(Credits: Far Out / IMDB)
Sat 10 January 2026 18:42, UK
There haven’t been too many pieces of rock history that Mick Fleetwood hasn’t seen firsthand. Compared to the other drummers that have come and gone throughout the biggest bands in the world, Fleetwood has gone through the bluesy 1960s, the AM pop of the 1970s and the posh synthesisers of the 1980s, all while propelling Fleetwood Mac forward at every chance he got. Although he might be the one irreplaceable member of the band, Fleetwood only got behind the microphone to sing once.
Given his resume as one of the greatest drummers of his time, though, Fleetwood didn’t need to make his presence known with his voice. When putting together the band in the late 1960s with Peter Green, half of their appeal came from the slightly chaotic drum fills that he would throw into every song.
Whether it was relying on groove or just getting the right sound for what suited the song, there weren’t many musical challenges that Fleetwood couldn’t take on. It was never going to be easy behind the scenes, going through the kind of emotional pain that should have killed most artists, either dealing with the fallouts between his bandmates or making the recording studio a virtual blizzard due to how much cocaine was flying around.
After the band soldiered along with albums like Rumours, it looked like they were truly indestructible, which naturally meant that everything had to start crumbling immediately after. Since Stevie Nicks wanted to move on to a solo career, the band had a touch-and-go relationship throughout the 1980s before Lindsey Buckingham decided he had enough and quit during a band meeting.
While Nicks hung around for the album Behind the Mask, Time represents the most uninspired point in the group’s career, featuring songs that sound like a husk of their former selves. Despite having a few token appearances from Christine McVie on certain songs, the new band members brought in to replace Buckingham and Nicks just don’t cut it compared to their predecessors, sounding like the kind of rock and roll band that should have never been signed, to begin with.
Mick Fleetwood on stage with a drum, as things should be. (Credits: Far Out / Raph Pour-Hashemi)
Towards the end of the record, we do at least get a little change of pace with the song ‘These Strange Times’. After decades in the music business, the song is entirely Fleetwood’s brainchild, featuring him playing various guitars, percussion, and providing a spoken word vocal part to the song.
“It’s about how you read things, which is very important today,” Fleetwood says. “Everyone needs to be carefully paying attention to the information coming our way. There is subtext to everything and we need to be aware of that. When I first encountered the painting that inspired the song and the photoshoot, it was a soul-searching exercise that I was driven to do but I didn’t know when would be the time to release it. Now I know why: the when is now.”
“This is something I wrote many years ago,” Fleetwood says, “and I want it to be nothing more than thought provoking. I want people to see and hear what they will in it. My hope is that by sharing these thought provoking moments in my world that I can somehow open the eyes of others to things in their world and to the existence we all share, which is more and more endangered with each passing day.”
Outside of the trivia of being the only song with Fleetwood, the song leaves the album with a whimper instead of a bang. Considering the rest of the public agreed that this was the lowest tier of ‘The Mac’, it wasn’t shocking that the classic Rumours eventually reformed for a handful of gigs directly afterwards, getting a second wind on albums like The Dance.
Then again, listening to the lyrics almost sounds prophetic on Fleetwood’s part, as he talks about doing things that he doesn’t want to do to close out the album. Time is definitely one of the most forgettable pieces of Fleetwood Mac’s discography, but it’s at least a little bit funny that Fleetwood seemed to have checked out of the project before the record was even finished.
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