The Best Song From Every Fleetwood Mac Album
The twisted history that marks Fleetwood Mac's various lineups over the years carries over to their decades of records. That makes our list of the Best Song From Every Fleetwood Mac Album a bit complicated.
Early standout singles like "Albatross," "Black Magic Woman," "Oh Well," "Man of the World" and "The Green Manalishi (With the Two Prong Crown)" aren't found on the original U.K. pressings of their albums from the late '60s and early '70s; you'll have to track down one of the group's many compilations for most of those songs.
The band's history – especially before the arrival of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks took them to a whole other level – is incomplete without those essential singles. Still, the nine albums made before the U.S.-bred couple joined the fledgling U.K. blues band contain some good songs buried among the shuffling grooves, by-the-numbers covers and forgettable, misguided attempts at finding some direction. But sometimes you gotta dig pretty deep to find them.
That's not the case with the records Fleetwood Mac made during their peak period. In fact, singling out just one great song from albums like Fleetwood Mac, Rumours and Tusk isn't easy. Entire box sets could be constructed from the dozen-year period between 1975 and 1987. Once Buckingham left, and eventually Nicks too, things got a bit messy again, even though Christine McVie – who appears on all but the first Fleetwood Mac album, though not always as a member – continued to write and sing some good songs.
But, again, sometimes you gotta dig pretty deep to find them. Christine turns out to be the band's MVP throughout their half-century career, keeping the band alive – along with Mick Fleetwood and John McVie – when it looked like it was DOA. But they've always been more than just the sum of their parts, as you'll see in our below list of the Best Song From Every Fleetwood Mac Album.