When I was fresh into my 20s, a pal of mine moved into a small, one-bedroom apartment with his girlfriend. Our group of friends thought she was wonderful, but still had our concerns, not all of them tied to the fact that he was splitting from our established post-college but pre-adult house and leaving his portion of the rent uncovered. The concept was entirely foreign to me: I hadn’t yet loved anyone enough to want to share a space with them that wasn’t temporary and then potentially quickly forgotten. The shared machinery of love and trust has many parts and therefore many flaws, and therefore many opportunities for disaster. At the time, it all existed on too thin of a ledge for me to imagine walking. When my pal and his girlfriend broke up three months into the lease, they stayed in the apartment together. Breaking the lease was too expensive, but so was one of them taking on the rent alone. There is also something about remaining inside of the wreckage that is more seductive than pushing your way out of it alone. It seemed, at the time, like stubbornness gone off the rails, but it is a judgement call. If I have the destruction of something that I once loved to carry with me at all times, isn’t it like I still have a companion? The summer of the breakup, my friend would stay at our house late, making sure he could get home after his now exgirlfriend fell asleep. They would avoid each other in the mornings, one sleeping on a tiny couch in the living room. Though it seemed like an absolute nightmare to me then, I remember both of them on the day we helped move them out of the apartment, as sad as I’d seen them in any of the months before. There are endings, and then there are endings.
In this way, heartbreak is akin to a brief and jarring madness. Keeping up the fight—any fight—to not have to reckon with your own sorrow isn’t ideal, but it might help to keep a familiar voice in your ears a bit longer than letting go would. Heartbreak is one of the many emotions that sits inside the long arms of sadness, a mother with many children. I suppose it isn’t all bad, either. For example, I am heartbroken at the state of the world, so I take to the streets again. But the real work of the emotion and all of its most irrational callings happens beneath the surface. When the room you once shared with someone goes quiet, there are few good ideas. I have gutted a record collection because too many of the songs reminded me of someone I didn’t want to be reminded of. My friends have fled jobs, bands, states. I don’t enjoy being heartbroken, but I’m saying I enjoy the point of heartbreak where we convince ourselves that literally everything is on the table, and run into whatever will dull the sharp echoing for a night, or a week, until a week becomes a year. It is the madness that both seduces and offers you your own window out once it’s done with you.
At some point, a person figured out that the performance of sadness was a currency, and art has bowed at its altar ever since. Sometimes it’s a game we play: if I can convince you that I am falling apart, in need of love, perhaps I can draw you close enough to tell you what I really need. Other times, it is not entirely performance. In 1976, Fleetwood Mac was in desperate need of a massive album to cement their shift from blues-rock obscurity to more radio-friendly pop. Mick Fleetwood had higher aspirations than kicking around small clubs, and could sense the band’s time running out. Their previous album, 1975’s self-titled effort, was the first with California duo Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. Containing songs like “Rhiannon” and “Landslide,” now seen as Nicks’ signature tune, the album saw success, paving the way for a monster follow-up. But in the two years that followed, everything began to come apart. Here, the part everyone knows: first bassist John McVie and keyboardist/vocalist Christine McVie divorced at the end of a tour after six years of marriage. Then Buckingham and Nicks, embroiled in a volatile on-again/off-again relationship since joining the band, finally permanently turned it off, which didn’t reduce any of the volatility. Mick Fleetwood, the only one not in an intragroup romance, found out that his wife, Jenny, was having an affair with his best friend. The press, catching wind of what was believed to be the band’s collapse, circulated inaccurate stories. In one story, Christine McVie was near-death in the hospital. In another, Buckingham and Nicks were labeled as the parents of Fleetwood’s child. The band was breaking apart, but not broken up, reveling in the false stories before falling into piles of cocaine to forget them. When the spring of 1976 came, they retreated to a recording studio in California. No longer at the edge of chaos, but fully immersed in it.
The lyric that opens up Rumours, the band’s most iconic album, is Lindsey Buckingham’s: “I know / there’s nothing to say / someone / has taken my place” opens the song “Secondhand News,” and just like that, the tone is set. There are few lyrics that set an album’s tone like this one, and few songs. Nicks’ vocals weaving in to clash with Buckingham’s in the verses, littered with bitter proclamations. What sells Rumours as more than just high drama, spun out on record, is the clean brilliance of its pop leanings. While their last album felt like what it was, an old blues band trying on some new clothes, Rumours was the sound of the band fully committed to their new role as a pop band playing the game, aiming for the charts. The collaborative spirit of Buckingham and Nicks, even fractured, played into this more than anything else. Taking on the bulk of the album’s writing and vocal duties, there was an ability to fashion a dual tone: Nicks, both remorseful and hopeful on “Dreams,” Buckingham angry and spiteful all the way through the album, most impressively on “Go Your Own Way.” Even beyond this, the album’s most interesting character, in some ways, is John McVie. He was the band’s most private and reserved member, and didn’t provide lead vocals on any song. This meant that the narrative of his failing message could only play out on record through Christine, the most brilliant and stunning example being “You Make Loving Fun,” an ode to an affair she’d had. She told John, at the time, that the song was about a new dog. It’s hard to ignore that the women made Rumours exciting. Christine McVie wasn’t as flashy as Nicks, but her familiarity and comfort within the band, paired with her and Buckingham’s musical rapport, allowed space for her to emote with ease and nuance in a way that often made Buckingham sound like he was having a frantic, exceptionally skilled temper tantrum.
