The Fleetwood Mac song that made Christine McVie cry

As a band, making an album is hard enough, with all the compromises you have to make to put it together. However, trying to make an album while the whole band is going through breakups, divorces or affairs with another member should have been impossible. There were moments when it felt like it, with members storming off or getting upset at the offensive nature of the songs they were writing about each other, like Buckingham insulting Nicks with “Go Your Own Way.”

“Dramatical. Drama-ma”, is how Christine McVie described the process, and even that would be an understatement. But somehow they managed to make not just an album, but one of the most timelessly popular records of all time.

It was no easy task for anyone involved, but it’s particularly a triumph for Ken Caillat, the producer at the helm of the album who was tasked with holding it all together. To make an album under these conditions required not just a good music producer, but more like someone like a leader or therapist who could read the mood in the room and understand what the members needed both sonically and mentally to bring out the best in them. When Christine McVie’s crowning moment on the album came, with her stunning ballad “Songbird,” Calliat wanted to make sure it was done right.

From the second he heard the song, he knew it was special. “We were finishing up one of the crazy sessions at the Sausalito Record Plant and I was winding up some cables,” Calliat recalled at the Grammy Museum. “Christine sat down at the piano and started playing this beautiful song. I stopped what I was doing and turned around and looked at her. I was just amazed at how beautiful this song was.”

He knew he had to keep it sacred and not let the drama of the rest of the album or the chaos within the band spoil it. So rather than leave it in the same studio the band had been dragged into, the producer decided to do something different, creating a moment that moved McVie to no end.

“Before RumorsI had recorded an album with Joni Mitchell at the Berkeley Community Theatre,” he said Music radar“I thought a similar concert recording would be perfect for ‘Songbird.'” But he didn’t stop there. Calliat even went a step further and created a beautiful scene that matched the overwhelming cinematic emotions of the song.

“As a surprise for Christine, I had asked for a bouquet of roses to be placed on her piano and for three colored spotlights to be placed on it from above. I really wanted to create an atmosphere,” he wrote in his memoirs. Making Rumors: The Inside Story of the Classic Fleetwood Mac Album“When Christine arrived, we dimmed the lights in the hall so she could only see the flowers and the piano while the spotlight shone down from the sky. She almost burst into tears. Then she started playing.”

The atmosphere of the hall, captured by 15 microphones placed around the hall and recorded live in one take, is part of what makes the ballad so incredibly beautiful. It’s all thanks to Calliat’s thoughtful acting, which created a moment of real peace in the midst of carnage.

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