name | Rumours |
---|---|
type | studio |
artist | Fleetwood Mac |
cover | FMacRumours.PNG |
alt | Mostly cream album cover with black-and-white image of tall, bearded gentleman holding the hand of blonde, cape-wearing woman. In the top right-hand corner, it is captioned "FLEETWOOD MAC" and "RUMOURS" below it. |
released | 4 February 1977 |
recorded | 1976 at Criteria Studios, Miami; Record Plant Studios, Sausalito and Los Angeles; Zellerbach Auditorium, Berkeley; Wally Heider Studios, Los Angeles; Davlen Recording Studio, North Hollywood |
genre | Rock |
length | 39:03 |
label | Warner Bros. |
producer | Fleetwood Mac, Ken Caillat, Richard Dashut |
last album | Fleetwood Mac(1975) |
this album | Rumours(1977) |
next album | Tusk(1979) |
misc | }} |
Rumours is the eleventh studio album by British-American rock band Fleetwood Mac. Largely recorded in California during 1976, it was produced by the band with Ken Caillat and Richard Dashut and was released on 4 February 1977 by Warner Bros. Records. The record peaked at the top of both the main United States Billboard chart and the United Kingdom Albums Chart. "Go Your Own Way", "Don't Stop", "Dreams", and "You Make Loving Fun" were released as singles. A Grammy Award winner, Rumours is Fleetwood Mac's most successful release with sales of over 40 million copies worldwide.
The band wanted to expand on the commercial success of the 1975 record Fleetwood Mac, but struggled with relationship breakups before recording started. The Rumours studio sessions were marked by hedonistic behaviour and interpersonal strife between Fleetwood Mac members; these experiences informed the album's lyrics. Influenced by pop music, the record's tracks were recorded using a combination of acoustic and electric instruments. The mixing process delayed the completion of Rumours, but was finished by the end of 1976. Following the album's release in 1977, Fleetwood Mac undertook worldwide promotional tours.
Rumours garnered widespread critical acclaim. Praise centred on its production quality and harmonies, which frequently relied on the interplay among three vocalists. The record has inspired the work of musical acts in different genres. Often considered Fleetwood Mac's best release, it has featured in several publications' lists of the best albums of the 1970s and the best albums of all time. In 2004, Rumours was remastered and reissued with the addition of an extra track and a bonus CD of outtakes from the recording sessions.
Press intrusions into the band members' lives led to inaccurate stories. Christine McVie was reported to be in hospital with a serious illness, while Buckingham and Nicks were declared the parents of Fleetwood's daughter Lucy after being photographed with her. The press also wrote about a rumoured return of original Fleetwood Mac members Peter Green, Danny Kirwan, and Jeremy Spencer for a 10th anniversary tour. Despite false reports, the band did not change line-up, although its members had no time to come to terms with the separations before recording for a new album began. Fleetwood has noted the "tremendous emotional sacrifices" made by everyone just to attend studio work. In early 1976, Fleetwood Mac crafted some new tracks in Florida. Founding members Fleetwood and John McVie chose to dispense with the services of their previous producer, Keith Olsen, because he favoured a lower emphasis on the rhythm section. The duo formed a company called Seedy Management to represent the band's interests.
The record's working title in Sausalito was Yesterday's Dreams. Buckingham took charge of the studio sessions to make "a pop album". According to Dashut, while Fleetwood and the McVies came from an improvisational blues-rock background, the guitarist understood "the craft of record making". During the formative stages of compositions, Buckingham and Christine McVie played guitar and piano together to create the album's basic structures. The latter was the only classically trained musician in Fleetwood Mac, but both shared a similar sense of musicality. When the band jammed, Fleetwood often played his drum kit outside the studio's partition screen to better gauge Caillat's and Dashut's reactions to the music's groove. Baffles were placed around the drums and around John McVie, who played his bass guitar facing Fleetwood. Buckingham performed close to the rhythm section, while Christine McVie's keyboards were kept away from the drum kit. Caillat and Dashut spent about nine days experimenting with a range of microphones and amplifiers before deciding on the best methodology of recording the band.
As the studio sessions progressed, the band members' new intimate relationships, formed after the various separations, started to have a negative effect on Fleetwood Mac. The musicians did not meet or socialise after their daily work at the Record Plant. At the time, the hippie movement still affected Sausalito's culture and drugs were readily available. Open-ended budgets enabled the band and the engineers to become self-indulgent; sleepless nights and the extensive use of cocaine marked much of the album's production. Chris Stone, one of the Record Plant's owners, indicated in 1997 that Fleetwood Mac brought "excess at its most excessive" by taking over the studio for long and extremely expensive sessions; he stated, "The band would come in at 7 at night, have a big feast, party till 1 or 2 in the morning, and then when they were so whacked-out they couldn't do anything, they'd start recording".
