Stone at the time and who we must picture as Patrick Fugit in all this - telling him like, yeah, I love John and the love didn't go away, but he's a bad drunk and I and his personality when he's drunk is different and it's bad, and I was getting mostly that. We couldn't be together anymore.

Carolyn: So they're breaking up. So Christine and John are breaking up because of his drinking problem. Yeah. And what does Stevie cite for the breakup between her and Lindsey?

Sarah: Stevie breaks up with Lindsey during the initial recording session for Rumours, which is in the music plant in Sausalito. In early 1976. Sausalito, our finest cookie. To quote Patrick Fugit, “Last year, during the ill-fated stretch in Sausalito, she separated from Buckingham after over six years. The best explanation is, try working with your secretary in a raucous office and then come home with her at night. See how long you could stand her. I could be no comfort to Lindsey when he needed comfort.” That’s what Stevie Nicks says. 

This, by the way, is for a Rolling Stone cover story where Cameron Crowe has to interview each individual member of the band individually as if he's their couple’s counselor. And it also features, I should just have you look at this cover. Look up Fleetwood Mac Rolling Stone cover Cameron Crowe. 

Carolyn: Okay. Oh, my God. Wow. Isn't it Annie Leibovitz who took the photo?

Sarah: Yeah, that is her. That's right. So, she would have been like 28 when this came out. 

Carolyn: Oh, my gosh. That's incredible. Yeah, and so it's the five of them in bed. It's like the two couples together going different directions and they're all topless and potentially some of them are fully naked and they're like holding each other's hands and feet like I think the context is that they're all in bed together, obviously, but, metaphorically as well.

Sarah: Yeah. But I think that they're actually even out of couple configuration. So Stevie is with Mick Fleetwood in the center, which you can tell if you're looking at the picture because he's giant. This is a tiny photo I'm looking at, but I believe Lindsey and Christine McVie are then lying with their head toward us. And then John McVie is reading all by himself. 

Carolyn: Oh, lonesome. Yeah, because the photo I'm looking at is not a super great resolution. So I can't really see their faces. And all of the men look like the same man. 

Sarah: Yeah, it's the 70s. They all have dark hair and beards and big curly hair.

Carolyn: Yeah, exactly. They're all exactly my type. 

Sarah: And two blonde women wearing sheets. 

Carolyn: So yeah, so even at this point, nobody is sleeping with each other literally at this point, they've just broken up, right? 

Sarah: So this Rolling Stone cover story comes out March 24th, 1977. So yeah, after they've been broken up for like over a year at this point, Stevie and Lindsey at least.

Carolyn: Every single band I have been in, there's just like a gravity that happens when you're in a band, there's an intimacy that happens, you're with these people all of the time. You just get to know people in a way that transforms just your daily life, or transcends your daily life, I should say. And you communicate in a totally different language that nobody else knows. And when you're in a band together with somebody, you know them as a person, but there's just this other angle that you also are intimate with them. And so it's just so common for people to fall in love with bandmates. 

I just don't know of bands unless it's like sibling bands or family bands where people just don't fall in love with each other. It just happens all the time. And every band I've ever been in, I've fallen in love with people and fallen out of love. It's interesting that we take this particular story, maybe one of the more dramatic examples of this happening, but it's just so common to fall in love with people that you're making art with. And it's also, I think, equally common to fall in love with the music that you're making with the person, but not actually know the person. 

And then when you actually get to know who you're together with as a human being and not just the music that they're making, you realize, oh, this person is imperfect. This person is not who I had thought that they were in my mind. And now I have to contend with the fact that I am in a business enterprise with somebody that I am unable to have a functional relationship with.

Sarah: And then you're like, oh no. 

Carolyn: And then you have to play shows together for a really long time.

Sarah: And then you have to drive great distances together for $45. 

Carolyn: You have to stop at Come n’ Go, get hot dogs in between gigs.

Sarah: And also I feel like the sort of the muse narrative for women is a classic. And what's so much more interesting is making art together, or even if you don't do it together, having art making lives together that inform and strengthen the art that you make. And Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham met in a band called Fritz, and they played together for a really long time before they got together, apparently. And then they did. And they worked as a duo and then they joined this band and broke up and were bandmates for longer than they were partners. 

And the same with Christine and John McVie. They met in the blues scene at the time, and they got married relatively quickly and then she retired from her own music to be his wife. And then she joined Fleetwood Mac, because apparently that was not enough. 

So Stevie Nicks has started talking on the phone to Don Henley of the Eagles. She says, “It was weird and fun.” And then they arrive and they're at the same venue as the Eagles. She says, “Now I would never go in there and say, ‘Hi, I'm Stevie.’ Never. I would die first. So I go into our dressing room and here's this huge bouquet of roses with a card in it. So I open up the card and it reads, ‘The best of my love…, tonight? Don.’ And I said, that's about the uncoolest thing I've ever seen in my whole life. How could he possibly preconceive something like that? And I'm dying, right? My face is red and I'm fuming. And then finally, Christine grabs me and takes me aside and says, ‘Don didn't send that, Mick and John did’.”

Carolyn: Oh, my God. 

Sarah: “They were in hysterics.” And yet, despite this sabotage, the Henley/Nicks relationship does continue, as we know from the song, Leather and Lace. 

Carolyn: Oh, okay. When did this happen?

Sarah: This is 1976. So this is as they're working on Rumours and also touring and becoming progressively more famous. It's after their previous album has become a hit. 

Carolyn: So they've broken up, but they're still recording Rumours. They're still performing together. What is the tenor of the band? Because they seem fine on this cover. There's the connotation that they're just swapping each other out, I suppose, but what is the tenor in the band at this point? 

Sarah: You asked a bit ago, what did Stevie say about this breakup and here's more of what she said to Cameron Crowe, which I think also speaks to how she's willing to tell us all about it. She says, “I could be no comfort to Lindsey when he needed comfort.” And the article says, “She cites an example from Sausalito. Lindsey was feeling depressed because he couldn't quite get some guitar parts down. She says, “So we go back to where we were staying and he would really need comfort from me, for me to say, it's all right. Who cares about them? Be an old lady. One problem, I was also pissed-off because he hadn't gotten the guitar part on. So I'm trying to defend their point of view and at the same time, trying to make him feel better. It doesn't work. I couldn't be all those things.” 

Stevie has kept mostly to herself since the breakup with Lindsey, outside of a short romance with drummer/singer Don Henley of the Eagles. She spent her days either in the studio or at home writing and taping her songs. She icily denies talk of an affair with Paul Kantner. ‘It's strange for me,’ she says in confidential tones. ‘I've never been a dater. I don't really like parties. I'm very alone now. I'm not one of those women who are just willing to go out and sit at the rainbow. In my position, I can meet a lot of people just because of the band I'm in. I don't want to meet anybody because of the band I'm in.’ Stevie doesn't mind airing her personal life like this at all. ‘I don't care that everybody knows me, and Chris and John and Lindsey and Mick all broke up,’ she declares, ‘because we did. So that's a fact. I just don't want people to pick up a magazine and go, oh, another interview from Fleetwood Mac.’ If it's interesting, I'm not opposed to giving out information. ‘On this album, all the songs that I wrote, except maybe Gold Dust Woman. And even that comes into it, are definitely about the people in the band. Chris's relationships, John's relationships, Mick's relationships, Lindsey's, and mine. They're all there. And they're very honest, and people will know exactly what I'm talking about. People will really enjoy listening to what happened since the last album.’” 

Carolyn: It's interesting how she is so just totally open about talking about these intense relationships. That's a very different instinct than I have, I would say. But, obviously, Dreams was written about Lindsey. So Christine is writing songs about John, I assume.

Sarah: About John McVie. Yeah. And also about her new relationship, which is captured in You Make Loving Fun, which I submit and have always submitted is the most brutal song on Rumours because the subtext is Christine McVie having her husband play bass on a song about how much she loves to have sex with her new boyfriend, which is the equivalent of saying to your ex-husband, oh my God, were we married? I totally forgot we were even married. 

Carolyn: Yeah, you're right. That is brutal, but also a power move. I definitely respect it because maybe he just wasn't, obviously he was a drunk and he was like, not meeting her needs. So you know what, he probably put her through a lot worse. 

Sarah: There's so much legend that this album has accrued. And I feel like this is an album about life during breakups because the McVies are divorcing, the Buckingham Nicks are emotionally disentangling. And also while they're recording, McFleetwood's wife, who has sensibly stayed out of the band, is like, ah, I'm going to leave you as well. You can also get a divorce. 

