Songbird

My journey to becoming a proper Fleetwood Mac is kind of a strange one.

My parents, my mother in particular, had always been fans, and Fleetwood Mac’s greatest-hits album was a staple of my mom’s car. Naturally, this made me a fan, too — I have a random but clear memory of my dad’s amusement at me singing along with “Don’t Stop” when Bill Clinton used it during his campaign — but more of a casual one. My mom and I had very different Fleetwood Mac preferences. She liked the slower, moodier songs with Stevie Nicks at the helm, like “Rhiannon” and “Sara,” while I preferred faster ones, with Lindsey Buckingham’s angry guitar solos or Christine McVie’s bouncy love songs like “Everywhere” and “Hold Me.” The only song we agreed on was “Tusk.” link to sage cigs piece and christine songs

One afternoon, my now-husband and I were spending some time wandering a record store — Dave’s Music Mine in Pittsburgh, my go-to for Record Store Day that is now, sadly, closed. He grabbed a used Rumours CD, and when we got back in the car, he popped it in the CD player. And when opening chords of “Second Hand News” rang out, then, then did I become a Fleetwood Mac fan proper. I’d never heard it before. My mom had only ever played the band’s greatest hits, and while I joke now that that is, more or less, Rumours, “Second Hand News” is one of the few songs on the album that wasn’t released as a single and therefore wasn’t a massive number-one hit. I didn’t just fall in love with “Second Hand News,” either. I fell in love with Rumours, because despite those massive number-one hits, most of them weren’t my mom’s favorites and therefore received limited car play.

Luck would have it that my new status as a Fleetwood Mac fan happened to coincide with a tour, and when my tax refund hit my bank account, I splurged on floor seats at the Pittsburgh show. I invited my mom, but she declined — having seen Fleetwood Mac in earlier years, she was firm in her opinion that the band was not the same if they weren’t all there, and Christine McVie had left years prior and pledged to never come back.

“Mom,” I said. “She’s never coming back. You might as well go.”

And damn if I didn’t end up being spectacularly, wonderfully wrong. After reuniting with the band for a London show, McVie decided she missed performing after all and rejoined the band, and naturally, a tour followed.

Fleetwood Mac live without McVie was an amazing experience, but with her, they became an unmatched powerhouse. One of the best parts of live music is hearing your favorite songs performed live, and in this case, hearing McVie’s unmistakable as she played songs like “Say You Love Me,” “Over My Head,” “Little Lies,” and a beautiful encore of “Songbird” was a real delight, one that feels very much like a privilege now. My mom was right — the band is better when they’re all together. I loved them the first time I saw them live, but with McVie back, it was a whole other experience.

And I wasn’t the only one who thought so. Every so often, particularly after McVie had a moment to shine, an impressed drunk guy near us would yell, “Goddamn!” He also often cited her age at the time, 71. “Goddamn! 71 years old! Goddamn!” Even now, eight years later, his enthusiasm is something of an inside joke in our family. If you say, “Goddamn!” in just the right tone, the rest of us will smile and laugh, and now, we’ll think of McVie and her musical prowess.

That night turned out to be the only time I ever saw the complete Fleetwood Mac lineup, as I imagine was also the case for many of the other thousands upon thousands of fans who saw them on that tour. In true fashion, the band battled interpersonal struggles that led to the firing of guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, with Neil Flinn and Mike Campbell taking his place on tour. And while the two did a fantastic job and made for a great show — Flinn’s performance of Crowded House’s “Don’t Dream It’s Over” was lovely and one of the show’s best moments — it still lacked the energy and chemistry of Fleetwood Mac proper.

The recent loss of McVie is a huge one for the music world. For those of us Fleetwood Mac fans who were waiting for another tour, even holding out hope that they would work out their issues as they have so many times before and reunite, it’s especially heartbreaking — we’ll never hear our songbird again.

There’s a strange feeling that comes with having seen a musician that’s now dead, and it’s one that’s hard to describe. It’s inevitable, of course, as we’ll all die, but perhaps it’s rooted in the feeling of our favorite musicians seeming larger than life, especially ones whose career spans years before you were even born.

Goddamn, Christine McVie. Goddamn.