1977: Fleetwood Mac, rumours
By Mayari Sherina Ong
Now Here I Go Again
When the rain washes you clean you’ll know.
When the bass line hits, my hips swing, my head bobs, my shoulders sway. It’s not long before they coax the rest of my body to move along with them. Stevie Nicks serenades in rasp while John McVie steadies the undercurrent. Alone in my studio apartment, I bounce and rock and bloom with abandon to the simplest, most evocative two-note bass line to ever rumble my ears. The song is “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac.
I’m back here for a week moving my belongings out while my freshly ex-boyfriend of eight years is away. My syncopated steps spring all over the hardwood floor. My arms raise, hailing themselves up towards the white lofted ceiling. For the first time, in a long time, I take up my own space.
When we moved into the Upper East Side studio six months ago, I could feel the walls caving in. We were on the ground floor of the building surrounded by high rises. The single window in the back of the room shed sunlight only between 11 am and 1. There was one closet. A pile of miscellaneous junk grew in the corner and there was no place to hide anything anymore. Not in the cabinets, not under the bed.
But now, hearing Stevie’s cool rasp soothing my ears, it all feels open. Turns out, this studio is exactly the right size for one person. Spacious even. There’s ample room for me to sashay and twist through the joint living room-kitchen. I keep dancing, watching my reflection in the mirror of the flatscreen TV. A girl in her late twenties, hip shaking in her underwear and a tank top, a towel wrapped over her head fresh from the shower. Her smile is effusive. As wide as the 55 inch screen. Wider even. I watch her and can’t remember the last time she danced. Not this way. Not this free.
The playlist shifts and I plop down onto the couch we picked together, still pungent with the staleness of new upholstery. I check my email on my phone and see the last one he sent, weeks old and glaring in my inbox. We were emailing to arrange a week in December for me to return to the apartment. I said I would try my best to have all my belongings out by Friday. He responded with a threat. If I didn’t, he would throw out all my stuff, change the locks on the doors, and sue me for rent money. The final blow. I choke down the acid swelling in my throat, every reckless word still bubbling in my body. I play the song again.
“Now here you go again, you say you want your freedom. Well, who am I to keep you down?” I let Stevie’s voice wash over me, as cool and assured as her lilting high notes. She is a woman meeting a moment of resolve, coming home at the end of a long journey. The way her voice transcends age, she has always sung like an elder. I lock back into the driving bass line, the steady drums, the California cool guitar. I never stop dancing to the song. I dance to it while I bathe, while I rifle through crowded drawers, liberating my things from his. I play it on headphones while dragging our IKEA furniture out onto the street, dumping our plastic-wrapped mattress on the side of the road.
*
The aftermath of a breakup is never so linear, of course. “Dreams” is but one hit song on Rumours, which I would dub as the quintessential breakup album. Prior to its release in 1977, the five members of Fleetwood Mac spent a straight year recording Rumours in The Record Plant Studio, all the while bearing through their infamously crumbling relationships. Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham were splitting up after eight years of romance, erupting into arguments whenever they shared the same room. Mick Fleetwood was divorcing his wife after discovering she was having an affair with his best friend. Christine and John McVie were, too, going through a divorce while Christine began dating the band’s lighting director and John disintegrated into jealous, drunken rages.
In that Sausalito studio, Fleetwood Mac labored through eighteen-hour days, recording the sounds of separation with the lovers they were trying to separate from. Throughout the entirety of Rumours, you can hear the tension straining through the vocals. This album was created in a pressure cooker and every peak and valley, every hot and cool emotion was spilled into it. There’s the angry dismissiveness of “Go Your Own Way.” The tortured devotion in “Oh Daddy.” The shouted duet of Nicks and Buckingham in “The Chain,” an echo chamber of bitter fights and ultimatums -- “if you can’t love me now, then you’ll never love me again.”
At the end of “Gold Dust Woman,” Stevie Nicks wails underneath a haze of ungraspable guitars. She admits the song was about cocaine, that the band needed it to endure the ever-growing grind on their sanities (the band even considered naming their drug dealer in the album credits). Twenty years later, in the 1997 Classic Albums docuseries, Lindsey Buckingham sits in front of a studio mix board, raising up the volume on his ex-lover’s grumbling vocals while fading out the instruments. Isolated, Stevie Nicks’ aching, wordless groans sound barely human. The howling underbelly of a tortured beast. A graying Buckingham looks down towards the board, somber but with a slighted smile that comes only from distance and time. He says, “Clearly, we were under duress.”
