Mick's 8 favourite Fleetwood Mac songs

[David]

Does anyone remember what the original words were? That could help us decipher who’s your daddy.

Like a lot of Fleetwood Mac songs, I don’t think Oh Daddy is about one thing or one person. I think it’s a mood piece and a lyrical collage. Perhaps it’s a vague sort of nod to someone in the band, like Mick, but it’s probably a string of words and phrases that just sounded great to Christine or the rest of the band, as it took shape in Sausalito, and maybe it started with an underlying reference to someone initially.

Oh, daddy, you soothe me with your smile
You’re letting me know
You’re the best thing in my life

Rather than draw arrows between each word and a supposedly corresponding reference in real life, I hear a song as a stylized way to create a mood. That’s certainly true in Lindsey’s case, where he admitted to often writing lyrics to fit existing bars of orchestrated music. I think even Stevie does that a lot, in more songs than we realize: If we took each mention of the word “tragedy” in her body of work literally, her life would have to be worse than that of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop. Sometimes a line of ersatz poetry is just a line of ersatz poetry, and it creates a fictional world or just sounds groovy.