Fleetwood Mac RUMOURS: Dreams Are Forever

February 4, 1977. The date Fleetwood Mac released the monster album that seems to just grow stronger with time: Rumours. There's an old adage that the more one puts into something, the more they'll get out of it. The members of Fleetwood Mac certainly didn't hold anything back when they ripped their collective guts open and spilled them all over the recording consoles of recording studios across the country to make what became Rumours. The world gleefully picked through the beautiful mess over and over, sending the album screaming to the top of the Billboard charts, where it would spend most of 1977 (and a little bit of 1978) at #1.

"It was the craziest period of our lives," Mick Fleetwood told Q Magazine in 1997. "We went four or five weeks without sleep, doing a lot of drugs. I'm talking about cocaine in such quantities that, at one point, I thought I was really going insane."

Fast forward to 2020, and what was classic was brand new again. With the country gripped in a pandemic compounded by social and political anxiety, it took one man: the freshly minted legend, Nathan Apodaca, in Idaho to remind everyone of the subtle but substantial powers of Rumours, and one song in particular: "Dreams."

Apodaca's viral TikTok video sent "Dreams" and Rumours right back up the charts, with the winner of the 1978 Grammy award for Album of the Year climbing back into the top 10 to peak at #7 on the Billboard 200 in October 2020: "This TikTok thing...has kind of blown my mind," Stevie Nicks admitted to CBS This Morning that year. "And I'm happy about it, because it seems to have made so many people happy."

One of the most beautiful moments on Rumours is the late Christine McVie's "Songbird," which unlike most of Rumours, was the result of something pure and lovely: "We were finishing up one of the crazy sessions at Sausalito Record Plant and I was wrapping up some cables," producer Ken Caillat revealed at the Grammy Museum. "Christine sat down at the piano and started playing this beautiful song. I stopped what I was doing and I turned around and watched her. I was just amazed at how beautiful this song was."

He was so moved by the tune that instead of recording it in the studio, he booked time at Zellerbach Auditorium at University of California in Berkeley, complete with orchestra shell and a nine-foot Steinway. "As a surprise for Christine, I had requested that a bouquet of roses be placed on her piano with three colored spotlights to illuminate them from above. I really wanted to set the mood!" he wrote in his book, Making Rumours: The Inside Story of the Classic Fleetwood Mac Album. "When Christine arrived, we dimmed the house lights so that all she could see were the flowers and the piano with the spotlight shining down from the heavens. She nearly broke into tears. Then she started to play."