{"id":346121,"date":"2025-12-15T05:33:10","date_gmt":"2025-12-15T05:33:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/346121\/"},"modified":"2025-12-15T05:33:10","modified_gmt":"2025-12-15T05:33:10","slug":"the-classic-fleetwood-mac-song-written-in-half-an-hour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/346121\/","title":{"rendered":"The classic Fleetwood Mac song written in half an hour"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Fleetwood<\/p>\n

(Credits: Far Out \/ IMDB)<\/p>\n

Sun 14 December 2025 20:11, UK <\/p>\n

While the sessions for Rumours found Fleetwood Mac<\/a> 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\u2019s recording, as heard in her optimistic songs like \u2018Don\u2019t Stop\u2019, \u2018You Make Loving Fun\u2019, and \u2018Oh Daddy\u2019.<\/p>\n

For McVie\u2019s central side-one-ending ballad \u2018Songbird\u2019<\/a>, that theme of optimism surrounding love continued on. While her bandmates were falling apart thanks to their own love lives, McVie was remaining strong. <\/p>\n

A simply gorgeous track from Christine McVie<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

McVie avoids being too sloppy and instead nails the juxtaposing feeling of the loneliness of love. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Even better, McVie was able to capture the song in only 30 minutes.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you take \u2018Songbird\u2019 as an example, that was written in about half an hour,\u201d McVie told Uncut. \u201cIf I could write a few more like that, I would be a happy girl. It doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s funeral. It\u2019s universal. It\u2019s about you and nobody else. It\u2019s about you and everybody else. That\u2019s how I like to write songs.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cStevie 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,\u201d McVie recalled to Mojo Magazine in 2015. \u201cI 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.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cIt was like a gift from the angels, but I had no way to record it. I thought, \u2018I\u2019m never gonna remember this.\u2019 So I went back to bed and couldn\u2019t sleep. I wrote the words down quickly,\u201d she added. \u201cNext day, I went into the studio shaking like a leaf \u2019cause I knew it was something special. I said, \u2018Ken, (Caillat, Rumours\u2019 co-producer\/engineer) put the 2-track on. I want to record this song!\u2019 I think they were all in there, smoking opium.\u201d<\/p>\n

When it came time to lay the track down, the studio environment at The Record Plant wasn\u2019t quite suitable. Instead, McVie and the album\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Check out \u2018Songbird\u2019 down below.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Related Topics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Credits: Far Out \/ IMDB) Sun 14 December 2025 20:11, UK While the sessions for Rumours found Fleetwood…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":346122,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[49,48,75,2009,341],"class_list":{"0":"post-346121","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-fleetwood-mac","12":"tag-music"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=346121"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346121\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/346122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=346121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=346121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=346121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}