And one of her reasons, predictably, is that he hasn't really been around and he's putting his energy into the band and he's the dad of the band, but that's inconvenient because he also has human children. 

Carolyn: Yeah, I've been thinking about this a lot lately in terms of when you're in a relationship that needs multiple things out of you, which obviously, we go through this in the podcast because we're not breaking up with each other in this regard, but we are friends and we're co-workers and we're emotional supports and then there's all of these different levels. And I think that as capitalism melts down the wall, maybe we never did have categories for what the people in our lives are, things just get more and more blurred when you don't have the same kind of traditional workplace environments. 

And especially when you work in arts or content or any of that kind of stuff, you're just inevitably working with people that you have multiple types of relationships with. And so it's just inevitable that we're never going to be able to be all of the things for the people in our lives immediately around us. And sometimes that's just hard. 

Sarah: Yeah, especially when due to supply chain issues, we all have to be four or five people now. This also occurs to me just thinking of the experience of working closely with people to mutually create something that you care about in the audio format. I'm not comparing myself to Fleetwood Mac, but I am comparing you to Fleetwood Mac. 

There's also an element of needing some form of comfortable, consistent intimacy for everyone to be able to get their jobs done. And for me to work with you, I have to understand that I'm being witnessed by you in all of my foibles. Both in the recording of this episode where we're talking to each other or the recording of any episode where you're editing and putting the episode together, and also in the working around that and the releasing and the infrastructure. There was a period in my life when I was really an intimacy daredevil, and Stevie Nicks was definitely my soundtrack for that because I think she's also an intimacy daredevil. 

Carolyn: Yeah, it sounds like it. 

Sarah: She's like, I'm going to jump my motorcycle over all 30 of my ex-boyfriends. 

Carolyn: Oh my God. And I'm going to tell you about it.

Sarah: Yeah, and I'll be singing the whole time. And then I broke a bunch of my intimacy bones and I feel like to a great extent working with you and doing this show with you and being part of an artistic team has been one of the things that's been forcing me to relearn that and get out on the flying motorcycle again.

Carolyn: Oh, that's so sweet. You can jump over me any day, if you're up for it. I think that's one of the reasons that people love you so much is that you're able to get to the heart of something very quickly. Which requires vulnerability and requires intimacy with whoever you're talking to. And that also maybe ties into why it's more difficult to do something scripted because when you're doing something scripted, you're talking to yourself and talking to yourself is a different kind of intimacy than talking with somebody else, right? That's the same thing that they're going through in the band. They're talking to themselves, and they're talking to the other people in the band, and then they're also talking to their audience. 

Sarah: Yeah, and I think you have to trust the people that you're looking at and working with directly in at least some capacity, maybe you can't trust them if they're Lindsey Buckingham to not cheat on you or something, but you have to trust them musically or artistically. And in some sense, trust them personally to be able to create something bigger than your parts. 

And this album is interesting because there's great moments of collaboration where you can see the ego knot being at the front of people's thinking and then all this conflict where you can see the ego come out. It's never all one thing. 

Carolyn: Two questions, did Lindsey Buckingham cheat? And second question, are there any lyrics from any of these songs specifically that stand out as good examples of what you're just talking about?

Sarah: I don't have sources for Lindsey Buckingham cheating that I pulled for this episode. But the lyrics of Silver Springs are about him cheating, among other things, and it's also an interesting kind of balance to Go Your Own Way. What I love about these songs is that they're like point, counterpoint. So Go your Own Way is ‘If I could, baby, I’d give you my world. How could I if you won't take it from me?’ So it's like, I'm giving you my world, I'm giving you everything, and you're not taking it from me. 

And Silver Springs with the counterpoint is, ‘I know I could have loved you, but you could not let me.’ And so it's both parties essentially saying, I had all the love in the world to give, but you couldn't receive it. 

And jumping into the production of this album, because this is a really interesting pressure point within it that is present all the way through. Silver Springs originally is a very long song. When Stevie Nicks first recorded it, it's eight minutes long. And also going into the production of Rumours, she's considered the weak link in the band. Not just by people around the band or listeners, but by the band, because she doesn't really have a lot of technical knowledge compared to the rest of them. She doesn't really play any instrument that well. She'll play the tambourine while they're recording, but they don't mic her. It's just for her to have something to do. 

Carolyn: Oh, wow.

Sarah: I know of people who cannot stand Stevie Nicks' voice. I'm sure that there are people who can't stand any voice that you can think of, but I know that she's divisive. I love her voice, but I'm conscious that she's doing something a little bit weird, which I wonder if you can speak to. 

Carolyn: It's definitely a very unique voice in the sense that it has a lot more texture than your average female voice of the 60s and 70s, maybe. I don't think she's afraid to touch that texture and lean into it. Especially as she gets older, I can hear it getting a little bit, you have that lower chest reverberation going on. And once again we come back to the idea that she's not afraid to express emotions within the melodies and things like that. 

And I think the emotions that she's conveying match up with the timbre of her voice in an interesting way. Just as a singer myself, I think a lot of times we're pressured, female vocalists are often pressured to be like, just sound sweet, just sing a sweet song or, make your voice sound pretty. And her voice doesn't always sound pretty, and I don't think it should.

Sarah: Yeah, I feel like that's such a big part of what she does, and it's such an interesting balance to Christine McVie, who does usually sound pretty. It's a more consistent product, and she's more of a trained musician. And Stevie Nicks reminds me a lot of Mick Jagger. I don't feel like you hear that comparison that much. But she understands that part of her job is to like, put on an outfit and jump around the entire time. 

Carolyn: She's often referred to as having witchy energy, and I think with Mick Jagger, there's like an energy there. And like you, all of the other members, like when I'm thinking about videos that I've seen of them playing, they all have energy, they're all energetic, but there isn't a gravity around their orbit. And Stevie Nicks has this, for lack of a better term, ‘aura’., Things just get pulled into her orbit. I love her voice. 

Sarah: Me, too. It's a Stevie Nicks partisan podcast. That's just the way it is. So the initial block of recording time for Rumours was nine weeks at the Music Plant in Sausalito at the start of 1976. And so the band is newly working with Ken Caillat, their engineer. And one of the main issues that becomes apparent is that they like to come in at different hours from each other and they have different drugs of choice. And it's fairly difficult to calibrate the timing so that they can all be able to work for the same chunk of time. Because sometimes John McVie will come in early and start drinking early. And he apparently will sometimes start drinking at 6am. 

Carolyn: Wow. 

Sarah: And he likes to come in and have a screwdriver with just like a float of vodka on top. So just as a garnish. And so he can become incapable of working by 10 o'clock, which is earlier than some of the other band members might even be coming in. Because one of the things Ken Caillat talks about that he believes in is the 12-hour rule. If a musician has been recording in the studio for a while, they need 12 hours of turnaround time to go home and relax and go to sleep and wake back up and come in. Mick Fleetwood is a Heineken guy and Stevie Nicks, to get her voice warmed up before she sings, likes to drink like a toddy with a lot of Courvoisier in it. 

Carolyn: Whoa, what is that? I don't know what that is. 

Sarah: I think it's like somewhat fancy brandy.

Carolyn: Oh, that sounds nice. I would try it. 

Sarah: I know. I really want to try that.

Carolyn: But she's not getting sloshed in the way that some of the other members are. But is there a lot of cocaine going on during this recording? 

Sarah: Yes.

Carolyn: Okay. That was my understanding was that's been the drug of choice for a lot of them. 

Sarah: Yeah. And it starts off with cocaine taking a few days to make its first appearance when they're in the studio, but then they begin using it more and more. There are songs where they're like, we got to all do a magic bump to get in the right headspace to really wham into motion. That's a technical term. And so the first time they use cocaine when they're recording is when they're working on Gold Dust Woman. And then they try to do something that Mick Fleetwood calls ‘transcension’. 

“We ran Gold Dust Woman down a couple more times, and we liked it enough to start recording. That night we got eight takes in the can, but still something just wasn't right. John went home a little before 11 P.M. After that, a transcension broke out, and the rest of us stayed for three more hours, continuing to record the song. Mick coined this term ‘transcension’ to describe the moment when most of the band members were at just the right buzz point where they were ready to play or record anything, even if they were missing a couple of band mates. Often I felt that these transcensions worked against our bigger goal. I would try my best to reason with the band to keep on schedule.” 

Carolyn: This is making me think of how so often what you're feeling is this moment of universal impact and things being just in the right zone. It's true that you feel that way, but then when you listen back to it, you're like, wow, that was messy, I’d say. 

