In Track Five of our column dissecting the greatest rock songs ever written and played, we explore Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” and how a fantastic song can be born from an unenviably complicated interpersonal relationship drama as an answer to a song telling you to “Go Your Own Way”.
Welcome to our column, Rock of Ages, where we deep dive into the stories behind the greatest rock songs ever written and played.
Great art is often born from some sort of conflict or struggle; Fleetwood Mac’s definitive album Rumors (1977) is one of them.
One of those albums where you can’t quite bring yourself to skip a single song, Rumors is a brilliant, cohesive end product of a group of people channeling their messy dynamics through a haze of drugs and into their music at the zenith of their most tumultuous era.
Fleetwood Mac was in the middle of experiencing a heartbreak epidemic at the time of recording Rumors. John and Christine McVie were in the midst of separating, Mick Fleetwood was in the middle of divorcing Jane Boyd (for the first time) while Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks were taking what was left of their relationship by its fragile legs and throwing it against the wall. The entire album comprises songs that are thinly veiled barbs about each other and being forced to play live together. It may be the textbook definition of toxic habits, but at least we got a good album out of it. What came out of the aftermath of Buckingham and Nicks’s relationship were “Go Your Own Way” and its counterpart, “Dreams”.
There’s a saying that goes if Stevie Nicks could sing “Go Your Own Way” every night on tour without fail, then you can definitely get through a bad day, and “Dreams” was her rebuttal to Buckingham’s song about their relationship.
“I told him that, in my heart, ‘Dreams’ was open and hopeful, but in ‘Go Your Own Way,’ his heart was closed. That’s how I felt. That line, ‘When the rain washes you clean,’ to me that was like being able to start again, and that’s what I wanted for Lindsey. I wanted him to be happy.”
Stevie Nicks, Blender, May 2005
On a day when Nicks didn’t need to be in the Record Plant studio, Sausalito, California, she headed over to another studio owned by Sly Stone, armed with her Fender Rhodes piano and a little cassette player. The room itself was dramatic — all black and red, complete with a big black bed and Victorian drapes to match the sunken pit in the center, where the piano was.
Nicks set up on the bed, put on a drumbeat more akin to a dance beat — unusual for her, switched on the cassette player and wrote what would become Fleetwood Mac’s biggest hit and the band’s only song to top the charts.
In ten minutes.
At the time, Fleetwood Mac had decided that they would focus on one song a day during the 12 days they had left at the Record Plant before heading to record at Sound City, and “Dreams” was the first they picked.
When Nicks initially played it for the group, it was three chords and a note on the left hand, all played on the piano. Buckingham then rearranged it so that the chords evolved from section to section. For a song to sound good, it needs to gradually grow, but in “Dreams”, the instrumentation stayed the same throughout the verse to the pre-chorus section. To build a stronger sound along with the tom accents Mick Fleetwood was playing, they wanted a bell-like sound. A piano would feel too heavy, so they used a vibraphone and added a repeat after each string, producing that bright, ethereal effect.
To get the vocal harmonies just right, Buckingham played triad chords on the piano while Nicks and Christine McVie harmonized with it. The result was a three-part harmony, doubled, which at that time meant singing the same part over and over again.
Nicks picked the Sennheiser 441 microphone, with a rubber band wrapped around a windscreen placed half an inch away, to capture the lower frequencies of her voice. She had to do about ten takes of the lead vocals, singing along with the drums.
For percussion, they did an eight-bar loop of Fleetwood drumming. The kick drum was placed closer to the mic for a punchy sound in the tight recording setup. They also used an old 24-inch drum kit that needed to be tuned every five hours, when the lungs would get loose.
Buckingham felt that the chorus needed a little more continuity while making it sound distinct from the verse and brought in the acoustic guitars. For the electric guitar, there was a miked signal, a direct signal, another direct signal running from a volume pedal, and one running from the output of the amp head. They fed one signal from the bridge of the guitar to the volume pedal, which was then fed into the isolation booth, where Buckingham was. These four signals would all be panned in stereo, sweeping left to right, Buckingham on the left, harmonics in the center and the direct signal on the right to create an echo.
“Dreams” is also a subject of controversy for music theorists because for a song that sounds simple, it’s difficult to determine what key it is in, and rhythm section players frequently dismiss it as a two-chord song. This claim is because the left hand plays only the F (and occasionally G) note, while a strong bassline oscillates between F and G. There’s also an A minor chord that appears in the instrumental break, just before the chorus, while Nicks sings the vocals in the A minor pentatonic scale. But if the song is in A minor, why are the F and G chords there?
It’s this conundrum that has left many speculating that the song is actually in the C major scale. In a bid to keep it neatly labeled, some are prone to box “Dreams” along with other songs in the F Lydian Mode (like “World of Pain” by Cream or “Hope of Deliverance” by Paul McCartney), a scale that shares all the same notes as the C major scale but uses F as its tonal center. But even then, it feels more like a melodic harmonic divorce that constantly flows throughout the song.
“Like a heartbeat drives you mad
In the stillness of remembering what you had
And what you lost
And what you had
And what you lost”
Evidently, as Nicks admits in the lyrics as well, the home chord is lost, and the beat of the song will drive you mad looking for a place to categorize it. The root of the controversy boils down to the fact that you don’t hear any harmonic closure. She descends towards the home chord of C major, but she never does. Which is exactly what makes the tone of the song feel like a dream that isn’t ending.
But closure, harmonically or otherwise, isn’t something one looks for in Stevie Nicks; Lindsey Buckingham never got it, and neither will the listeners of the song.
“It was most difficult for Lindsey because Stevie was the one who pulled away emotionally. He would say, ‘I’m doing this for her and making her music, but I can’t have closure.”
Mick Fleetwood, The Guardian, 2003
Surprisingly, “Dreams”, is their only single to top the charts in the U.S. and reach number one on the Billboard Hot 100. It’s a wonder that ten minutes, a cassette, a piano and heartbreak can get you. As Nicks herself puts it:
“Sometimes you can get tired of singing a certain song over and over again, but I have never gone onstage, either with Fleetwood Mac or in my solo shows, without singing ‘Dreams.’ I don’t think I could.”
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