“Dreams” (Fleetwood Mac)

We’re going to start off this week by featuring a few songs that were big when I was in college, starting with this one by Fleetwood Mac. The song is “Dreams” and it was featured on the group’s massively popular album, Rumours. Released as a single in March of 1977, this one was all over the radio at the end of my freshman year at Indiana University, hitting #1 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Stevie Nicks wrote “Dreams” while Fleetwood Mac was recording Rumours at the Record Plant recording studio in Sausalito. In her own words:

“One day when I wasn’t required in the main studio, I took a Fender Rhodes piano and went into another studio that was said to belong to Sly Stone, of Sly and the Family Stone. It was a black-and-red room, with a sunken pit in the middle where there was a piano, and a big black-velvet bed with Victorian drapes. I sat down on the bed with my keyboard in front of me, I found a drum pattern, switched my little cassette player on, and wrote ‘Dreams’ in about ten minutes. Right away I liked the fact that I was doing something with a dance beat, because that made it a little unusual for me.”

During my freshman year, Rumours was one of the records that was coming out of seemingly every other room in the dorm. The other big one was the Eagles’ Hotel California, and I hated both of them. They both sounded too slick and corporate for my tastes at the time. In my little dorm room, I was listening to Steely Dan’s The Royal Scam, Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life, Joni Mitchell’s Hejira, Al Stewart’s Year of the Cat, and Weather Report’s Heavy Weather. I was, even then, the iconoclast—but with impeccable musical taste.

Back to Fleetwood Mac. The recording sessions for the group’s Rumours album have become a thing of legend. They were in the studio from February through August in 1976, during which time two intra-group relationships collapsed—John and Christine McVie divorced and Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham separated. Not to be left out, Mick Fleetwood also divorced his wife, Jenny Boyd (sister of Pattie Boyd, who had her own relationships and issues with George Harrison and Eric Clapton). All that tension and turmoil inevitably spilled over into the recording sessions, with several of the group’s new songs being written about other group members, and not kindly. There was also a shit ton of cocaine consumed, or so rumor has it.

“Dreams” was part and parcel of that whole environment. Stevie Nicks wrote the song as an angry response to Lindsey Buckingham’s “Go Your Own Way,” which was obviously written about her. The line “Players only love you when they’re playing” was particularly biting.

Stevie recalls Lindsey’s initial response to the song:

“I remember the night I wrote ‘Dreams.’ I walked in and handed a cassette of the song to Lindsey. It was a rough take, just me singing solo and playing piano. Even though he was mad with me at the time, Lindsey played it and then looked up at me and smiled. What was going on between us was sad. We were couples who couldn’t make it through. But, as musicians, we still respected each other—and we got some brilliant songs out of it.”

I’ll be honest with you—I consider many of Stevie Nicks’ Fleetwood Mac songs to be one and the same, musically repetitive with uninteresting melodies and stream-of-consciousness vocals. I really have trouble telling one from another. Christine McVie thought the same way, at least initially:

“When Stevie first played it for me on the piano, it was just three chords and one note in the left hand. I thought, This is really boring, but the Lindsey genius came into play and he fashioned three sections out of identical chords, making each section sound completely different. He created the impression that there’s a thread running through the whole thing.”

That said, Ms. Nicks’ songs have a kind of hypnotic appeal, and I always appreciate Mick Fleetwood’s drumming on these tunes. His backing differs from song to song and is often subtly imaginative. For “Dreams,” Fleetwood played a fairly straightforward beat, from which producer Ken Caillat made an eight-bar loop to create a “deep hypnotic effect.” The drum loop was no doubt a blessing to Mr. Fleetwood, as he might have fallen asleep playing the same groove over and over for four minutes. (He did overdub some tom fills and a conga part, however, to liven things up a little.)

Interestingly, “Dreams” got a second life in 2020 when TikTok user Doggface208 (real name Nathan Apodaca) uploaded a video of himself skateboarding down a highway in Idaho Falls, Idaho, while drinking Ocean Spray cran-raspberry juice and lip-syncing along to the song. That led to “Dreams” re-entering the charts, hitting #12 on the Billboard Hot 100 and becoming one the most-streamed songs on Spotify and Apple Music.

And that TikTok video is today’s daily bonus video of the day. I will never figure out TikTok.