Sarah: And so also this is the day when Colbie Caillat’s dad first witnesses how a rage filled Lindsey Buckingham can get out of nowhere because he's in the booth working with another engineer. Lindsey, for some reason, thinks that he's preventing the other engineer who he's used to working with from doing his job. So Ken writes, “Suddenly, the band screeched to a noisy halt as Lindsey jumped up, turned, and screamed at me at the top of his lungs, ‘Damn it, Ken, let Richard fucking get in there and do something.’ He was screaming at me so hard that his face had turned bright red and I could see the veins popping out of his neck. Flabbergasted, I hit the talk back and blurted out, ‘I'm not stopping him,’. I stepped away from the board so Lindsey could see that I was making room. Richard sat down and just looked at Lindsey as if to say, everything's fine in here, idiot. I didn't know what to make of it. Everything was going great and then out of nowhere, blind rage over nothing. ‘Is it me or is that guy crazy?’ I asked Richard. ‘You're fine, Richard smiled. ‘Nevermind, Lindsey’.”

Carolyn: And what is Lindsey's drug of choice?

Sarah: Lindsey and Stevie both are smoking a fair amount of pot. He doesn't seem to be doing a lot more cocaine than anyone else. 

Carolyn: So he's like the average cocaine user. Okay. 

Sarah: I don't know which substances are contributing to this behavior, although cocaine would make sense. Although this is actually before the cocaine comes out for the band as a whole. So we don't know about his choices. But yeah, this is a trend in this account that things will be going fine and then again, in this book, over some aspect of the music, Lindsey will go from a 1 to 10 anger wise. 

Ken Callait writes, “I was shocked. Everybody went back to what they've been doing before Lindsey's freakout without so much as batting an eye. Little did I know that this was the real Lindsey coming out in front of me for the first time. The others were simply used to it. In truth, it wasn't just that they were used to it, but they allowed it. They understood it. That day's outbursts, like the verbal and physical outbursts that would follow, was just the most extreme manifestation of the obsessive character that every member of the band possessed.” Which I can see that being true to an extent. 

Carolyn: My first thought is just that it's amazing what we let people get away with in the name of making art. It's obviously not acceptable behavior, and obviously we didn't have the same sort of rhetoric around what is acceptable in terms of how to express emotions at the time. But yeah, it's just too bad that kind of environment was tolerated, I suppose, and that it was just seen as normal. 

Because I also think about the fact that like I work as an engineer sometimes and it's such a male dominated industry, I think partially because if I were in that room, I would be like, I'm definitely not safe. This could go bad and so I'm just not going to be here. And I think that makes me sad to think about all the people who could have been not in just that room, but in any room where that kind of behavior is tolerated and then subsequently aren't because of that culture.

Sarah: And the extent to which that's the meaning of ‘if you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen.’ 

Carolyn: Yeah. It's like, why do I have to work in a kitchen that's on fire? 

Sarah: Good point. If you can't stand the heat, perhaps you should talk to OSHA about ventilation or something. That's a good saying. As they're recording this album, their previous album is climbing the charts, and especially during this initial Sausalito phase, it suddenly is popular in a way that it really wasn't before, to the point that previously they had been able to just quietly go up to this recording facility and not be particularly noticed and go out for dinner and not really be recognized and then the fans start showing up and are trying to hang out in the building. 

And also, according to Ken Caillat, he's sharing a house with some of the band members and because they work such long hours. There are groupies who show up who have been told that they can sleep in the engineer’s beds because they won't be back home until morning.

Carolyn: Oh, my god.

Sarah: I wouldn't like it. 

Carolyn: Yeah, I wouldn't want a stranger in my bed by any means. But I could also see this in the culture of the time being like, what do you mean you don't want a beautiful groupie sleeping in your bed? Come on, Ken.

Sarah: Don't you get tired driving that train? Do you know where Songbird was recorded? 

Carolyn: I don't. Why don't you tell me about it?

Sarah: So Ken Caillat, according to himself, heard Songbird, the song that Christine McVie was working on. And it was like, this song would sound good with some reverb. What if we recorded it like in a giant auditorium and had that kind of sound for it? And so they recorded it at the Zellerbach Auditorium in Berkeley. 

Carolyn: Interesting. 

Sarah: Tell me about that auditorium. You've been in there?

Carolyn:  I haven't been in there. But it's interesting that it's in Berkeley, first of all, because I think of Fleetwood Mac recording in Sausalito. So Sausalito is closer to Berkley than it would be to L.A., but when you said reverb, I was thinking maybe they ended up going to Capitol Records to go do this. Because Capitol has a very famous reverb chamber, and also other LA studios. 

So reverb is essentially taking a recorded sound, and then it's like reverberating it. And maybe I'll put on reverb right now so that you can hear the difference between reverb on my voice and reverb not on my voice, so that maybe you can do that. But then a lot of times what they do is that they just will put your voice going through a different speaker in a different room and then it'll echo in that room and then they'll take that recorded sound and put that on right. But that's just replicating what happens when you're in a bigger space, like in an auditorium. So it's interesting that they just record it in an auditorium, which is sometimes a little bit harder to control sound wise than if you were in a chamber situation. 

Sarah: This reminds me of something that Tom Waits said about that album he did in the mid 80s that everybody likes, Rain Dogs, I think.

Carolyn: You know the one. 

Sarah: The one everyone likes that isn’t Closing Time.  And I think about this album, or definitely about this period, he was saying, this is when everyone was in love with synthesizers. And we had all these ways of circumventing actually having to make the sound in the world. You could just create it. You could synthesize it. That's what that word means when you think about it. And how he was very much against that and in this vein of no, I'm going to if I want this weird percussion sound, I'm going to hit this door with a stick, right? Yeah, there's something about the literalism of all this that is really nice to read about. It's like reading about the very early days of film. 

Carolyn: Totally. It's like a very analog experience, which obviously in 76, we're still in analog in a way that we are, we're just totally digital now. It's like a novelty to record analog. But okay, you want it to sound like you're in a big room? Record in a big room.

Sarah: Simple solution.

Carolyn:  Which you would think that would be obvious, but... At least I think to people who record now it's not because you don't have money to record in big rooms now.

Sarah: That's the other thing too that like the label was like, sure you can take a year to make this album. What do we care? Or like maybe we care slightly but we're persuadable.  

Carolyn: I know it's also interesting to hear about this even the fact that, what was it? Did you say nine days initially?

Sarah: Nine weeks. 

Carolyn: Nine weeks. Fuck. 

Sarah: Nine initial weeks in Sausalito.

Carolyn: So just for context for people. Your average independent artists now, if I were to go make an album right now, probably the minimum, like a 9 song, 10 song album with a full band and the whole deal recording at a studio, it would probably cost me between 10,000 and 15,000. 

And so the way that the recording industry is set up now is either you have to figure out how to do that with no money and basically figure out how to do it at home by yourself, or you figure out how to save 10-15 thousand dollars and then you pay for it yourself, or you get a Kickstarter to get that money. Or you get signed to a label that basically functions totally differently now than they did pre streaming, pre internet. But now it's basically more of a loan situation where they front you the money and then you sell records to give them the money back. So it's basically just giving money up but you're not making money in the same way that people made money then. 

Sarah: It's so weird.

Carolyn: If I were to make a record right now, which I'm hoping to do this year, actually, I would be like, okay, how can I get this done literally as fast as possible? I will only be able to book studio time for probably six days. Studio time is going to start recording at 10 a. m. We'll stop at six. We'll do comps at the end, which is where you figure out which takes you're going to take from the day. You probably will record two songs a day, maybe three if you're really fast. And so the idea of having nine weeks to experiment and be like, oh, I took 10 takes of this song today, but like the energy wasn't there so maybe we'll do a little cocaine.

Sarah: I tried to do enough cocaine, but then I did too much cocaine. So let's start again tomorrow at 2 p. m. 

Carolyn: That is the most luxurious, not the cocaine part, but it's the most luxurious thing I could ever think about having. And it's true that they're popular at this point, and they probably didn't have these luxuries when they were recording their first albums, but I'm sure that it was a much more loose environment than it is now. And also, labels at that time were just like, it's like how you hear about the kind of projects that Joan Didion was sent on. You're like, I'm sorry, they paid for what? 

The relationships do not shock me in this because it is not shocking to me that people fell in love, started a band, and then fell out of love while they were making the band because being in a band is much less sexy than starting a band, but the actual components of making this record and the kind of machine that was behind it is definitely fascinating to me.

