The Fraught History And Enduring Power Of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Dreams’

It was a little bit of respite in a long, tough year — an American man with the handle @420doggface208 , head shaved, floating down the highway, sipping cranberry juice and singing ‘Dreams’ by Fleetwood Mac.

No wonder that the video, posted to social media platform TikTok, went unbelievably viral, spawning countless parodies. We’ve all been so torn up and burnt out for the last eight months that such a genuine slice of peace was always going to connect. “This is a vibe,” was the prevailing response online.

So thanks for the love and support an here it is my original video same as all going around but yes thanks for the love n donations it’s very appreciated an much needed ?? vibe on world pic.twitter.com/gkCgc1U9As

— *BLAZIN*4*1*NATION* (@doggface208) September 27, 2020

That’s testament in part to the uncomplicated, open-hearted attitude of @420doggface208 himself. But it’s also testament to the song DoggFace wrapped his lips around, a gently heartbreaking paean to self-determination and catharsis that might be one of the most accomplished tracks Fleetwood Mac ever released.

The Slow Destruction of Fleetwood Mac

For their 11th album, Fleetwood Mac wanted to go pop. Despite a number of line-up changes, the Mac name had been going for almost a decade, accumulating a steady army of fans in the process. But it was their 10th release, a self-titled collection of ballads and gentle snatches of poetry released by the line-up of Stevie Nicks, Christine McVie, John McVie, Lindsay Buckingham and Mick Fleetwood that had won them new success.

It was ‘Rhiannon’ that had done it, a radio smash that opened up their fanbase in a new way and launched them into the public eye. And so they looked to strike while the iron was hot, releasing a follow-up to certify their new position in the charts.

But there was a problem. The band was on the verge of near total collapse. Keyboard player Christine McVie and bass guitarist John McVie had once been married. But the pressures of touring and a number of affairs — including one with a sound engineer — combined with John’s drinking drove them apart. Some nights on tour, John would pace up and down the hotel corridors, bellowing Christine’s name while she hid from him.

The pair divorced a matter of months before work on Rumours started, while still on tour. And though they spoke to one another, it was strictly business — there was too much hurt there for anything else. Christine began a relationship with the sound engineer that had contributed to the breakdown of her marriage, and John began sleeping with copious numbers of the band’s fans. According to Fleetwood, his house was a “blacked-out bordello”, covered in drug ephemera.

Indeed, in escaping the intensity of the dissolution of their marriage, both parties stepped up their drug and alcohol abuse. The band had a velvet bag of cocaine that they heaved around with them on tour, and it became the staple of their dressing room.

The rest of the group wasn’t doing much better. Mick Fleetwood, the band’s drummer, had just discovered that his wife was having an affair with his best friend. Buckingham and Nicks, who were having an on-again, off-again relationship, would fight terribly. The only two members who could manage being in the same room with one another were Christine and Stevie, who referred to each other as their only friend in the band.

And yet nobody was willing to quit the group, no matter how ugly things got. So Fleetwood Mac pushed on, and created their masterpiece.

The Strange, Sad Story of ‘Dreams’

The recording sessions for Rumours were infamously nightmarish. The band constantly fought; wrote cruel songs about one another; threw glasses of vodka at one another’s heads. They would assemble at the studio at 7pm, eat far too much, and then party into the early hours of the morning. When they were incapable of even standing up, they started making music. Christine, when referring to the sessions, would simply call them a “trauma.”

It was against this background that Nicks wrote ‘Dreams’, addressing her decaying relationship with Buckingham. She handled the original composition by herself, sequestered away, writing the thing on an electronic keyboard. When she brought the scrappy version of the song to the rest of the band, they weren’t into it. She had to beg them to give the thing a shot.

And so they did. Christine, who had once considered the song “boring”, gradually began to warm to it. Even Buckingham was won over after he put his own stamp on the song, a repeated riff that carries throughout ‘Dreams’ and became the song’s sonic and emotional thread.

When it was done, the label immediately clocked to the power of ‘Dreams’. As part of the roll-out of Rumours, it was the second single, and almost immediately cracked the Billboard charts. And then it stayed there longer than any Mac song had before. The band had sought to follow-up the success of ‘Rhiannon’. And they had achieved that goal. All it cost them was literally everything else that makes life liveable.

‘Dreams’ Will Never Die

In the decades since ‘Dreams’ has been released, it’s been a constant mainstay of the charts and the cultural conversation. It’s probably one of the Mac’s best-known songs, a mini-masterpiece that has become shorthand for an entire way of making music. Sure, it’s shot up the charts after @420doggface208’s video, but it wasn’t so far from people’s minds before that.

It’ll never die, either. The song is just too emotionally clear-eyed; too direct and simple, too heartbreaking. While other musicians cloak themselves in misdirects, Nicks and her band simply told their truth. Given the state of their lives, that truth was painful of course.

But that’s why ‘Dreams’ has endured. It is a sad story, told in an unwavering voice. It times of strife and hardship — as in, pretty much constantly these days — that kind of clarity is only becoming more important.

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Joseph Earp is a staff writer at Junkee. He tweets @JosephOEarp.