![]() When she flutters down, she’s sighing in bliss, but measuredly, pragmatically, honestly: “I’ve a feeling it’s time to try.” The band slows, like it’s readying for a nap, and McVie ascends, as if picked up by wind, while confessing to never believing in magic. Then, in the chorus, something amazing happens: The song seems to surrender. ![]() The opening verse is a seduction, her syllables long and lassolike. Really, though, McVie’s vocals are the main event. The rhythm conveys tension and grit, which are leavened by the song’s ethereal wind chimes, guitar solos, and harmonies. The song builds off one of the band’s characteristically magnificent grooves, a boogying pulse ornamented with rock-and-roll detail work. McVie gives one of the prettiest renditions ever of one of the most elemental tales: the unhardening of a heart. But in just over three and a half minutes, an epoch’s worth of emotion circulates. Although it was a smash, the track does not quite have the reputational mystique of knottier, more grandiose cuts such as “The Chain” and “Dreams.” It is, in fact, that most suspicious thing-a capital- p Pop song with a silly name. The exemplary song that first comes to my mind is “You Make Loving Fun,” which McVie wrote and sang on the group’s 1977 album, Rumours. Read: Was classic rock a sound, or a tribe? She wrote and sang songs that suspended time and defined eras: the panting “Don’t Stop,” the plaintive “Songbird,” the irrepressible “Everywhere.” Classically informed and practical-minded, she was a crowd-pleasing genius (“I’m a hook queen,” she once said) who used her powers for art. We all know that voice of hers, a clear and strong river cutting through dry rock. She was a glory-agnostic musician’s musician, content to entertain the public from behind the buffer of an electric piano.īut the grief millions feel at the news of McVie’s death may help reframe her legend: She was a titan in her own right. She could be thought of as both the band’s first woman (joining in 1970 shortly after marrying its bassist John McVie) and the band’s second woman (having willingly ceded the spotlight to Stevie Nicks, who joined in 1975 and quickly became a superstar). She was first a fan (back when she performed under her birth name, Christine Perfect, at the same gigs as Mick Fleetwood’s blues group), and then a pillar (described in multiple obituaries as something like the “eye of the storm” in Fleetwood Mac). To most people, the singer and keyboardist Christine McVie, who died yesterday at age 79, was the member most recognizable for her role in the whole. Bustling with rumbling blues, painterly folk, and hippie pop, its songs are pleasant blurs from afar, and cathedral-ceiling complex up close. The group’s long saga includes marriages and divorces and affairs, departures and firings and returns. ![]() The popular image of Fleetwood Mac is of the band as an unstable molecule, its parts best understood by their place in an ever-changing swirl of connections. ![]()
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