Nicks has suggested that Fleetwood Mac created the best music when in the worst shape, while, according to Buckingham, the tensions between band members informed the recording process and led to "the whole being more than the sum of the parts". The couple's work became "bittersweet" after their final split, although Buckingham still had a skill for taking Nicks' tracks and "making them beautiful". The vocal harmonies between the duo and Christine McVie worked well and were captured using the best microphones available. Nicks' lyrical focus allowed the instrumentals in the songs that she wrote to be looser and more abstract. According to Dashut, all the recordings captured "emotion and feeling without a middle man ... or tempering". John McVie tended to clash with Buckingham about the make-up of songs, but both admit to achieving good outcomes. Christine McVie's "Songbird", which Caillat felt needed a concert hall's ambience, was recorded during an all-night session at Zellerbach Auditorium, across San Francisco Bay in Berkeley.
Following over two months in Sausalito, Fleetwood arranged a ten-day tour to give the band a break and fan feedback. After the concerts, recording resumed at venues in Los Angeles, including Wally Heider Studios. Christine McVie and Nicks did not attend most of the sessions and took time off until they were needed to record any remaining vocals. The rest of Fleetwood Mac, with Caillat and Dashut, struggled to finalise the overdubbing and mixing of Rumours after the Sausalito tapes were damaged by repeated use during recording; the kick and snare drum audio tracks sounded "lifeless". A sell-out autumn tour of the US was cancelled to allow the completion of the album, whose scheduled release date of September 1976 was pushed back. A specialist was hired to rectify the Sausalito tapes using a vari-speed oscillator. Through a pair of headphones which played the damaged tapes in his left ear and the safety master recordings in his right, he converged their respective speeds aided by the timings provided by the snare and hi-hat audio tracks. Fleetwood Mac and their co-producers wanted a "no-filler" final product, in which every track seemed a potential single. After the final mastering stage and hearing the songs back-to-back, the band members sensed they had recorded something "pretty powerful".
Rumours was released on 4 February 1977 in the US and a week later in the UK. The front cover features a stylised shot of Fleetwood and Nicks dressed in her "Rhiannon" stage persona, while the back has a montage of band portraits; all the photographs were taken by Herbert Worthington. On 28 February 1977, after rehearsing at SIR Studios in Los Angeles, Fleetwood Mac started a seven month-long promotional tour of America. Nicks has noted that, after performing mostly Rumours songs during gigs, the band initially encountered poor receptions from fans who were not accustomed to the new material. A one-off March performance at a benefit concert for United States Senator Birch Bayh in Indiana was followed by a short European tour of the UK, the Netherlands, France, and Germany in April. Nigel Williams of Uncut called Fleetwood Mac's performances "rock's greatest soap opera". "Dreams", released in June 1977, became the band's only number one on the US Billboard Hot 100.
"Don't Stop", written by Christine McVie, is a song about optimism. She noted that Buckingham helped her craft the verses because their personal sensibilities overlapped. McVie's next track, "Songbird", features more introspective lyrics about "nobody and everybody" in the form of "a little prayer", while the song "Oh Daddy" is a direct reference to Fleetwood, whom the band considered "The Big Daddy". McVie commented that the writing is slightly sarcastic and focuses on the drummer's direction for Fleetwood Mac, which always turned out to be right. Nicks provided the final lines "And I can't walk away from you, baby/If I tried". Her own song, "Gold Dust Woman", is inspired by Los Angeles and the hardship encountered in such a metropolis. After struggling with the rock lifestyle, Nicks became addicted to cocaine and the lyrics address her belief in "keeping going".