Sarah: Yeah, I'm just thinking about how nine weeks if you look at it one way, it could seem really grueling and exhausting and oh, my God, it's so long living as this musical astronaut. But on the other hand, it's a luxury to be able to have that kind of time with your work. And also somebody was making them lunch every day. They had catered lunch. 

Carolyn: And they had a house that paid for where their engineer was staying. It's also just crazy, everything of this is just in a totally different financial world than we're in now.

Sarah: So speaking of Songbird again, I love how there were various little problem-solving aspects to this that does remind me a little bit of when we record shows where they have her set up in the auditorium, awesome. But one of the problems is that she needs to stay on tempo and they're like, why don't we play click track for you? I know what a click track is just because I've watched a bunch of YouTube videos about the Les Mis movie and how they tried and failed to use a click track to keep people singing the same song. But what's a click track, Carolyn? 

Carolyn: Oh my gosh, that's hilarious. So basically a click track is a metronome that gets sent into headphones so you can hear the tempo while you're recording. And also, when you're recording with headphones, that means that you can't hear anything else other than what's in the headphones, right? But also people are recording generally isolated from each other so that there isn't what we call ‘bleed’. So that when you're mixing the guitar part, the piano isn't over it because you need to have different balances of everything, right? There used to be a lot more bleed in more analog recordings and things like that. And especially if they're recording in an auditorium, but basically the click track is going to be sent in so that you can hear what tempo you're on and it'll be like, *snap* *snap* *snap* *snap* *snap*

Sarah: And so they suggest doing that. And Christine says, “Ken, I can't play my lovely song with this bloody fucking clicking blasting my ears.”

Carolyn: That's a great impression. 

Sarah: That’s my Christine McVie impression. So the engineers are like, okay what if we have Mick just softly play the drums with brushes and you can listen to that? And then they're like, what if we had Lindsey very softly playing the guitar and you could hear that on your headphones? And they're like, great, nailed it. 

So they have Lindsey on the other side of the auditorium playing the tempo on his guitar, and even that they get some bleed from that, unfortunately. And then the other issue is that Christine has to play it without singing, which she isn't used to doing because they need the piano track all by itself. 

And I'm sure a lot of pianists do this, but I feel like the one I always think of is Glenn Gould, who's the famous, very important Canadian pianist who was best known for playing Bach's Goldberg variations and hummed the entire time and it seems to be still divisive to this day because some people cannot stand to listen to Glenn Gould because he is humming the whole time forever for the rest of your life. 

Carolyn: It's so standard to use a click track now and there is something that happens with like older Generations where they're like, oh, it just doesn't feel natural because I'm used to performing in a live environment where you don't have a click track necessarily, being pumped into your brain while you're playing your songs. 

But yeah, because music is produced now on such a time crunch, often people will do overdubs, which is where, for example, this is what Christine would have been doing. You record your piano part first and then you sing over the part that you just recorded, right? And that typically tends to be a little bit more efficient because if you're recording to a click track, that means that you can mix and match which takes you've done because it's standardized to a tempo. And so that means that you can do three or four takes of something. And then since it doesn't deviate in time, you can use any of them instead of having to completely redo all of the parts, right? 

Sarah: And I feel like that's the answer to the question I realized I should really need to pose to you as well, which is like, why not just record it all together? Why record it in parts at all? As you were talking about editing podcasts before, I feel like it maps onto both things the same way, it gives you more choices. 

Carolyn: Yeah, it gives you more choices. And then it also if you're doing such a long recording session, you're not going to finish the song. If you know you're not going to finish the song today and you're going to have to revisit it in a few weeks, or if you're going to go to a new studio or just do anything where you might have to revisit it later, it's a lot easier to be like, okay, the click track is 86 beats per minute and so we can send this off to somebody to play over it rather than us all having to be there at the same time. And then also with podcasts, we record isolated so that I can move all of the words around, so it doesn't sound like we're talking over each other when we definitely are.

Sarah: Yeah, and it's the best. And what if instead of that you just had two people talking over each other and there's nothing you can do to separate their voices and you can't make them make more sense. 

Sarah: Which is what most podcasts are. And yeah, it's terrible.

Sarah: Unfortunately, yeah. And then it's like, if I wanted this, I would just live in my real life. Yeah. And so the other issue they're running into acoustically is that, so she records her piano. She can't really sing while doing it, or she can't sing while doing it. And then she records her vocals, and they want the vocals to have reverb to go with the piano reverb, which is the reason they're playing it in this auditorium. But she's singing very softly into this fancy new microphone. 

And they get through the day, they send her home, and then they're listening to what they've got. And they're like, oh, we're not getting a reverb from Christine. She's not matching the sound of the piano. And so they're problem solving this, Ken and Richard, the two engineers, and they're like, why don't we just get a speaker and play Christine's vocals through that and then record that, and we'll play the speaker at a higher volume so we'll get the reverb that we wanted. 

Carolyn: Yeah. Okay. Interesting. This is what I was talking about earlier, which is what they used to do. If I'm understanding this correctly, this is what they used to do at Capitol. 

Sarah: Yeah. And then it's so funny how, like when you listen to Songbird, which is one of the iconic Fleetwood Mac songs. They made so many of them, it's hard to pick a short list. But it feels like you're hearing this moment that really happened, but really you're hearing the combination of different moments in time. 

And also you're hearing a piano played by real Christine and then the voice of speaker Christine. There's a day when the women who work at the studio who cook for them make what turned out to be some very strong weed cookies and everyone gets too high to continue and they have to scrap the whole day and also some piano tuners have come to tune Christine's piano and they also get too high.

Carolyn: Oh my god. We're just definitely not working with efficiency in mind. 

Sarah: No. And also it's like when Stevie needs to record, they'll be like, Stevie, you want to come do vocals? And she's like, I really need to sit on this couch, drinking brandy and smoking pot for another hour. And this is at a time in the industry when it's like, okay, yeah, I'm sure you do. The ability to have the luxury of being like, yeah, you need another hour to mentally or whatever get where you need to be emotionally to sing this song right. That seems like something that we have lost and could have used more of. 

Carolyn: Yeah, what kind of emotion would we be able to tap into if we had the ability to work when we wanted to?

Sarah: Yeah, and use the parts of the day that have the most energy for us. Ken Caillat writes, “By Monday, March 15th, I had lost all ability to keep the band sane and sober. There were continual outbreaks of drugs, alcohol, and paranoia. We still had a month to go in Sausalito, and everyone was getting homesick. Our start time was slipping later and later each day. As I explained earlier, the 12-hour rule always holds true. If they left the studio at 4 A.M., then they would not be back until 4 P.M. Period. Mick was the worst influence. He always made the excuse that genius music would come out of the transcensions, but it never did. Maybe that was because the whole band was rarely there for most of the transcensions, just the coked-up crazies, Mick and usually Stevie or Christine. If Mick could get either of them tooted up enough, then off the deep end we'd go. Very rarely would Lindsey fall for the late nights and John never did. Mick had a phrase he frequently repeated, which I later learned was a quote from Robert Frost. ‘The woods are lovely, dark and deep, and we have miles to go before we sleep.’ If that phrase was spoken to him, he would go into a trance-like state and reach into his pocket and pull out his tiny bottle of coke and share it with us. It became a game of sorts.”

Carolyn: Interesting.

Sarah: And apparently, this kind of changes through their recording sojourn, but at the start the band will just keep like a baggie of three or four ounces of coke just in the middle of the studio and they can all just grab some when they want it. And Ken decides to prank them by filling another baggie with flour and then bringing it out and pretending to drop it everywhere. This is just a good description of the process. “Stevie couldn't find the same mood she had the first time she had sung it. But she was a trooper and didn't give up. Lindsey played an acoustic guitar for her to sing to. Nope. She tried smoking a joint. Better. The big guns came out: Courvoisier. Interesting. She tried a magic bump. Nothing had the feel of her original vocal.”

Carolyn: Which song is this for? 

Sarah: This is for Dreams.

Carolyn: Oh, wow. 

Sarah: And so also there's tension because Stevie is spending less time recording than the rest of the band because they don't need her as much because they're not miking her tambourine. And so she starts going off to another area of the music plant, which is called the pit. I tried to find pictures of this. I couldn't. I'm sure that there are some out there but basically you got there by climbing through a pair of red lips and then you could record while in a four-poster bed.

Carolyn: Wow, that is not what I was expecting when you said the pit. I was expecting more of like, I don't know why I was expecting one of those ball pits that you used to go to at McDonald's. 

Sarah: I would like that to. You jump into the ball pit at McDonald's, and you bump into Stevie Nicks with her keyboard writing her song.