And then, there were the quiet moments. Of clogged throats and wayward looks as each of the exes pretended the other was not there. Strained with so much restraint. Christine and John McVie stopped speaking most of the time, aside from asking each other what key they were playing in and other musical these or thats. Stevie Nicks confined herself in unused studios whenever she wasn’t needed for recording. It was during one of these moments, sequestered in the vacant studio of Sly Stone, that she wrote “Dreams.” It came to her in fifteen minutes. Over a fixed drum track, she parsed out three simple chords on her keyboard and the melody poured out. Immediately, she knew she had something. Perhaps, a moment alone was all she needed to hear her elder voice sing through.
It’s true that there are more uplifting tracks on the record than “Dreams,” each of them revelling in the wide breadth of emotions that swivel throughout a breakup. “Second Hand News” blows open the album with Buckingham’s irreverent freedom (and just a tinge of resentment). In the arm-sweeping “You Make Loving Fun,” Christine McVie proclaims her revived faith in love while beginning a new relationship. And of course, there’s “Songbird,” a reverent piano ballad where Christine sings “I love you, I love you, I love you” like a tender prayer on the verge of miraculous tears. But for me, it’s “Dreams” that reverberates down my spinal column, striking the right bittersweet chord between tension and release.
Stevie Nicks has said she’s always considered “Dreams” and Buckingham’s “Go Your Own Way” to be twin songs. Opposite sides of a crumbling coin. But while her ex-partner wrote the story of sweet and sour anger, Stevie Nicks wrote hers as one of acceptance. In the same Classic Albums docuseries, she says to the camera twenty years later, “I always try to hang onto a thread of hope.”
*
I keep dreaming I’m on the edge of the same breakup, my subconscious still looking for an answer to the end. My sleep is often restless, the moment before a cliffhanger. Covered up secrets and averted eyes. The scent of rotten odor. Something gone terribly, terribly bad. The violent ones are the worst. My ex is hunting me down with a butcher knife. He corners me in a stairwell and stabs me in the chest. I go limp awaiting my death but the knife won’t pierce through. The bone of my sternum has become steel.
But lately, the tint of my sleeping mind has begun to shift. After four years of therapy, of detours and breakdowns, of digging myself out of crevices in the earth, of attachment theory, of awakening, of arms wide open, of holding my inner child, of three steps forward and two steps back, of solitude, I’ve now begun to dream of closure. The kind of closure I never got in my waking world, but perhaps can create in my subconscious one. We’re in the bricklaid courtyard of our old college campus. Nervously, I tell him that I’m dating a woman now. He tells me that he’s been dating men and we hug each other and laugh. We release our embrace and then, still laughing, we wave goodbye. With a gentle nod, we part ways in peace.
Today, “Dreams” stumbles onto my Spotify radio. The bass line moves me again and I realize it’s been awhile since I last heard it. An ocean of relief washes over me. A week ago, the woman I’m dating asked me to go steady. We awoke to each other, wrapped in arms and blankets, and I saw a beaming face rising in her pupils. A mirror of myself safely held in her eyes. She told me she could see the same of herself in mine. Stevie’s young-old voice breezes through my ears again and I feel the old scars fading. I dust the memories of heartbreak off my shoulder and smile. Now here I go again.
I thought “Dreams” was a song about the end, but in this moment, it’s a song about the beginning. Or maybe, it’s something in between, a time marker in a cycle, rolling forward like the bass line. Look how far you’ve come, look how much more you have to go.
Mayari Sherina Ong is a Pilipinx American writer, sound artist, and Reiki practitioner raised in Northern Virginia (Manahoac territory). Intertwining her creative and spiritual work, Mayari creates to realize a world of radical liberation and connection. She’s a double Scorpio who reps her ancestors hard. You can find more of her work at mayarisong.com, follow her on IG @mayari.s.o and on Twitter @mayarisong.