Side two of Rumours begins with "The Chain", one of the record's most complicated compositions. A Christine McVie demo, "Keep Me There", and a Nicks song were re-cut in the studio and were heavily edited to form parts of the track. The whole of the band crafted the rest using an approach akin to creating a film score; John McVie provided a prominent solo using a fretless bass guitar, which marked a speeding up in tempo and the start of the song's final third. Inspired by R&B;, "You Make Loving Fun" has a simpler composition and features a clavinet, a special type of keyboard instrument, while the rhythm section plays interlocking notes and beats. The ninth track on Rumours, "I Don't Want to Know", makes use of a twelve string guitar and harmonising vocals. Influenced by the music of Buddy Holly, Buckingham and Nicks created it in 1974 before they were in Fleetwood Mac. "Oh Daddy" was crafted spontaneously and includes improvised bass guitar patterns from John McVie and keyboard blips from Christine McVie. The album ends with "Gold Dust Woman", a song inspired by free jazz, which has music from a harpsichord, a Fender Stratocaster guitar, and a dobro, an acoustic guitar whose sound is produced by one or more metal cones.
By 1980, 13 million copies of Rumours had been sold worldwide, a figure which increased to nearly 20 million by 1987. By the time of Fleetwood Mac's reunion tour in 1997, it had sold 25 million copies worldwide. The amount rose to 30 million by 2004, and to 40 million by 2009. , Rumours is the 13th best-selling album in UK history and is certified 11× platinum by the British Phonographic Industry, the equivalent of three million units shipped. The record has received a Diamond Award by the Recording Industry Association of America for a 19× platinum certification or 19 million units shipped. , it is the 10th best-selling album in US history. It is also certified 2× diamond by the Canadian Recording Industry Association after shipping two million units, it debuted at #1 in Canada when it was released with sales of 59,000, and 13× platinum by the Australian Recording Industry Association, the equivalent of 910,000 copies shipped. By 2006 it was also certified 5× gold by the Bundesverband Musikindustrie for shipping 1,250,000 copies in Germany.
In a retrospective piece, Allmusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine noted that, regardless of the voyeuristic element, the record was "an unparalleled blockbuster" because of the music's quality; he concluded, "Each tune, each phrase regains its raw, immediate emotional power—which is why Rumours touched a nerve upon its 1977 release, and has since transcended its era to be one of the greatest, most compelling pop albums of all time." In a 2004 review, Slant's Barry Walsh praised Fleetwood Mac for turning romantic dysfunction and personal turmoil into "classic, undying pop". In 2007, BBC's Daryl Easlea labelled the sonic results as "near perfect", "like a thousand angels kissing you sweetly on the forehead", while Patrick McKay of Stylus wrote, "What distinguishes Rumours—what makes it art—is the contradiction between its cheerful surface and its anguished heart. Here is a radio-friendly record about anger, recrimination, and loss."
In 1998, Q placed Rumours at number three—behind The Clash's London Calling and Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon—in its list of 50 Best Albums of the 70s. In 1999, Vibe featured it as one of 100 Essential Albums of the 20th Century. In 2003, VH1 ranked the record at number 16 during its 100 Greatest Albums countdown, while Slant included it as one of 50 Essential Pop Albums. The same year, USA Today placed Rumours at number 23 in its Top 40 Albums list, while Rolling Stone ranked it at number 25 in its special issue of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time", the highest Fleetwood Mac record. In 2006, Time named it in its All-TIME 100 Albums shortlist, while Mojo featured it in its unnumbered list of 70 from the 1970s: Decade’s Greatest Albums. The record is included in both The Guardians "1000 Albums to Hear Before You Die" and the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.
In the second season of the hit musical television series Glee, the nineteenth episode Rumours is a tribute to the album and features almost exclusively songs from the album including "Dreams", "The Chain", "Never Going Back Again", "Songbird", "I Don't Want to Know", "Go Your Own Way" and "Don't Stop".
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!Chart (1977–1978) | !Peak |
Austrian Albums Chart | |
Canadian Albums Chart | |
South African Albums Chart | |
UK Albums Chart | |
Singles
Song | Peak | |
! width="50" | ! width="50" | |
"Go Your Own Way" | ||
"You Make Loving Fun" |
;Bibliography
Category:1977 albums Category:Fleetwood Mac albums Category:Albums produced by Ken Caillat Category:Albums produced by Richard Dashut Category:Warner Bros. Records albums Category:Grammy Award for Album of the Year Category:Albums released on DVD-Audio Category:Recording Industry Association of America Diamond Award albums Category:Albums certified decuple platinum by the British Phonographic Industry Category:Albums certified duodecuple platinum by the Australian Recording Industry Association Category:Albums certified quintuple gold by the Bundesverband Musikindustrie
de:Rumours es:Rumours fr:Rumours it:Rumours ka:Rumours hu:Rumours nl:Rumours ja:噂 (アルバム) pl:Rumours fi:Rumours sv:Rumours uk:RumoursThis text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
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