These are the politics of splitting apart: we run to our friends and tell them the version of the story that will ignite in them a desire to support our latest bit of grief. It becomes a bit tastier, of course, if your friends are millions of pop fans. If, in the telling of your heartbreak, you have to share a microphone with the person who broke your heart. If, perhaps, the drugs wore off just in time for you to remember watching your ex-partner going home with someone else the night before. This is what made the album, particularly the collaborations between Buckingham and Nicks, so interesting, and slightly troubling: a real-time plea to see which of them could come out of the breakup more adored than they were inside of the relationship. Buckingham lost, of course, and didn’t stand much of a chance. Nicks, gifted, charming, and singular, was the greatest and most fully developed character in the album’s soap opera, despite only taking lead vocals on two songs. But beyond winners and losers, the formula had already been figured out. For the voyeur who prefers public collapse, there is no better combination than someone who is both sad and willing to lie to themselves about it.
Without a healthy investment in the art of denial, the album doesn’t work. That, truly, is the album’s greatest performer. Only denial of an emotional desire for escape could lead a band to complete an album when, at their worst moments, they were unable to talk to each other without screaming. In the Sausalito studio where the album was recorded, there were no windows. Mick Fleetwood, after a few weeks of recording, removed all of the clocks from the walls. When there is no image of time to make stand still, everything can become a type of stillness. The album represents the sound of ’70s excess at every turn, asking the band how much of the process and all of its demons they could take into themselves. It all spoke to the band’s interest in self-torture for the sake of Mick Fleetwood’s mission, his desire to make The Great American Pop Album at all costs, even if Fleetwood Mac had to be held together by cocaine and scotch tape.
“The Chain,” the album’s most acclaimed song, is haunting, angry, teeming with regret and disgust. It is the whole of the album, condensed into just over four minutes. It was crafted largely in separate rooms, pieced together with past parts of old songs. It churns along painfully, driven by a McVie bass riff that sounds like a caged animal finally coming to terms with its surroundings. On the song, Buckingham and Nicks engage in a tug-of-war on the chorus, “If you don’t love me now / you will never love me again” and it is like they are shouting at each other from across the studio. Buckingham, toward the end before he takes on his howling guitar solo, feels like he is almost shouting. It is the one song on the album that makes me feel like something could be broken at any moment. It is the song you play for someone when they ask you what the fuss about Rumours is. It is the entire emotional cycle of dissolution, peaking at the end of the song with the band singing “Chain, keep us together” in unison, more as a plea than anything else.
It helps to think about Rumours as not just an album, but a living document. Once you push past the theatrics of it, the massive album sales and the thrilling gossip, it is a deeply sad project. One that reflects the human conflict of leaving and not leaving and trying to find some small mercy in the face of what has left you briefly torn apart. The songs are perfect, of course, drenched so richly in the late-’70s California aesthetic that, for a moment, you may forget what the songs were born out of. For anyone who has ever loved someone and then stopped loving them, or for anyone who has stopped being loved by someone, it’s a reminder that the immediate exit can be the hardest part. Admitting the end is one thing, but making the decision to walk into it is another, particularly when an option to remain tethered can mean cheaper rent, or a hit album, or at the very least, a small and tense place that you can go to turn your sadness into something more than sadness. It’s all so immovable, our endless need for someone to desire us enough to keep us around. To simply call Rumours a breakup album doesn’t do it justice. Most breakup albums have an end point. Some triumph, a reward or promise about how some supposed emotional resilience might pay off. Rumours is an album of continual, slow breaking.
My favorite photo of the band from the Rumours era was taken by Annie Leibovitz for the March 1977 Rolling Stone cover, the same month the album was released. The band is sprawled on a queen mattress that is resting on the floor. Mick Fleetwood, the glue, in the middle, his long limbs stretching from the top of the mattress to the bottom, a single sheet covering everyone. Buckingham has Christine McVie in his arms, a hand in her hair. Christine’s hand is outstretched, reaching over to touch Fleetwood’s foot. Nicks is resting on Fleetwood’s bare chest, her legs draped over John McVie’s stomach. John McVie is unbothered, reading a magazine. The joke is that they were always too connected to let each other go so easily. I like to think of this as the great lesson hiding in Rumours: there are people we need so much that we can’t imagine turning away from them. People we’ve built entire homes inside of ourselves for, that cannot stand empty. People we still find a way to make magic with, even when the lights flicker, and the love runs entirely out.