Carolyn: She really is the face of Fleetwood Mac, I would say at this point in time and currently in 2022, but it's interesting to think about the fact that she was maybe recorded the least on it, even though she probably has the most cultural impact.

Sarah:  It is really funny. I think she's the secret ingredient that kind of holds the whole thing together because of the emotional vulnerability and kind of clarity of the lyrics, and then also the showmanship of it, where she was the person who didn't need to be behind an instrument and could be the visual of the music that was happening.

Carolyn: Yeah. It is crazy that they are doing all of this, even though they're breaking up actively and obviously going through addiction issues and anger issues and just generally not having their shit together. I do relate to the fact that sometimes the power and desire to make the music that you're hearing in your head is so much more powerful than anything you're going through and you're just like everyday life and I think that feeling definitely comes through in this album and it's probably why it's had such a lasting impact. 

This album is very impactful and very emotional and intense and obviously that's because of what they were going through but also it seems like they were like, we just have this innate desire to make this music. We just have to, even though we're going through this. Because they easily could have just been like, no, we're just not doing this. Or were they under pressure from the record label? Was that part of it? 

Sarah: In nothing that I've read did it seem to occur to anybody to stop. That's why they call that song Don't Stop, I guess. But there was a feeling of it being difficult to get through. But it seems like everyone was so passionate about the work that they were doing and so excited about it that it felt to some extent like we obviously have to do this because we're improving, and they were improving as they were touring and their live renditions of songs that had been on the album they'd put out the past year were improving on what they'd recorded for that. 

And so they have until April 11th at the record plant in Sausalito, where Stevie gets to go write songs in the pit. That's where she writes Dreams and where the general practice for recording songs is, they'll mic and record each instrument individually. They'll do a bunch of takes. They'll do eight or 10 takes at a time. They'll listen back to what they have and they'll pick different instruments from different sessions that kind of create the best whole and then go back in and fill that in and add more instrumentation and more vocals, potentially. And Christine McVie actually mentioned in one interview that she got a sculpture degree in school and that kind of feels like what they're doing, they're doing a paper mache album, which is sculpture. 

Carolyn: Yeah, it's interesting because it is so standard now in the recording industry to do everything in parts and for not everybody to be in the same room at the same time. And often if somebody is recording something in Nashville, but there's a guitarist that they love in LA, they'll just send the tracks to LA. It's just very standard for people to not necessarily be working in the same zone at the same time. 

But I think this is like a newer thing in the 70s because if you watch Get Back, which is the Beatles documentary that's like a gazillion hours long, which is perfect for me but maybe not perfect for people who don't love the Beatles. They're all recording just in one room at the same time and that's in 1969, so late 60s and 70s are really when people start getting more into the ability to do this. 

Sarah: Yeah. And when I was a little Beatles fan, I'm still a Beatles fan, I just spend a lot less time actively thinking about the Beatles than when I was like 13. I remember reading about how it seemed like they were actively innovating when they were recording and just trying out a bunch of stuff and that Revolution Number 9 was technically a very new thing when it came out and stuff like that.

Carolyn: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. 

Sarah: Yeah. So it feels like the seventies were like the space age for music engineering. 

Carolyn: Recording in general blows my mind all the time. Even just the fact that I can talk into a microphone, and it can get converted into signal. I understand how it works, but just the fact that it sounds like my voice still, no matter who records, it's going to sound like them. That's crazy. That's like magic. Also, the fact that a lot of recording equipment came about to exist through the military. 

For example, compressors, which levels the highs and lows of a soundwave so that it's not so loud that it hurts your ears and not so soft that you can't hear it, that came about as technology for radio walkie talkies and things like that, because one guy might talk super loud and blast your ear off if you're in combat and then another guy might be so soft that you can't hear him. So they created this technology so that you can hear each other and that's a lot of the technology that we use for recording and a lot of the technology that was being used for overdubs and things like that in this recording session, I'm sure, came about because of military technology and then was like repurposed into art.

Sarah: Wow. That's amazing to think about is the connection between World War II and Rumours.

Carolyn: Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. It's a short walk.

Sarah: That also reminds me of one of the facts in this book that makes me feel like I'm being pranked is Ken Caillat being like, yeah, “Rumours was successful I think partly because it was a loud album. We made it louder than other albums were at the time. So when you played it, it was louder.” And I'm like, is that how records work? And apparently it is.

Carolyn: Yeah. So there is something that happens. There's like a loudness bias that people have where people think something sounds better if it's louder, which is why stuff that's on the radio now, if you're listening in the car, you can turn the knob up and down for it to fit your comfort. But overall, things are mastered. 

The difference between mixing and mastering: mixing is when you're leveling the voices with each other and like leveling everything so everything's like intelligible within the song and then mastering for an album is like matching each of the songs levels to each other. So if you're listening to Songbird, you don't have to turn it up once you get to Goldust Woman, right? Because they're all different loudnesses. So mastering is making sure that everything is basically the same volume from song to song. And now we master songs way louder. There's much less variance in dynamics now than there used to be just because people or record labels and they tend to think that loudness is better.

Sarah: Yeah, that makes me think of watching TV and a commercial comes on.

Carolyn: And no, exactly. Yeah, it's the best. 

Sarah: So they finished their initial session in Sausalito. They're nine weeks at the record plant and Ken drives the masters down on the seat beside him in his car down to LA, which just boggles my mind. And there's like another copy. There's one more copy, but that's it. Yeah. 

Carolyn: Oh, God. So stressful. 

Sarah: There exists a finite number of the objects on which this music is encoded. And if they're lost, they're just lost forever. It's amazing how many important films of the silent era are just gone because people didn't bother preserving them or didn't do it correctly. 

Carolyn: Yeah, totally. 

Sarah: And so two of the main issues that the band is having a hard time resolving is that there's a song that they've been working on from the beginning that they've been calling, Keep Me There, but that doesn't really have lyrics and that they can't figure out how to make cohesive. It's this great song instrumentally, like it's got this great, John McVie bass part. It's got Lindsey freaking out on guitar. There’s something really compelling about it, but they can't get it to come together. 

And then Stevie has written the song called, Silver Springs, but it's eight minutes long and they have to figure out whether it's going to fit on the album. And I remember when I first learned about this, I thought it was bullshit that they were like, listen, Stevie, it's too long, but it was too long because the album could only be 44 minutes long. 

Carolyn: Yeah, because when you're working with vinyl, and when you're working with analog, you're working with a physical medium, and there's only so much time that you can have on either side of a vinyl, because you're literally putting the grooves into the vinyl, and if it's too much, data on one side, then the sound will start to distort. So you can only have I don't know, 20-ish minutes on either side of a vinyl.

Sarah: Which is amazing, just thinking about the freedoms we have today that we don't really notice. And stuff that I'm aware of, because I remember when, even in high school, I would make playlists for people or mix CDs, but you still had to fit it onto a CD, and you had 80 minutes or something.

Carolyn: Yeah, totally. Yeah, if eight of your 44 minutes is taken up with this one song, then that's a pretty big percentage. 

Sarah: So some record executives come down to listen to one of the tracks as it sounds so far, they listen to Go Your Own Way, which is Lindsey writing bitterly about his breakup with Stevie Nicks and famously having her sing backup on it on a song about how shacking up is all she wants to do.

Carolyn: I wonder if that's true or not. 

Sarah: It's an odd accusation, more than anything.

Carolyn:  Yeah, especially after hearing that quote from her about ‘I couldn't comfort him’. That doesn't sound like the language of somebody who's just trying to pin him down.

Sarah: It's just that ‘you couldn't comfort me’ is just a bad lyric, or it's not compelling in the same way, because Stevie Nicks has a lot of I'm so sad in the lyrics she's writing about this breakup, and you don't get that so much from Lindsey Buckingham. Go Your Own Way is such a bouncy defiant cocaine influence song. And it's just like, I'm fine. I'm good. I'm fine with this breakup. I love this for us. 

Carolyn: I actually would have been surprised if he would have been able to access any sadness, because I don't generally feel like when men are going through breakups, that's like the first thing they can do. 

Sarah: Yeah, you have to be angry for six months to your entire life and then you can think about accessing sadness. 

Carolyn: Yeah. Especially for somebody who obviously is already prone to anger issues. 

Sarah: So they're touring, they can feel their level of fame changing, it's evident. And then they're in the studio and Lindsey quote barges in. And a few minutes later, Richard, the other engineer, Richard Dashut, whose name I hope I'm pronouncing somewhat correctly. And Lindsey's new girlfriend, Christina, comes in. And Christina says that Lindsey erupted and got angry and punched her. 

