Nit picks I have about Rumours

[Wdm6789]

1. Christine should sing both verses on Don't Stop and the "I know you don't believe that it's true, I never meant any harm to you" line. Then the chorus should be all three of them singing.

2. Christine and Stevie's voices should sound like Christine and Stevie's voices on the chorus of Go Your Own Way. It kinda just sounds like two or three Lindseys singing.

3. They should have done the vocals on the album version of The Chain like they do when they perform it live. Also, I really like Christine's keyboards on The Chain live, the keyboards should be a little more prominent on the album version.

4. They should have put Silver Springs on the album instead of I Don't Want to Know.

5. I really like Oh Daddy, but not as much as I like Why. I wish they did a Rumours version of Why in place of Oh Daddy. Why sounded so good when they played it live in 1975-76.

6. I like in the live version of Gold Dust Woman that they all three sing "go home" twice together and then Stevie sings it once more at the end of the singing part. They should have done that on the album as well.

[sadmabelnormand]

I agree with you on most of those points. I'm sorry, but you can't tell me that I Don't Wanna Know should've been on Rumours instead of Silver Springs! I also agree about the vocals on The Chain. If they had the harmonies like they do on the live version (or here's another creative idea: each vocalist sings the chorus a different time, Lindsey first, then Christine, then Stevie), the track would have been even more perfect.

[Macfan4life]

The full version of Silver Springs would not fit on Rumours. You would have to nix more than "I Don't wanna know." What would be your other song to nix?

I am brave enough to say Never Going Back Again would be the other sacrificial lamb to make it work.

Other than that... Rumours is perfect the way that it is. I think Lindsey singing on Don't Stop adds a cool element.

[vivfox]

The full version of Silver Springs would not fit on Rumours. You would have to nix more than "I Don't wanna know." What would be your other song to nix?

I am brave enough to say Never Going Back Again would be the other sacrificial lamb to make it work.


I was never a fan of Songbird. Silver Springs would have been the perfect replacement.

[Wdm6789]

The full version of Silver Springs would not fit on Rumours. You would have to nix more than "I Don't wanna know." What would be your other song to nix?

I am brave enough to say Never Going Back Again would be the other sacrificial lamb to make it work.

Other than that... Rumours is perfect the way that it is. I think Lindsey singing on Don't Stop adds a cool element.


Yeah probably Songbird. I like songbird and it's a signature song of Christine's. It's kind of like Rumours' Landslide, but it's not one that I will turn on in my car and jam out to.

[iamnotafraid]

Though I love Silver Springs, I wouldn't change
a thing concerning Rumours.

[dawn_amanda]

Love the album but love this thread too! Much like the last album I want more Stevie to make it perfect...

Stevie should be on Don't Stop, much like World Turning... She enhances the live version.

I like the versions of Oh Daddy and You Make Living Fun much better on the out takes albums with Stevie doing the harmony line. Why was it changed? :(

Go Your Own Way ends too soon with that fade out on the vocals! Same with The Chain.

Silver Springs should have fitted on somehow! Much as I love all the songs, it's one of the best. Maybe Rumours should have been a double album instead of Tusk?! With Silver Springs, The Dealer, Planets of the Universe, Doesn't Anything Last, Keep Me There, Think About It... We're over half way there! I guess they weren't big enough to do a double album by then but it would have been amazing.

[Mr Scarrott]

I wish the breaking glass on GDW was on the original version. It's on the first CD issue but not on the remaster. Don't know about the 35th anniversary edition as I don't have it.

Stevie should be audible somewhere on Don't Stop. She's probably singing along at the very end with anybody who was in the studio at the time. I wonder who else was? Maybe Bob Welch as he was around. There's a thought.

I also think Lindsey's vocals are mixed too high on IDWTK.

Christine slightly fluffs a note somewhere at the end of Songbird, (to my ears anyway) so it's not perfect.

Other than that, my dear late wife should have been asked to read out another poem at the very end...

[On Ice]

Like anything in life, Rumours while fantastic, is not perfect. As we've heard in the number of re-issues of the album, some pretty good stuff did not make the cut. The mixes of Oh Daddy and You Make Loving Fun are far superior and bring out Stevie's voice, the band's biggest strength at the time, to where it should be. Silver Springs arguably among the best, if not the best songs the band has ever recorded, should've made the final version of the album, although, it could've used a bit of work on the instrumentation to make it the monster hit single it could've been, for example more piano vs guitar. Each one had an abandoned track that would've been good fits, Keep Me There in some form or another, some of Stevie's original Chain lyrics may have brought Planets along to completion and Doesn't Anything Last would've have been a very cool kind of refrain between a couple of songs like Don't Stop and Go Your Own Way. Although the iconic break up album it was, it could've been tweaked a bit with these options.

