Review Summary: Here's to the hearts that break.
We all know the stories, even if we've only listened to "Gypsy" on a summer's road trip or tried our hands at "Go Your Own Way"'s guitar solo. Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks as star-crossed divorcees of a marriage that never happened, Christine and John McVie playing songs about their extramarital affairs, Mick Fleetwood trying desperately to keep the spirits high before he himself succumbs to the disaster in the air. Rumours is the centerpiece of a bunch of 20-something's romantic lives in all their boredom and glory, all their beautiful splendor and drug-induced comedowns. The highs and the lows, the somber evenings and the wild affairs and the pure, unadulterated hatred you can only feel for someone you once loved - it's all here, in whatever format you choose.
So why talk about it? "Rumours" turns 40 years old this year, and though every member of the lineup that created the album is still alive, they're all pushing seventy and look it. It's almost weird to see them sing some of these songs - can people this old still remember all the problems they faced when they were younger, all the petty little things they have, surely, grown out of? And the answer is that yes, of course they can, and Rumours is nothing less than an enduring statement of our common human capacity to be bad at relationships. We err, we *** people we shouldn't, we hurt the ones we love, always, every time. No other album encompasses the breadth of human capacity to lust, love, forgive and regret as much as these short forty minutes of Pop. The three lead singers (Lindsey, Stevie and Christine, in order of appearance) trade places in a cabaret of goodbyes and accusations while the band plays on, producing sonic soundscapes that support the bitter and cynic lyrics. "Go Your Own Way" rises out of the relative optimism of "Don't Stop" only to send someone off so thoroughly, so pathetically you might think Lindsey is asking Stevie to leave whilst still holding on to her hand. "Songbird" floats, "The Chain" rocks harder than any breakup song ever has and "You Make Loving Fun" is a pearl among pearls, a weirdly dark verse breaking against the cliffs of a chorus so pure, so harmonic, I always want it to go on forever.
But it doesn't, and therein lies the other great quality of Rumours: It's a Pop masterpiece because of its ability to keep songs short, solos tight, choruses catchy. But there's something here missing in most high-charting music, and that's a raw, wild heart beating tenderly underneath all the glamour and glistering lights. Rumours is the Pop equivalent of a painting made by someone throwing paint at a canvas in anger, only to see the outlines of a past lover they can't quite forgive in the mud of reds, blacks and blues. Rumours is a short eleven songs, twelve if you have Silver Springs on your edition, and they say everything than can and must be said about that very type of love that doesn't end in long evenings watching your children play, or walks by the pier when you're both grey and old. Instead, it's about the love that might not be love at all, the obsessive, the compulsive bordering on sick, never seeming to fill you but always consuming. It's in Stevie Nicks's voice on "Dreams", it's in the way the first song, "Second Hand News", encapsulates the feeling of being so close to someone you could feel the warmth of their breath on your back only to be strangers again, hearing about what they're doing from a Facebook page or some friend who casually namedrops them in conversation before looking at you with a weary, careful expression. It's in "Gold Dust Woman", a passive-agressive closer if there ever was one. It's in the way these songs and their singers seem to become, at first, random passersby, and then, surely and steadily, friends, lovers, everything.
I feel like I've met a young Lindsey Buckingham in a bar somewhere, listened to a blonde croon about thunder only happening when its raining, seen a woman sitting by a piano whispering promises into the keys. They're there, in my room at night, eerily alive through headphones while I cry or laugh or simply wonder how people who barely functioned as couples made a work that unites to many people in their common whiny moods and neediness. I just know that its honest, brutal and utterly overplayed, but once you get past the last point the songs open up to reveal their tender heartbeats, almost begging you to cut them even further open. The "You" in Pop Music has rarely been this defined, the "I" so vulnerable. These "I"s have helped me through times tough and awful, through break-ups and the long periods of loneliness in-between. Stevie, Lindsey, Christine, Mick and John are always around the corner, and have stood the test of time when many flings, relationships or marriages haven't. I've shown it to lovers, played these songs in the most different of places, regretted associating these songs with an ex before the music overpowered any old memories, always hungry for the new. It's been there when parties and dates seemed eternally far away, when time seemed to move on but leave me standing in place. And it'll be there for my next relationship, and the one after that, and the one after that, and the one...
Rumours is forever. Forever young, forever good, forever mine.