Carolyn: Oh, wow. Lindsey.

Sarah: Apparently Richard talks to Lindsey and says, “What are you doing, Lindsey? Are you fucking crazy? You don't do that to people.” And Lindsey says, “I know, you're right. I don't know why she got me that mad”. Which is…

Carolyn: Oh, Lindsey, fuck you. 

Sarah: Lindsey, yeah. Not the response we were hoping for. Got to blame the person that you just punched. And then Lindsey gets truly angry at Ken a little bit later on because basically Lindsey is doing take after take of lead guitar for Go Your Own Way and isn't satisfied with anything they've reached the max of what they can keep recorded before they have to say start taping over stuff, which as anybody who has used a home video to record a Treehouse of Horrors episodes understands the trauma that could potentially surround that. And Lindsey's like, let's do another one, let's do another one, let's just record over that last one. And they're like, are you sure, Lindsey? Are you positive? And he's like, yeah. 

And then at some point into this, he's like, actually let's play that one from before again. I think they like that better. And they're like, that's the one that you told us to record over. And according to Ken, he goes into the booth, grabs him by the throat, which is fucking terrifying. Everyone knows that’s terrifying. I don't have to say that's terrifying, but it is. 

Carolyn: Yeah, that reminds me of Kubrick during the filming of The Shining who was famously just terrible to Shelley Duvall and was like, you have to do take after take after take. And basically, in this case, Lindsey is the one telling himself to do the take over and over again. But basically, I can definitely speak from experience that there is a point of negative returns when you're doing something over and over again, where the 50th take is not going to be that much different from the 100th take. And at a certain point, you have to just live with yourself in your imperfections. But also, it reminds me of Kubrick in the sense that's like a very violent thing to do.

Sarah: What we're willing to forgive in the service of art. I feel like Rumours is a great album in spite of that kind of thing, because there's drive and then there's drive that takes you to the point where it's not actually improving your work, you're just stuck in a loop with yourself. And you're strangling Colbie Caillat’s dad.

Carolyn: Not so bubbly.

Sarah: I guess this idea of yeah, the lone male genius who he was right, and everyone was wrong. I myself like stories about someone who had to be a bit of a dickhead to make art. And that's why I love the making of the Titanic story so much. But I also feel strongly that Lindsey Buckingham, when he joined Fleetwood Mac, brought Stevie Nicks with him. They just came as a unit. And I feel like that gets told as he insisted on bringing his girlfriend with him. And they were like, all right, and there can have been, I'm sure some element of that. 

But I also think that he didn't really have his own musical identity yet, that was just how they performed and what they knew how to do and how their best work had come to them so far, as a duo. I still can't say why Fleetwood Mac ever made the choices that they did, but I feel like if you are a band who, if you're people who are learning to exist as bandmates as you're learning how to stop existing as romantic partners, you have to be doing that out of some recognition that you're doing something together that you couldn't do alone. And not just financially.

Carolyn: I am relating to that because I often have been somebody's girlfriend who- maybe not often, but it's happened to me before where I've been somebody's girlfriend. They're like, oh you're their girlfriend. Maybe just be in the band. You're around all the time anyways.

Sarah: That way he won't complain about never spending time together.

Carolyn: Yeah, something like that. And then not that I'm Stevie Nicks or anything like that, but I've often been in situations where you're the face of the band, even though you were an afterthought. And I've definitely been in many musical situations where I've been doing the majority of the writing or doing the majority of the work or doing the majority of, whatever. And then the Lindsey Buckingham of the situation will claim that work that I did was their own. I can see some of that in this where it's like he's treating himself as if he's this genius where you're just Lindsey Buckingham

Sarah: And he can even be a genius of guitar, but he's not a genius of emotions. You don't have to have strong emotional intelligence to write Holiday Road, I'm sorry to say. 

Carolyn: I just don't really believe in genius. I just don't really think that's a thing, even though there are people who are incredible at what they do. It's just interesting that she's just thought of as this afterthought at this point in time, and not to totally conflate my own situation, because they're obviously vastly different, but she's doing a ton of work in this and obviously a ton of emotional lifting and that's coming through in her lyrics definitely. And then also just this idea that you have to suffer to make art is just so bullshit. Just being basically alive is enough to be able to tap into the depths of emotion that we all have and like you don't have to experience pain and you don't have to inflict pain to be better at making art.

Sarah: I always think of those stories where somebody did like a bajillion takes of something and I guess was pushed past endurance. And then I guess you use the first take anyway. I think that happened with Anne Hathaway and Les Mis, speaking of click tracks. And that's always passed off as a funny story, but it's not funny. You can't treat performers as your little human props that you can push to an emotional breaking point whenever you feel like it just because you can. 

Carolyn: Yeah, absolutely. 

Sarah: Yeah, what stands out to me about Rumours really is like Lindsey Buckingham is a scary guy and John McVie is drinking way too much and everyone's apparently doing at least some and probably too much cocaine and there's a lot of elements of precarity here but also people are sleeping enough people are eating enough. People have time to back off of an idea and come back to it and release something they're truly happy with. And really the comfort of the whole thing is what stands out today. 

Carolyn: And also, yeah, it's like, why are you pushing yourself like this when you don't have to?

Sarah: Yeah, Lindsey. The best work in this seems like it comes from just being in the lips and bedroom sometimes, or not trying again and again until you're past the point of endurance. 

So speaking of the point of endurance, Silver Springs is still eight minutes long. Ken and the rest of the band are like, Stevie, the song is too long. And Lindsey is yeah, Stevie, this song is too long. Silver Springs is my favorite Fleetwood Mac song. It's my favorite Stevie Nicks song. My favorite lyrics of it, I think, are “Time cast a spell on you, but you won't forget me. I know I could have loved you, but you could not let me. You'll never get away from the sound of the woman who loves you.” There's no mathematical canceling out of feelings. It's not like love plus anger equals nothing. It's like love plus anger plus hurt plus sadness plus hope plus question mark equals the song. 

So they go through Silver Springs and try and cut it and try and cut down inessential lyrics. And Stevie is in tears while they're doing this because it's so painful for her. She says, “These lyrics are part of the story, and we can't cut them.” And Ken says, “If we don't shorten the song, then it may not fit on the album. It's my job to try and save your song.” Which I feel like is very much the producer's role. Which is like, I am trying to help you. ‘Then cut the lyrics.’ She straightened up like a proud soldier. We worked for several hours, and I could see that poor Stevie was devastated by the process. ‘It's so unfair that my beautiful song has to be mutilated’, she said at one point. ‘I agree’, I said. As I've already mentioned, I thought Silver Springs was one of the strongest songs we'd recorded, and I really wanted to save it. But if you want to keep a longer version of Silver Springs, then the only option is to take one of your other songs off the album.” 

And so they do get it down to 4 minutes and 33 seconds. And ultimately, according to this book, which I guess I would like to dig deeper in this, but I will accept the story that the band was all like yeah, it's still too long. And I don't think that anyone was conspiring to get rid of it. But I think that it's a song about her breakup with Lindsey, and I think it's not mean, and I think it's devastating because it's not mean. Go Your Own Way is a mean song, and there's no bitterness in this. Which I think is in a way kind of scarier. 

Carolyn: Yeah, especially maybe for somebody whose first instinct is anger. It's terrifying to not be met with your first instinct, to see something totally foreign emotionally.

Sarah: Yeah, to not have the Stevie recrimination song, Go Your Own Way become a TOO. And he says that he feels like Gold Dust Woman is like a bitter, acrimonious song. And it's directed at him, even though it's really about groupies. But yeah. And so they don't put it on the album. The band nominates Mick Fleetwood to go tell her because nobody else wants to.

Carolyn: Yeah, yeah, I wouldn't. 

Sarah: And he breaks the news to her, and she's very upset about it. And it ends up being the B-side for the first single off of Rumours, which is Go Your Own Way. 

Carolyn: Oh my God, that is a real knife to the chest right there. 

Sarah: Yeah, and it just gets out into the world and like people find it gradually and love it and they perform it when they reunite in the concert film, The Dance. But I guess it's like the Fleetwood Mac story all over, which is it's the song that wouldn't die, that technically gets out into the world, but people have to figure out over the years how great it is. And Go Your Own Way is great as well. It's not, not a great song.

Carolyn: But once again, it's just kind of one emotion at a time. 

Sarah: Yeah. And the emotion is Go Your Own Way. I'm fine. I'm fine. I didn't get impaled when I fell in this hole. That's just a stick I'm holding over my torso. 

