Caillat Gives Rumours Analysis, Track by Track

[David]

Originally Posted by michelej1

"Stevie hated when Lindsey got even a little literal. The minute Lindsey would start singing his lyrics, Stevie stormed out and the session would end."

Why would the session need to end just because one of the singers went home early?

"Originally, John McVie had an amazing, flowing and melodic bass part. Lindsey had a problem with that. It took him a while, but eventually, while John was on vacation, he put down his own bassline, one that was very simple, just quarter notes."

So the simpler, later bass line was something Lindsey recorded, not John? Uh-oh. Cruisin' for a bruisin'.

"We made an eight-bar loop of Mick's playing, which created this fantastic, deep hypnotic effect.

I wonder just how many wonderful Mick Fleetwood drum tracks are loops. "Dreams." "Tusk." "Angel"? "Annabel Lee"?

Don't Stop
“I never really liked this song. It was the first shuffle I ever worked on. I didn’t like the drum sound, either – maybe it’s because it started out kind of slow.

You ought to know better than that, Ken. Any time that amazing shuffle player Christine McVie is doing her unique stuff, you're going to have something memorable, something with texture that has no correlative.

“The Berkley Community Theatre wasn’t available, so we used the Zellerbach Auditorium, the same kind of vibe. Christine sat on the stage and played a nine-foot Steinway, and she sounded magnificent. I used 15 tracks for the piano – two close mics and the rest were distant mics. For something like Songbird, I wanted the room to really speak.”

To me, the one flaw on Rumours is the murky sound on "Songbird." Done deliberately, too, which is puzzling, considering that Dashut & Caillat had such fantastic ears.

The Chain
“The very first song we worked on. It began as one of Christine’s things, something called Keep Me There.

Christine wrote the chord progression on the chorus, too.

You Make Loving Fun
“Originally, it was done on Christine’s Yamaha electric piano.

Not Yamaha, Ken. Hohner.

“To accentuate the ‘Clav-iness,’ we put it through a wah-wah pedal.

Well, everybody did that at the time.

Gold Dust Woman
“The song grew more evil as we built it. I called over to SIR and they send over a bunch of weird instruments, like an electric harpsichord with a jet phaser – that created a cool, whooshing sound.

Never mind the stupid glass that everyone talks about. It's that electric harpsichord or Clavinet with the phaser that makes "Gold Dust Woman" have that ultra-cool Navajo sound: American Indian hippie music mixed with Appalachian hillbilly. It's masterly atmosphere they all created on that track, & the band never recaptured that in all its live performances.