Rumours

Rumours, released on February 4, 1977, was recorded largely at the Record Plant in Sausalito, California, while nearly every romantic pairing inside Fleetwood Mac was coming apart at once. Christine and John McVie were ending an eight-year marriage, Mick Fleetwood was going through his own divorce, and Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks were breaking up after years together, all while continuing to write, sing, and perform alongside each other night after night.

The band members largely avoided socializing outside the studio, yet the friction and heavy partying that defined the sessions became the album's raw material rather than its undoing.^[1] Songs written independently by Buckingham, Nicks, and Christine McVie ended up in open dialogue with one another, turning the record into something like a group diary of the same breakup told from several angles at once.

Critics recognized the achievement immediately, praising the interplay of the band's three vocalists and the polish producers Ken Caillat and Richard Dashut brought to the arrangements.^[1] Rumours won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1978, has sold more than 40 million copies worldwide, and was added to the National Recording Registry in 2017 as a work of lasting cultural significance.^[1]