Carolyn: I'm actually making way better music now that I have this stick in me. 

Sarah: So Ken and Richard, the two engineers, Ken is now a producer. So Ken and Richard are listening to the masters. And they're like, does this sound wrong? This sounds a little off. What he says is that the heads, the little tape heads that the tape goes around are getting tape oxide on them. So the tape is basically starting to rub itself off onto the playback equipment. So that's terrifying. And so luckily they have the other set of tapes, the only one other one. 

Carolyn: So scary. 

Sarah: So Ken starts troubleshooting this. He talks to a maintenance engineer, Billy Youdelman, and says, “Is it possible to get the overdubs from our worn-out tape onto these unused masters,’ I asked him. ‘Maybe’, he said, “But you'll have to sync up two machines by hand and control the speed of one machine, so it stays in sync with the other. That's never been done before, and it won't be easy.’”

Carolyn: Sounds difficult. I wouldn't want to do it. 

Sarah: Yep. So yes, they do it. It takes till five in the morning. And they're able to save the masters and save Rumours.

Carolyn: Holy shit. 

Sarah: So we're getting into the homestretch. Silver Springs has been cut. We're trying to cope with that loss. And then they shoot the album art. And it is, of course, I don't know why this didn't occur to me, but of course it was. It is controversial with the rest of the band that the cover of Rumours shows only Mick Fleetwood and Stevie Nicks and nobody else. That's a really cool cover, but if you're one of the three other people in that five-person group, then you would be mad. 

And then according to Ken Caillat, to avoid this happening with Tusk, the little dog on the cover of the Tusk album is his dog, Scooter. And then he said that Stevie Nicks told him that she placed a hex on Scooter because he got her place on the cover.

Carolyn: Stevie! I really respect that energy. She's like, fuck Scooter. 

Sarah: And Ken feels that Stevie and Christine never liked Scooter because he was always humping their little dogs. 

Carolyn: I was meaning to ask what is the relationship between Stevie and Christine? Do they get along at all?

Sarah: They seem to get along fine in the making of Rumours, but I think they're just on somewhat different planets. One of the pieces from soon after the Buckingham Nicks has joined the group, Christine McVie is quoted at length being like, no, I love having Stevie in the band. It's great. It's so great. And it's like, okay, maybe I believe you. 

Carolyn: She's like, No, really, it's really great. No, it's so great. 

Sarah: Because I don't know, this is pure projection. But I think that one of the things that makes Fleetwood Mac unusual is having multiple women, usually you have a bunch of guys, or maybe a bunch of guys and one woman. And if there's two, then if you're the pre-existing woman, then your ability to not be totally discredited in conflict or to collectively bargain improves, or you have someone to go to who understands the position that you're in some ways, but also you're not the only woman anymore. It's like a very toxic position, but it's one that has benefits if those are the only ones you can imagine, especially. 

Carolyn: Yeah, especially at this time. I could see that being difficult to deal with. 

Sarah: Yeah, I feel like the tension, there's the couple tension. And Stevie Nicks and Mick Fleetwood have a brief and ill-advised affair.

Carolyn: I was going to ask.

Sarah: There's all kinds of stuff, which shockingly did not inspire, Oh Daddy. But there's also the tension between the rest of the band and Stevie, who again is like, it's unclear to everybody exactly what she's contributing. I don't think that anyone doubts that she's contributing something or a lot of something, but it hasn't yet become evident what she's doing to the whole of the band structure. She's maybe the one or a big part of what helps to bridge the gap from music that is really good and that you can really enjoy and can bring out big feelings in you to music that will get a big feeling out of you, whether you like it or not.

Carolyn: This makes me think of Landslide, which is obviously one of the most sighted emotional songs. She seems inevitable. Her whole thing seems inevitable. But if you haven't heard Rumours yet, I guess it may be confusing. 

Sarah: And so yeah, to Stevie's abilities, we have this nagging song, Keep Me There, which has a lot of promise, but just isn't fully there yet. And then finally, near the end of the process, they look at these lyrics that Stevie has written for this song called, The Chain, which are just like sad, desolate, just like pure sadness, and then decide to use those. And then suddenly that's the missing piece. And you have this barn burner of a song that Opens with lyrics about vulnerability.. 

Carolyn: I feel like that's also your brand. 

Sarah: Oh my God. Ideally. Yeah. I love that song so much and it's impossible to categorize and it just feels it's angry and it's sad and it's defiant and it's scary and it's passionate and you could match it to a bunch of different emotions, and it would work for all of them.

Carolyn: Also, I'm just looking at the lyrics to The Chain right now and the opening lines are, “listen to the wind blow, watch the sun rise, running in the shadows, damn your love, damn your lies.” 

Sarah: “And if you don't love me now, you'll never love me again.” Which I think in that original drafting was just this sad, desolate thing to say and then it somehow becomes, when matched with that instrumentation, defiant, I've always felt. You either have to love me right now or just fucking give up on it, man.

Carolyn: Yeah, totally. 

Sarah: And so they get the final mix done. And then just to highlight the wonder and horror of analog, I'm going to read you a little passage, again, from Ken Caillat’s book about how records are born, because this is just, again, I feel like I'm being pranked. “In the days of Final Records, the mastering engineer had to play the tape through his console and turn all of the knobs precisely on cue to make the required adjustments in real time. This sent the final stereo mix out of the mastering console to a large lathe which had a sharp blade that vibrated and converted the sound waves into grooves on the disc. It literally cut the grooves into the rotating blank virgin lacquer to make an actual long playing (LP) record. When people played the discs on their turntables at home, their record players each had a diamond needle that would sit in the groove. As the disc turned, the tiny bumps down in the cut groove would convert back into sound that could be played out of the speakers. Then the mastering engineer had to reload the lathe with new blank lacquer, put side two of the tape onto the tape machine, and repeat the process with different cues for side two. After both sides were cut, the mastering engineer placed the lacquer parts in a box to be shipped out to the local pressing plant, where each vinyl disc was placed in a bath that coated the lacquer discs with silver. These metal images became the master impressions from which other vinyl versions would be created.” 

And Ken and Richard, who have been working together on Rumours this entire time, are watching the little records being born. And then they're like, what happens when you just leave the masters sitting here for a while after making them? The guy who's cutting them, Ken Perry is like, oh, yeah, we always do that. The quality isn't compromised very much. And he says, much? “Ken explained that after the grooves were cut into the lacquer, they were perfect. But as the hours passed, the grooves tend to spring back toward their original state somewhat. I was horrified.” 

And so Richard and Ken decide that they need to drive the lacquers to the bath, which is in another building down the street, so that they ca, get bathed in silver before they have a chance to degrade, which apparently they determine later saves like 5% in terms of overall quality. That's almost the end of the story of Rumours and then to me the end is Silver Springs Live in 1997, but I don't know, I love knowing that about the actual little records that went into the world. 

Carolyn: I think it's cool that we're learning about this through the engineer's perspective, because I think it could be very easy to just focus on the interpersonal relationships, which is obviously a massive part of this. But the feat of this music is that it happened despite all of these things working against it, despite it being such a long process, despite all of these people going through massive turmoil interpersonally, and these engineers were like, okay, we're just going to make it happen. We're going to drive it to the silver coating place to get it reproduced faster. Congratulations to Colbie Caillat’s dad for caring so much. 

Sarah: There's something so great about knowing that when I have to get something I've recorded to you, I just put it in Google Drive and then share it with you as a file, but it would be cool to have to drive it to you. That's all I would do. We would just need to live across the street from each other, which would be fine. 

Carolyn: Yeah, that would be totally great. 

Sarah: What we have today is in many ways superior, but we're also at the point where we're realizing that the internet is not particularly protected and huge swaths of it can just be gone all of a sudden and that there is no cloud. It's just the cloud is just in a building somewhere and that building can catch on fire. 

Carolyn: Absolutely. And speaking of this analog weekend that I did recently, it was at the studio in Nashville called, Welcome to 1979, where they actually do all of this vinyl cutting and reproduction and things like that and the silver plating and all of that. And I was talking to the owner of that studio and he was saying that the safest way to store your music is to have analog basters made, which is crazy to think about because they have these analog tape masters and this analog vinyl, and it feels precarious to have a physical medium be the finite thing because anything can happen to physical art. I mean our bodies will all be disintegrated one day. 

