A New Book Explores Our Ongoing Love Affair With The Album

CIRCA 1977: (L-R) Lindsey Buckingham, Christine McVie, Mick Fleetwood, Stevie Nicks and John McVie of the rock group ‘Fleetwood Mac’ pose for a portrait in circa 1977. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

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Nearly 50 years after its original release, Fleetwood Mac’s masterpiece Rumours continues to enjoy widespread success. Not only has the record been a mainstay on the album chart, but Rumours’ musical influence and the personal drama involving the band members — Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, Christine McVie, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks — in the record’s creation have seeped into pop culture over the last decade.

From social media (remember the viral video of the guy on the skateboard drinking cranberry juice to the music of “Dreams”?) to fictionalized depictions of the band’s story (the book/TV series Daisy Jones & the Six and the musical Stereophonic), Rumours has taken on a life of its own. More importantly, this Grammy-winning album from 1977 has struck a nerve with millennials and Gen Z-ers — a remarkable feat for a record that their parents likely listened to when they were their age.

The continued phenomenon surrounding the album is the subject of veteran music writer Alan Light’s newly published book, Don’t Stop: Why We (Still Love) Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Rumours.’ Drawing from archival interviews with the band members, as well as new commentary from such artists as Suki Waterhouse, Mark Ronson, Jimmy Jam, Allison Russell and Jennifer Nettles, the book examines how the album became a cultural benchmark.

The idea behind the book, says Light, occurred when he noticed his then-high-school-aged son’s friends having an awareness of and relationship with Rumours that was different from other ’70s cornerstone rock albums, such as Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, the Eagles’ Hotel California and Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run.

“They played it when he had friends over to the house, or somebody had the T-shirt or whatever,” says Light, who previously wrote The Holy or the Broken and is the co-host of the Sound Up! podcast with Mark Goodman. “They may not know the album top to bottom, but there was a connection to it as an album that still had meaning and relevance to them. I got interested in what it was that was so unique about Rumours, that it towered above all of its peers in terms of its current standing.”

Light didn’t want to make Don’t Stop a history about the making of Rumours. Rather, his book reads both like a music appreciation and sociological study, especially through his interviews with a cross-section of Gen Y and Gen Z members who talk about their affinity for the record. “It was such a moving thing to hear from people about how this stuff lives in the world and what it means in their lives and how it actually works,” he says.

A combination of the power of the songs and the story of the disintegrating romantic relationships within the band (from Buckingham and Nicks to the McVies) explains Rumours’ resonance with young audiences. “When I first set out to do this and would tell people that I was working on it,” Light recalls, “everybody was sort of like, ‘Oh, the kids love the soap opera and the story,’ and that’s it. And I found that there was a huge range of awareness and interest in all the backstory stuff, as crazy as it is.

“As much as we know, it’s the greatest rock and roll soap opera of all time,” he continues. “There were kids who were super into it. But there were others who really didn’t know much about it. There was one girl I talked to. I asked, ‘When did you find out about all of the chaos and the backstory?’ And she said, ‘Just now, when you asked me. I don’t know anything about any of that that has nothing to do with why I listened to this record.’”

One factor that draws people to the music of Rumours, according to Don’t Stop, is that Fleetwood Mac had two prominent female members in Nicks and Christine McVie in the usually male-dominated rock world. “The gender composition of the band, I think, is really important,” Light says, “in a world where kids look at four long-haired white guys with guitars and think, ‘That’s my parents’ band.’ In a world that’s more gender- and multicultural-aware, it’s easier to find a way into a band like that. A lot of them talked about the relationship between Stevie and Christine — that they were not pitted against each other and that they each had their space. You got that sense of solidarity and female strength.”

Another telling item in the book is how young people’s interest in Rumours has made some of them buy the vinyl version of the album without owning a record player. Says Light: “I think Cameron Crowe used the word ‘talisman.’ It’s this thing that you want to have, you want to look at, you want to be close to. I love the couple of kids who said, ‘I bought the vinyl and I don’t have a turntable. But when I get a record player, I want it to be the first thing that I play.’”

Each song from the album — including the hit singles “Dreams,” “Don’t Stop,” “Go Your Own Way” and “You Make Loving Fun” — has its own chapter in Light’s book where its genesis and meaning is discussed. Notably, the Nicks-penned track “Silver Springs,” which didn’t appear on the original vinyl release, has become a classic in its own right due to the band’s live performance of the song in the 1997 reunion special The Dance; its story is also told in Don’t Stop.

“It’s such a fascinating journey for that song,” says Light. “Stevie writes [it] as sort of her magnum opus. It doesn’t make it on the album and it was the B-side for “Go Your Own Way.” Then there’s that Dance performance and Stevie does this thing that she had never done before where she picks up the mic at the end and, in that climactic section, goes over and sings it straight at Lindsey, staring fire through his head. And he’s got to keep playing and take it. The video and especially the TikTok section of that performance have become this super iconic call to arms for young fans.”

For Light, the album’s centerpiece is “The Chain,” the only song on the album in which everyone in the band has a songwriting credit. “I just think from the experience of writing it in the way that it was created out of these three separate songs to the message of it, and the way that that resonates over the years of your relationships are never over. That there’s a part of that that you always, whether you want to or not, take with you through the rest of your life, and that affects who you are. And that’s obviously what we’ve seen this album do, that it does continue with this afterlife. That song starts so quietly and then gets so loud and explosive. If there’s one to capture most of the themes of the project, that would be the one I would say.”

Rumours has also provided the template for today’s pop music albums when it comes to offering a personal narrative, as heard on recent albums by Beyoncé, Lily Allen, Sabrina Carpenter and, of course, Taylor Swift. “Clearly, there were other confessional singer-songwriters,” says Light. “This is coming after Carole King, James Taylor and the Laurel Canyon [scene]. It was certainly different to have that in a band context, to have stuff that was as personal and intense as the Rumours songs are coming through this collaborative effort in this way. It’s the part we can’t imagine of everybody breaking up and then being in the studio the next day singing songs about each other with each other. I think that certainly it created a space for this kind of super-personal, super-confessional writing.”

At the moment, the popularity of Rumours shows no sign of flagging (On Spotify, three of the album’s songs have had streams past the 1 billion mark). Recently, Stevie Nicks has performed the songs she wrote for Rumours (“Dreams” and “Gold Dust Woman”) during her current solo tour to rapturous cheers and applause.

“What I was really interested in is, ‘How a project like this lives in the world today? Why does it continue to connect when other stuff that at the time would have been considered more important?’” Light explains. “If you had sat the rock establishment down on Dec. 31, 1979, and said, ‘Here are the biggest albums of the decade: Born to Run, Hotel California, Dark Side of the Moon, Led Zeppelin IV and Rumours. And 50 years from now, which of these are young people going to care about?’ I don’t think one person would have said Rumours. The reality is that those [other albums] are very much of their time and place and just sound old and not particularly relevant to a 16-year-old. And I love all those records.”

“But there is something eternal in the themes of Rumours,” he adds. “So what I hope is that we think more about the continuing power of this stuff, what it is that pop music can continue to mean over the decades, and why some things are truly timeless. I just love hearing people talk about music that they love and what it means in their lives, what draws them to it. I think that’s eternally fascinating.”