(Credits: Far Out / IMDB)
Sun 14 December 2025 20:11, UK
While the sessions for Rumours found Fleetwood Mac at their most chaotic, Christine McVie was usually the centre of gravity that kept everyone anchored. Although she and her husband, bassist John McVie, were going through a divorce at the time, McVie herself was a routinely positive force throughout the album’s recording, as heard in her optimistic songs like ‘Don’t Stop’, ‘You Make Loving Fun’, and ‘Oh Daddy’.
For McVie’s central side-one-ending ballad ‘Songbird’, that theme of optimism surrounding love continued on. While her bandmates were falling apart thanks to their own love lives, McVie was remaining strong.
A simply gorgeous track from Christine McVie, as she delicately sings about her love for another. The awkward moment comes when you remember that she was singing this about a man other than her recently divorced husband, who just so happens to be playing bass across from you.
McVie avoids being too sloppy and instead nails the juxtaposing feeling of the loneliness of love. It’s another moment in which we get to see behind the curtain of Fleetwood Mac. It not only provides McVie with one of the most crystalline moments on the entire album, as she speaks of the sacrifice of true love, but it also unites the group. The songwriter often notes this song as the track that kept the entire band together.
Even better, McVie was able to capture the song in only 30 minutes.
“If you take ‘Songbird’ as an example, that was written in about half an hour,” McVie told Uncut. “If I could write a few more like that, I would be a happy girl. It doesn’t really relate to anybody in particular; it relates to everybody. A lot of people play it at their weddings or at bar mitzvahs, or at their dog’s funeral. It’s universal. It’s about you and nobody else. It’s about you and everybody else. That’s how I like to write songs.”
“Stevie and I were in a condominium block, and the boys were all in the Sausalito Record Plant house raving with girls and boozer and everything,” McVie recalled to Mojo Magazine in 2015. “I had a little transistorised electric piano next to my bed, and I woke up one night at about 3:30 a.m. and started playing it. I had all, words, melody, chords in about 30 minutes.”
“It was like a gift from the angels, but I had no way to record it. I thought, ‘I’m never gonna remember this.’ So I went back to bed and couldn’t sleep. I wrote the words down quickly,” she added. “Next day, I went into the studio shaking like a leaf ’cause I knew it was something special. I said, ‘Ken, (Caillat, Rumours’ co-producer/engineer) put the 2-track on. I want to record this song!’ I think they were all in there, smoking opium.”
When it came time to lay the track down, the studio environment at The Record Plant wasn’t quite suitable. Instead, McVie and the album’s producers embarked over to the Zellerbach Auditorium in Berkeley. As Lindsey Buckingham strummed an acoustic guitar offstage, McVie was given a literal spotlight as she recorded the delicate track more or less on her own.
Check out ‘Songbird’ down below.
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