One day these vinyls will all be disintegrated. None of this is permanent. Art is not for forever, unfortunately, no matter what, but it's especially not for forever. Because if you think about the history of digital recording, even in the last 20 years, if somebody sent me a recording or a set of files that was in pro tools from like 2008, I wouldn't be able to access it. I wouldn't be able to work on it. If it was like an MP3 or something, but if they sent me the actual pro tools session, I wouldn't be able to open it. And that's not that long ago. 

And the same thing between if somebody sent me a digital session from 1999, I wouldn't be able to access it. And that's not that long ago. I would have to have a lot more equipment than I have, but if somebody sent me analog masters, I would be able to do something with it if it was 10 years from now, 20 years from now, 50 years from now, a hundred years from now, right? 

There was a tornado in Nashville in 2020, right before the pandemic hit, this was like in March, and actually contributed to why Alex and I moved away from Nashville, because the house we were going to live in got hit by the tornado. But Woodland Studios, which is Gillian Welch's and Dave Rawlings studio, has all of their analog masters of all of their music in there, the tapes, and as the tornado was hitting, the roof got taken off of that studio and one of the biggest things that they had to deal with was making sure that their masters were okay and getting those all safely. I would much rather have to deal with that precarity, which is the same precarity that we deal with in our mortal bodies every day. Then being like, oh shit, I can't open this Google Drive link.

Sarah: Yeah. God, it's funny too, because I've felt this desire to just do as much stuff analog as possible, and I'm sure that's a response to just by default, more and more of life is taking place in these virtual spaces that your body doesn't really register as real in the same way, and you're not really tricking your mammal self. I feel like I haven't adequately said, like, why Rumours? Why do I care? Why are we here? Because it's easy to take it for granted that it's great. Why are you invested? Why does Rumours matter? Why does it matter to you?

Carolyn: First of all, Rumours matters to me because it was shown to me by one of my best friends, Natalie Peterson, in high school. And I grew up in a very instrumental household. My parents are both jazz musicians and classical musicians. So I grew up around a lot of that and a lot of prodigiousness, being a prodigy or playing something as fast as possible. That was considered or at least what I interpreted that kind of music to be valued. 

And when I finally started listening to more rock music, more folk music, more country music, more blues, just music that was song based rather than instrumentally focused only, it just unlocked this part of me that I had no idea was even possible or that I even had capacity for. My main mode of making music now is writing songs and it took me a long time to be able to get into that and be able to like actually access that part of myself because it's a very vulnerable thing, but listening to rumors was definitely one of the first stepping stones to being able to get there because of how incredibly crafted the songs are and incredible the lyrics are. 

And so that's why it matters to me for sure. I don't know if you feel this way because you're very well spoken and you're very good at articulating your thoughts. But I think that the only time I am myself and the only time I'm able to actually express who I am and what I'm thinking and what I'm feeling is when I write a song. 

Sarah: I think that's how I've felt about writing for most of my life. And for a really long time, I felt like the only place I could really truly articulate myself was like through like when I was writing something. And if I had to do it live, socially, it would not happen. I would look back and be like, I don't recognize that person. 

And I think I love podcasts so much because it was bringing this kind of, I don't know, and being in academia where you're in seminars a lot and bringing me to a place where I felt like I was being asked to express how I authentically thought or felt in a way where it was like actually me and not you create a proxy for yourself that then goes out and talks to people for you. So I identify with that. And that's why I love Stevie Nicks. Because the idea of this voice that opens up to you if you sit very quietly in the room behind the lips. That feels very real to me. 

Carolyn: I'm not a particularly religious person. And I think that we all need that feeling that comes with transcendence. And that's probably what they were trying to get out with the drugs, but maybe missed a little bit. You need to get these songs out there. You need to say the things that you're feeling, and you don't always have other ways to do it. It seems like these people were not very great communicators and this was like their way of figuring out how they felt.

Sarah: Yeah, I think there's a generosity to just being like, yeah, this is about all of us having breakups, because I feel like maybe not bands as much, but definitely writers are often like, no, my fiction is not autobiographical at all. And it's like, oh, okay, what is it based on then? Because, it's about the experience of being a human and you are a human. So like, where are you getting that from? 

Carolyn: Yeah. Yeah. It just makes sense to me that they didn't stop making this because it seems like the only way that they could authentically really touch God.

Sarah: Yeah. And I feel like this is one of the reasons why we bother or feel compelled to make art or if you don't feel comfortable calling what you do art, which is fine, it's a process, making whatever you make, which is art, no matter what. On some level, I think we understand that we can lift something out of ourselves that can make sense to so many more people who we can't conceive of who are out there somewhere.

Carolyn: So what happens after Rumours is released? Do they keep playing together? They just keep trucking on. 

Sarah: They keep going for a few more years. The album is a mega hit. People famously start doing solo projects. Stevie Nicks starts doing solo albums because she says she's just writing too many songs for Fleetwood Mac to fit onto their albums. So she just has to do solo albums as well. They break up and then reunite for The Dance. 

And they will re reunite as well, but reunite very famously with this 1997 concert film, The Dance, which Ken Caillat argues that Bill Clinton is partly responsible for getting them to come back together to play for his inauguration. I feel like her revenge is that this song didn't die, and Lindsey just has to keep hearing it and also getting to hear it. 

Carolyn: And he has to play it. 

Sarah: And he has to play it. 

Carolyn: And he has to listen to her sing it to him.

Sarah: And this lovely verse about him cheating on her. 

Carolyn: Sometimes it's the best thing that can happen. Because then you know.

Sarah: Because then you know, and then you can go hang out with Don Henley. 

Carolyn: Then you can go your own way.  I just want everybody to just take a moment, think about your most difficult ex. Think about the worst fight you've ever been in with them, and now think about performing with that person in front of thousands of people. 

Sarah: And there's just something, I don't know, I feel like the kind of the jokes that we make point at the truth, but are not quite there. I think of the John Mulaney line about how Bill Clinton was telling us who he was by choosing Don't Stop as his campaign song. “Don’t Stop, a song from Rumours, an album by and for people cheating on each other.” And it's not, not true, but also I think that there's lots of albums by and for people cheating on each other. There's more to it than that. It's really the ability to look your ex in the face and sing a song about them to them, which- and again, I'm a Stevie Nicks partisan. 

So why do I think it's unfair when Lindsey does it and it's fine when Stevie does it? It's because I'm being unfair, possibly. But that's what it is really. It's not just the rawness or the size of the feelings, it's somehow making them into something that other people can feel with you. I feel like it's simple like a knife is simple. These songs go down really easy. And you cannot be conscious of everything that's happening in them, but it's still happening. And if you want to pay attention to that, then you can. And a knife is a complicated thing to make, but it has a very simple job that it can do. 

Carolyn: And it does that job pretty well when it’s sharpened. Okay, so just quickly, I know we're done, but I just want to quickly know your Fuck, Marry, Kill for the songs on this album.

Sarah: Oh my God. Yes. Okay, so wait, let's get our track list here. 

Carolyn: Okay, so we've got Secondhand News, Dreams, Never Going Back Again, Don't Stop, Go Your Own Way, Songbird, The Chain, You make Loving Fun, I don't Want To Know, Oh, Daddy and Gold Dust Woman. Okay, so I unfortunately am going to kill, Oh, Daddy. Because that song personally, I just can't really listen to it seriously.

Sarah: Because it's called, Oh, Daddy. 

Carolyn: Because it's called, Oh, Daddy. And that saying daddy should be Illegal unless you're like literally in bed with somebody I know, and I just can't think about that when I'm walking down the street. And then I am going to fuck Dreams, because that song is just sex straight into your veins. And then I think I'm going to marry, You Make Loving Fun, which is maybe even a little bit more interesting now that we know that it's about her new boyfriend after divorcing her ex-husband. 

Sarah: That's like the joyful freewheeling song. It's a carefree one. Yeah. I was also going to maybe say kill Oh, Daddy, but you've expressed why I would do that. I think that I would kill I Don't Wanna Know, because that's just the least, to me, the least memorable song on there.

Carolyn: Oh, interesting. 

Sarah: I really like it, but I don't. And I'm sure now that I've said that I'll go listen to it and be like, no, there's so much happening here. But yeah, if I have to kick one of them off the lifeboat, it's that and Oh, Daddy are about even for me. I think I would fuck Gold Dust Woman. It's just very sexy and it captures some of that kind of live Stevie Nicks freak out energy that I love. There's broken glass in it, which obviously seems like a recipe for safe sex. It reminds me of Jim Morrison singing The End, and that's the kind of sex song I want. And then I think I would marry Songbird because there is such a sort of the morning after the massacre tenderness to it. Songbird is amazing.