Launching into my Top 50 Fleetwood Mac tracks, we’ve got a variety of songs from five different Mac albums. It’s a fairly diverse group, which will probably be the case all throughout, as Fleetwood Mac features three pretty different songwriters.
#50 – World Turning (McVie, C. & Buckingham, L.) Fleetwood Mac (1975)
Coming in at #50, this guitar driven rocker anchors this list and its inclusion secures the 1975 Fleetwood Mac album’s singular accomplishment of having every track appear in my Mac Top 50. “World Turning” is a bit of a rarity in the Mac world, as it was co-written by two Mac songwriters, Christine McVie and Lindsey Buckingham. The two split the vocal duties as well. The song was inspired by a track off the 1968 Fleetwood Mac album written by Peter Green called “The World Keeps on Turning.” The band played this song in nearly all of the Fleetwood Mac tours and featured a lengthy solo by Mick Fleetwood n the “talking drum,” a special percussion instrument made for him by a friend in Nigeria.
#49 – Straight Back (Stevie Nicks) Mirage (1982)
Stevie Nicks makes her first appearance on the list with this deep cut from 1982’s Mirage. By and large, for me, Stevie’s best work was her early work, in Buckingham Nicks, Fleetwood Mac, and Rumours. By the time Tusk came a long, she was starting to lose some of that magic, and after that, it was rare that one of her Fleetwood Mac songs would rise to the top for me. Maybe she was keeping all her good stuff for her solo albums by then?
“Straight Back” makes the cut largely because of the prominent featuring of Christine McVie, both instrumentally and vocally — something pretty rare on one of Nicks’ cuts. I always wanted an out and out Nicks/McVie duet. Wouldn’t that have been great? Their voices were so different, yet they blended together so well. Lindsey sang with both of them often, and the three of them often cut loose together, but it was rare to feature the two of them harmonizing alone. I remember hearing “Straight Back” for the first time and being thrilled hearing Christine’s ghostly counterpoint to Stevie’s melody. And the song was so keyboard-driven as well, with little frills tossed in all over
And speaking of that huge solo career Stevie Nicks had embarked on? “Straight Back” is about her relationship with Jimmy Iovine, the producer of her first solo album Bella Donna (981), and her desperate desire to return to her solo work. It’s an interesting topic for a song that she performed with her band… the very thing keeping her from what she wants… but then that’s what Fleetwood Mac does: lean into the discomfort. Of the three songs Nicks contributed to Mirage, “Gypsy” was the smash hit, but that song doesn’t even crack my Top 70. “Straight Back” is her only Mirage track to appear here.
#48 – Spare Me a Little of Your Love (McVie, C.) Bare Trees (1972)
Bare Trees is a great album, one of my favorites, with five songs in my Top 70, but only two of in my Top 50, and surprisingly, four of of those five songs were written by early Fleetwood Mac guitarist Danny Kirwan, and only one, this one, was from Christine McVie. Bare Trees was clearly Danny’s album, after all, Christine only had two tracks on the whole album!
“Spare Me a Little of Your Love” is a straightforward, solid, Christine McVie love song. Its features a lilting melody, and is a great example of the strength of Fleetwood Mac’s underrated rhythm section. Mick Fleetwood is a subtle drummer, but if you tune in to listen to what he’s doing, it’s usually making the song that much more interesting. And how about that flat-out country & western outro, where’d that some from? “Spare Me a Little of Your Love” was also one of the songs that bridge the pre and post-Buckingham/Nicks eras, and was featured heavily in their early concert tours. It’s nice to hear Lindsey give the song his looser flair, and I’m always a fan of the three of them singing together, and they use Stevie Nicks really well on backing vocals in the live version.
And so that’s what I’ll leave you with. The quality isn’t that great; after all it’s 45 years old, but here is a nice live version of “Spare Me a Little of Your Love” from 1975 on the Fleetwood Mac tour.
#47 – The Ledge (Buckingham, L.) Tusk (1979)
Ah, Tusk, what an album. What a shock. What a WTF? I distinctly remember being a senior in high school and being blown away by this crazy double album from Fleetwood Mac. In fact, “Tusk!” is the first word in my high school yearbook profile. Tusk was created by Lindsey Buckingham, largely, in diametric response to Rumours. Punk and new wave were sweeping across the musical landscape, and Lindsey was caught up in the raw, energetic chaos of it all. Surely Christine and Stevie must have though he had lost his mind, particularly when they hear “The Ledge.”
After being lulled into a false sense of smooth security with “Over and Over,” the opening track of the album, “The Ledge” arrives and yanks you roughly into Fleetwood Mac’s new, raw, world. Buckingham is still singing about Stevie Nicks here, angrily lamenting that she won’t be able to live without him, a belittling her for thinking she could even try, over a deep, grinding, buzzsaw of distorted post-punk/country twang.
“The Ledge” is the first of ten songs from Tusk to appear in my Top 50. It’s probably also the most way out… well, excepting “Tusk” perhaps. It’s also one of three songs off Tusk that Lindsey recorded by himself (except for the backing vocals), so i’ve included a video from a tour rehearsal so you can see how he integrated the band into the performance. I love this video because it features Christine on acoustic guitar! I saw the Tusk! tour in 1979, and remember that moment. First the studio track, then the live track (which also includes a recording of the rehearsal for “I Know I’m Not Wrong” which appears much higher in my list, so you can get a peak of it now.)
#46 – The Way I Feel (McVie, C.) Mystery to Me (1973)
Most of Christine McVie’s songs are love songs of a sort: falling in love, falling out of love, being treated poorly by a lover, unrequited love. It’s rare when love isn’t somewhere at the root of a Christine McVie song. And I guess love is a pretty universal theme to work with. The first song written solely by Christine on this list certainly qualifies.
“The Way I Feel” appears on Fleetwood Mac’s eighth studio album, Mystery to Me. It’s one of four McVie contributions to the album (she was one of three songwriters in the band at the time including Bob Welch and Bob Weston), all of which appear in my Top 50. It was a good album for Christine McVie. This first entry is a gentle love song about a woman confessing her love to someone for the first time. The instrumentation is a simple and sweet blend of Christine’s piano and some lovely acoustic guitar. It’s a straight-ahead ballad that shows off Christine’s voice and piano playing.