[sorcerer999]

Great thread!

I am also of the opinion that "Rumours" is just fine as is. Obviously they were "up and coming" after the White album but since they hadn't released this masterpiece yet and hadn't reached "super group status", Warner Brothers was not going to take a chance on a double album. Songs were inevitably going to be cut. It was necessary. If they hadn't have released it the way it is, it might not have been a huge success. As much as I love "Doesn't Anything Last", "Planets" and "Think About It", I think they made the right decision to scrap them. Lyrically, the themes coincide with the other songs, but musically, they don't gel. Just my opinion.

I'm glad "Silver Springs" was, at the very least, released to the public as a B-Side. Yes, it would have been great on the record, but then two other songs would have needed to be dropped. And also, if it had been included, it might have been a hit but then it also might have faded either into "set list obscurity" or "overkill". This song, having been left of the album and then reintroduced during "The Dance" gave it a second life, a Grammy nod and shot it up to "cult status", introducing the band to a younger generation of fans who could relate to the song.

While I do prefer listening to the alternate versions of "Oh, Daddy" and "You Make Loving Fun", the ones with Stevie's prominent harmony vocal, I still wouldn't change anything about "Rumours" and how it turned out.

[SisterNightroad]

My only nit pick is that I would like Oh daddy like its demo with Stevie's vocals doing harmonies with Christine. That way is much more interesting.

[jbrownsjr]

I love not having Stevie on Don't Stop. I hate her on it live. I wish she wouldn't sing on ISA, too. But, that's another topic.

I want more Stevie on Oh Daddy. Her vocals on that song are wonderful.

Silver Springs does not belong on that album. I'm so glad it came alive during the Dance. Her Dance performance was epic.
I Don't Wanna Know is a fantastic song and it's concise message really gives side 2 a nice punch.

Thunder really does happen when it's not raining.

Songbird is such a beautiful piece between GYOW and The Chain. I sill get chills listening to that segment.

Hard to find anything wrong with this album. It's near perfect.

[FuzzyPlum]

My nitpick is that Silver Springs was not included.
No matter what people say it could easily have been included in place of I Don't Want To Know and if they'd rearranged the record they could have included them both (It'd be sad to have lost IDWK).

Other than that it's perfect.

[Macfan4life]

In the vinyl age......space was limited. Its a shame Silver Springs could not fit. Later in the tape and CD age...it was common to get 12 songs on an album. Vinyl was so limited.
I agree with many points people made here. Rumours is pretty much the perfect album and its hard to think of tampering with perfection.

[FuzzyPlum]

In the vinyl age......space was limited. Its a shame Silver Springs could not fit. Later in the tape and CD age...it was common to get 12 songs on an album. Vinyl was so limited.
I agree with many points people made here. Rumours is pretty much the perfect album and its hard to think of tampering with perfection.

they could put 22 minutes on a side before quality was compromised.
Rumours was 40 minutes. They therefore had an extra 4 minutes to play with.
They could have easily included Silver Springs over IDWK if they'd chnged the running order.
3.15 (IDWK) + 4 = 7.15

[aleuzzi]

As Stevie says, "Silver Springs is a great old song," but I think the band made the right decision not to include it there. IDWK works better to balance the male-female vocal presence on side two. It's tempo and key are also a welcome element between the two (outstanding) Christine songs.

The Rumours version of Silver Springs is good, but nowhere near the impact of The Dance version. That's one of the miracles of that live record. It was a neglected song that finally found its place on record and in the public imagination--and the band and Stevie were ready to perform it with the weight and wisdom the song deserved. In the original version, Stevie's voice is too high, too girly, to wobbly, too inconsequential. She sounds like one of Alvin's chipmunks. But in the Dance she is magnificent. Her voice and approach to the song so supple and strong.

I wouldn't change a thing about the existing Rumours record, except that I wish I could hear Christine's remarkable Chain harmonies more on it--as one hears them live. But that's quibble.

[David]

My nitpick is that Silver Springs was not included.
No matter what people say it could easily have been included in place of I Don't Want To Know and if they'd rearranged the record they could have included them both (It'd be sad to have lost IDWK).

