Songbird: A Christine McVie Appreciation

Christine McVie acted as the bonding agent within Fleetwood Mac, tying together the band's blues beginnings with their pop period and functioning as the glue between Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks—a pair of personalities so powerful they often overshadowed her during the band’s prime. McVie was an active participant in the sturm und drang fueling Fleetwood Mac’s golden years but her transgressions generally were garden-variety rock excesses, not the operatic betrayals of Buckingham, Nicks, and Mick Fleetwood, whose emotional entanglements became the stuff of legend. 

Wild rumors didn't circulate about Christine McVie, not in the way they did about many of her bandmates. At one point, she grew tired of the rock rigamarole and retired to a house in the country. Fleetwood Mac carried on in her absence because that's what the band is designed to do: as long as Mick Fleetwood and John McVie roam this earth, there's a good chance they'll assemble a new incarnation of the group that bears their names. Nevertheless, the band never felt the same without her. Christine McVie gave Fleetwood Mac a sense of depth, an emotional and musical resonance that was difficult to quantify as it was simultaneously subtle and overt. Her melodic gifts were readily apparent, glowing in aching ballads and sharpening the candied hooks of her buoyant pop tunes. Her voice—sweet, clear, and strong—carried a sense of steadfast empathy. McVie was a steady, soulful presence, calming the anxieties of Buckingham and softening the edges of Nicks without erasing their idiosyncrasies. 

This isn't to say that McVie lacked idiosyncrasies, of course. McVie could disguise a standard blues progression as a pop rallying cry or polish her yearning so it had an eternal ethereal shimmer, qualities Buckingham teased out with his cinematic productions. A listen to her eponymous 1984 album—the one that generated the cheerful Top Ten hit "Got a Hold on Me," a single inexplicably missing on this year's McVie solo comp Songbird—is instructive: the melodies are there, as is her voice, yet much of the album simply fades into the background. Within the confines of Fleetwood Mac, McVie never was recessive. She had a soft touch that served as a misdirection from her strength, a quality she had since the beginning of her career when she had the fortitude to be one of the few women on the British blues circuit. When she joined Fleetwood Mac after marrying John McVie in 1968, she quickly became an integral part of the band, developing into a distinctive songwriter during the band's wilderness years of the early 1970s.

Despite the fact that she vied with Bob Welch for the title of the group's main songwriter prior to his departure in 1974, Christine McVie needed the mercurial Buckingham and Nicks to put her gifts in sharp relief. It wasn't merely the contrasting songwriting styles illuminating her own aesthetic. Buckingham, Nicks, and McVie were exquisite collaborators, gracing each other's songs not only with vocal harmonies and counterpoints but with instrumental accents that revealed hidden dimensions within the songs. This chemistry was apparent on 1975's Fleetwood Mac, the first record to feature Buckingham and Nicks, an album where McVie dominated, writing five of its eleven tracks. McVie always contributed that many songs to a Fleetwood Mac, eclipsing the number of Nicks originals, eventually getting overshadowed by Buckingham, who wound up steering the band's productions after Rumours turned them into superstars. 

Buckingham may have shaped the sound of Fleetwood Mac records starting with Tusk, his manic magnum opus, but McVie didn't retreat into her own corner. She continued to craft songs that were melodic and clear without succumbing to sappiness; the surfaces may have been crisp or cool but her emotions were firm, sometimes in surprising ways, like on "Little Lies" when she's an active participant in self-deception. "Little Lies" arrived toward the end of Fleetwood Mac's reign, a dozen years of dominance kick-started by the rapturous sigh of McVie's "Over My Head" and concluded with the sparkling "Everywhere," her other major hit from 1987's Tango in the Night. Between those two singles, McVie racked up seven other major hits, besting both Buckingham and Nicks, the couple who reshaped the contours of Fleetwood Mac and often acted as the face of the band. During this golden period, Buckingham and Nicks often seemed to pursue their own interests over those of Fleetwood Mac. Buckingham pushed the group's boundaries on Tusk because that's where his heart lay. Amidst the chaos, Nicks opened up a side career as a solo act, her 1981 debut Bella Donna eclipsing Tusk as it reached number one, propelled by the hits "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around," "Leather and Lace" and "Edge of Seventeen." Buckingham also stepped away from Fleetwood Mac during this time, landing a hit with "Trouble" off of his Law & Order solo debut. McVie didn't use a solo career as an escape hatch. That 1984 solo record arrived only after it seemed as if Fleetwood Mac was a spent force. McVie invested her best work within the group, sticking around long after Buckingham and Nicks departed for greener pastures. By the time the pair returned for the pleasant but odd live-in-the-studio reunion The Dance, she had exhausted herself keeping the band afloat through Behind the Mask and Time. She retired from Mac and music, spending the next decade and a half in quiet retirement. 

Fleetwood Mac coaxed Christine McVie back into the fold for the On with the Show reunion, a tour that lasted from 2014 into 2015. Upon its conclusion, a new Fleetwood Mac album from this lineup seemed imminent. It never materialized. Nicks stopped participating in the sessions, leaving the remaining Mac members to finish it as Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie, a 2017 album that marked her first new music in 22 years and first collaboration with Buckingham since Tango in the Night. While Stevie Nicks is certainly missed, Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie feels fuller, richer, more like a Fleetwood Mac than the curiously stilted Say You Will, the 2003 album the band did in McVie's absence. Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie revives the elegant tension that fueled Mirage, the 1982 masterwork the reunited Mac ignored on both The Dance and On with the Show tour. Both their eponymous album and Mirage illustrate how McVie brought Buckingham to earth, while the guitarist poked and prodded at her gorgeous melodies, making them sturdier, stronger. The pair's rapport was smooth but barbed as Alfred Soto pointed out in his superb Christine McVie appreciation for Billboard. Writing about "Hold Me," a single that sat in the Top Ten for weeks in 1982, Soto notes "Dueting with Buckingham, McVie is barely in sync, like being on the phone with a boyfriend who talks past her. Buckingham woos her with sundry twinkling guitar parts that adduce his intuition about what love songs require: crosstalk, tension, release."

Alfred focuses on a crucial element of Buckingham and McVie's chemistry: they're sympathetic, they share the same goals, yet they don't quite move in step. They're slightly off balance even when their moves are elegant, as they are on "Hold Me," a single that still is a bit of a mystery to me even after a lifetime of spins. "Hold Me" is perhaps the quintessential Fleetwood Mac song to my ears. McVie opens with a delicate piano fanfare that glides into a shuffle so understated it's easy to not notice that it's grounded in the blues. After the first verse, where the harmonies and electric pianos are distinct presences, it's impossible to pinpoint when new elements are introduced into the mix: it's an escalating cascade of voices, percussion, guitar and effects, sounds that sometimes seem to be quarreling on their way to transcendence. That Buckingham and McVie managed to capture a modicum of that magic on Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie is a bit of a miracle and given her passing, it's certainly a fine, even moving, epilogue to her career.