I can't find it right now but I thought I remembered Stevie saying "all Lindsey had was listen to the wind blow". And alluding to how long it was taking him to finish the song. That may have been on the Classic album doc. On the work tape they started out singing "write me a love song, take away the sadness that you gave me" as the opening line. Later Lindsey sings, "listen to the wind blow watch the sun rise" and says "something like that" and Christine says "yeah that's some really nice phrasing" and they keep hammering out the harmonies.
Here are some other quotes I found:
Lindsey: I think it was a really an interesting collaboration of forces. It started off as a song of Christine’s called ‘Keep Me There’ [Butter Cookie] and much of that did not end up being the song. We had the tag ending to the song.
Mick: Lindsey ran with whatever Chris had formulated and then basically ended up hitting a brick wall. And it felt like the whole thing was just never gonna work. They all got this revelation, and suddenly it just made sense, like a jigsaw puzzle.
Lindsey: I came in one day, and said why don’t we just remove the verses? And we can do some sort of measurement of what the tape is, and do a reverse count back from there to create a metronome to play to, and once we have the blank tape in we can figure out what we want to put in there! Mick or I laid down the kick drum that gave us a start point. Eventually I started fooling with the dobro and that became the foundation for what was written over that. The 3 part harmony of listen to the wind blow was a collaboration of the three writers.
Christine: I remember Stevie, Lindsey and myself sitting in my den and doing the 3 parts. Lindsey with his guitar and trying to figure out the chords things to go underneath the vocals.
Stevie:
I had written another song. The whole ‘running in the shadows’ thing. And Lindsey said can we use this? So of course I said yes…so it was funny that I had that melody and those words or it never would’ve happened.
Mick: Lindsey is more prone to see different pieces of things. Not only in his own songwriting, but in the girls’ songwriting and picking parts out.
Lindsey: We were able to think of tape as a very plastic, cinematic and abstract way. Just to come up with pieces of music we could treat as pieces of film, and we came up with something that was truly a communal effort.
Stevie: I remember that great solo of John’s (hums the bass solo)…and it was like the monsters are coming! And we all loved that.
John: That was an Olympic fretless bass on a stainless fretboard with a pick. And I was just messin about in the studio and I just played the riff. Chris said ‘Oh! I like that!’ So we kept it in. If I had my way, I would’ve brought the band in a little earlier on the ending…it tends to stand out and look a little lonely out there, but it seems to work.
Mick: You can’t change it now John, you’d break too many people’s hearts! (laughs)
Christine: I guess we must’ve just loved that bass part so much to do something with it. And Lindsey raved and put that guitar solo on it.
Mick: It’s one of the best examples of how things can work from a different point of view. The collaboration of the band brought it back to the shape it’s now in. It’s one of those songs that could’ve ended up in the dust bin, and it didn’t.
Source:
http://www.fleetwoodmac-uk.com/album.../thechain.html
***
Mick Fleetwood: "'The Chain' basically came out of a jam. That song was put together as distinct from someone literally sitting down and writing a song. It was very much collectively a band composition... Originally we had no words to it. And it really only became a song when Stevie wrote some. She walked in one day and said, 'I've written some words that might be good for that thing you were doing in the studio the other day.' So it was put together. Lindsey arranged and made a song out of all the bits and pieces that we were putting down onto tape."
(Courtesy: lucky98fm.com. Thanks, Edward Pearce - Ashford, Kent, England.)
***
"That started off as---jogging the memory here---it was really Stevie’s and mine to begin with in the verse: [sings] "Listen to the wind blow . . ." And my ever-present pseudo-blues riffs in there. And at some point I think Christine fashioned the feel of the chorus, and the chorus was certainly Stevie’s lyrics." Lindsey Buckingham 1993
***