Rumours

Rumours is one of the best-selling albums in history, with over 40 million copies sold worldwide. It also might be the most emotionally complicated recording session ever committed to tape. Christine and John McVie were divorcing. Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham had just ended their years-long relationship and were still in the same band. Mick Fleetwood discovered his wife was having an affair. All five of them showed up to the studio anyway, every day, for nearly a year, and made something extraordinary out of the wreckage.

The sessions ran from early 1976 into late in the year, primarily at the Record Plant in Sausalito, California. Producer Ken Caillat later told MusicRadar that something like Rumours could never happen today because a record label would have shut them down after two weeks. The production bill approached a million dollars. Co-producer Richard Dashut recalled that the studio felt less like a workplace and more like a pressure cooker. Buckingham and Nicks were writing songs at each other from opposite sides of the same breakup, "Go Your Own Way" and "The Chain" sitting on the same album as weapons pointed in every direction.

What came out the other side is an album that sounds effortlessly beautiful and contains barely a wasted note. "The Chain," "Go Your Own Way," "Gold Dust Woman," "Dreams" — these songs have been in circulation for nearly fifty years and none of them have aged a day. Rumours is proof that sometimes the most devastating personal circumstances produce the most enduring music.