Songs that somehow outshine the melodrama that forged them.
Rumours
Fleetwood Mac
11
To understand what made Rumours so impactful, you have to look at the music that came out around it. This was the era of the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt—artists who, like Fleetwood Mac, combined the intimacy of singer-songwriters with a softened take on rock ’n’ roll. But it was also the era of Boston, Foreigner, Pink Floyd and a wave of bands that scaled up the ambition of ’60s rock to blockbuster heights. And there, in the middle of the road, is Rumours. For an album that went on to sell more than 10 million copies, it’s more unsettling than it probably should be.
And while the album—and its infamously messy circumstances, which included the implosion of two intraband relationships—feels so emblematic of a very specific mid-’70s SoCal kind of indulgence, Rumours would not have endured the way it has had that pain not been rendered so universally. Later generations may know it through “Dreams” going viral in a TikTok or Daisy Jones and the Six mining the melodrama and mythology—but they know it.