Other than that it's perfect.I think I Don't Want to Know is essential to the album. Its Buckingham-Nicks vocal and its musical arrangement make it of a piece with The Chain, Never Going Back Again, Second Hand News, and the chilling chorus on Go Your Own Way. Albert Goldman wrote a perceptive essay on the album in a 1977 issue of Esquire. He differentiated the "dreadful modern product" of Nashville-based country at the time (Glen Campbell, Kenny Rogers, Ronnie Milsap, Charley Pride, ad nauseum), which was invading pop charts with its bland, dispiriting corporatism, and the much older rural roots music of the Carter Family (whose Will the Circle Be Unbroken is quoted on the sleeve of one of Stevie Nicks's albums). Goldman likened the sound of Rumours to "long-forgotten strains of ancient mountain music," drawing parallels between, on the one hand, its acoustic guitar and mandolin picking and the timbre of the Buckingham-Nicks harmonizing and, on the other hand, the dirges and elegiac spirituals of Appalachian folk songs, like I'm a Man of Constant Sorrow or Lonesome Valley. If someone doesn't hear this side of Rumours, which is largely what makes it stand out from the pack of rock albums in 1977, then he does not hear Rumours well.

It isn't that Silver Springs does not belong on the album: actually its treatment makes it fit right in. But it doesn't replace I Don't Want to Know.

One thing I don't like about the album (and I've always been disappointed by) is the production team's misguided decision to record Songbird in an obtrusively microphoned sound field: a theater auditorium. The reverberative wobble of that track (as if your sinuses were filled with water) is all wrong for the album's sound statement, which is how to make studio artifice sound as if it were being played in an aurally unidentifiable environment; on Rumours, the medium is transparent. It calls no attention to itself. Songbird should have been treated the way everything around it was treated: as a studio performance of layered intricacy and immediacy, without announcing the presence of the environment. (Think The Way I Feel off Mystery to Me, which has virtually identical orchestration with the acoustic piano and the acoustic guitar.)

Actually, the theater recording might have worked had the theater been full of people. But an empty theater and all that space that the sound traveled through kill the track.

[aleuzzi]

Songbird should have been treated the way everything around it was treated: as a studio performance of layered intricacy and immediacy, without announcing the presence of the environment. (Think The Way I Feel off Mystery to Me, which has virtually identical orchestration with the acoustic piano and the acoustic guitar.)

Actually, the theater recording might have worked had the theater been full of people. But an empty theater and all that space that the sound traveled through kill the track.

I have come to love the very problem you're describing in "Songbird." When I first heard the album years ago, I was puzzled by the echoey effect of an empty theatre. Now, when I listen to Rumours front to back, its live aura and echoey remoteness feel refreshing. But I get your point. For what it's worth, one of the track's alternative takes, featuring more prominent guitar and some bass, feels a bit warmer.

(I've often compared "The Way I Feel" with "Songbird." As much as I adore both songs, the recording techniques on the former distract me from fully appreciating the song. The microphones are so close to the piano and her voice that the overall effect feels like a wall of sound rather than a dynamic interchange between guitar, piano, and voice.)

[jbrownsjr]

In the vinyl age......space was limited. Its a shame Silver Springs could not fit. Later in the tape and CD age...it was common to get 12 songs on an album. Vinyl was so limited.
I agree with many points people made here. Rumours is pretty much the perfect album and its hard to think of tampering with perfection.

Agreed. The way it sounds, the way it sold.... It really shouldn't be tampered with.

[bsavi4]

Rumours is so incredible that it's hard to criticize, but I definitely would make a few changes. I would replace 4 songs with earlier version that were on the 35th anniversary box set. I would replace You Make Loving Fun and Oh Daddy with her versions that include Stevie's harmony vocals, I prefer the version of Songbird with the extra instrumentation, and I'd replace Never Going Back Again with the version that is sung by Lindsey and Stevie in unison. I'd leave Silver Springs off because there's not really anywhere to put it, and there's already one "heavy" Stevie ballad on the record.

[stevierocks87]

TOTALLY agree that the outtake version of "You Make Loving Fun" is SOOOO much better. I love the extended jam after the second verse- it may be my favorite part of the song- and Stevie sounds GREAT on it. Same with Oh Daddy, I cannot see at all why her backing vocals were taken off the track. Stevie should have had one more song each on "Fleetwood Mac", "Rumours", and "Mirage".