my love for fleetwood mac

the bassline that opens "the chain" is the sound of something climbing. i have always heard it this way, as a progression that does not so much ascend as lurch, as though the notes themselves are grasping at a ledge that keeps crumbling beneath their weight. there is a desperation in that riff, a quality of reaching, and it is this reaching that i recognise as my own. the song does not begin with a chord or a vocal or any of the conventional gestures of pop music. it begins with this sound, this insistence, this declaration that something is about to happen and you are not prepared for it. four minutes later it ends with a breakdown that sounds like everything collapsing at once, and somewhere in between there are harmonies that should not work, voices that should not blend, lyrics that should not make sense, and the whole thing should be a disaster but it is not. it is transcendent. it is the sound of people who cannot stand one another producing something that makes the rest of us feel less alone in our own private catastrophes.

the cocaine was not the point. the cocaine was the apparatus. the cocaine was the thing that allowed them to stay awake for the seventy-two hour sessions, to tolerate the presence of the person who had broken their heart, to sing about their devastation with the kind of clarity that only comes when you are too exhausted to perform. there is a particular quality to the vocals on rumours, a rawness that cannot be manufactured, a vulnerability that sounds almost like an accident. stevie nicks sings "dreams" with a voice that cracks at precisely the right moment, and the crack is not a mistake. the crack is the whole point. the crack is the thing you cannot fake, the thing that only emerges when you have been awake for too long and you have ingested too many substances and you are standing in a room with the person who wrote the chorus and you are singing about the impossibility of your love and the crack is the only honest thing in the room.

there is a story about lindsey buckingham and stevie nicks having an argument in the studio, one of those arguments that seems to be about one thing and is actually about everything, and the engineer kept the microphones running and the argument was later sampled and incorporated into a track. i do not know if this story is true. i do not need to know. the story persists because it contains a truth that transcends fact, a truth about the porousness of the private, the impossibility of keeping anything secret when the microphones are always on. they were making a document of their dissolution, an archive of their collapse, and they were also making a pop album, and the two projects were inseparable. the argument is in the music. the argument is in the harmonies. the argument is in the particular quality of the bassline, the way it climbs and stumbles and climbs again. everything is in everything. nothing is hidden. they thought they were concealing their dysfunction beneath the polish of the production but they were not. they were amplifying it. they were making it audible.

christine mcvie wrote "you make loving fun" about her new lover, a man who was not her husband, and she recorded it in the same studio where her husband was playing bass on other tracks, and everyone knew what the song was about and no one said anything because saying anything would have required acknowledging the catastrophe they were all inhabiting. the song is impossibly bright, impossibly cheerful, a piece of pop perfection that sounds like sunlight and optimism and the effortless pleasure of new love. it is also a betrayal, a confession, a public declaration of something that should have remained private. i have always loved this contradiction. i have always loved the way the song sounds like everything is fine and the context reveals that nothing is fine, that the brightness is a performance, that the cheerfulness is a mask, that the music itself is the apparatus that allows her to access what she cannot say directly.

the album is a document of simultaneous catastrophes. everyone was sleeping with everyone. everyone was hating everyone. everyone was consuming substances that should have destroyed them. and out of this chaos emerged something that sounded like perfection, something that sounded like it was made by people who had their lives together, something that sounded like the opposite of what was actually happening. this is the paradox i keep returning to. this is the paradox i am writing about. the chaos produced the order. the dysfunction produced the harmony. the destruction produced the creation. the cocaine was not the point. the cocaine was the fuel for the paradox, the substance that allowed them to sustain the contradiction, the apparatus that enabled the impossibility.

stevie nicks has spoken about the shawl, about the way it became a costume, a character, a version of herself that could stand on a stage and sing about heartbreak without succumbing to it. she has spoken about the ritual of putting it on, the way the ritual transformed her, the way the fabric became a kind of armour. this is not a story about fashion. this is a story about the things we wear to become ourselves, the external apparatuses we require to access the interior, the shawls and the substances and the rituals that allow us to perform our own lives. she did not write the songs. the shawl wrote the songs. the shawl was the thing outside herself that allowed her to access what was already inside. the shawl was the cocaine. the shawl was the architect. the shawl was the thing she could not do without.

i have spent years trying to write without the shawl. i have spent years sitting in rooms with blank pages and fluorescent lights and the weight of my own expectations, trying to access the interior through discipline alone, through persistence alone, through the sheer force of my own will. the words would not arrive. the words would not arrive and i could not understand why. i could not understand why the discipline was not enough, why the persistence was not sufficient, why the interior remained inaccessible, why the gap between the vision and the execution would not close. i could not understand why i needed the apparatus, why the crutch was necessary, why the natural channel did not exist. i could not understand why the year i spent trying to channel the intensity naturally was a year of silence and the years i spent using the apparatus were years of production.

the arctic tern flies from pole to pole each year, a distance of approximately seventy thousand kilometres, and it does this alone. i have always found this comforting. i have always found it comforting that a creature can traverse such vast distances and still recognise its nesting ground, can migrate through entire hemispheres and still return to the place where it began. i have been accused of distraction, of sudden and inexplicable tangents, of speaking about the migratory patterns of seabirds when the conversation has turned towards something more intimate. these tangents are not distractions. they are the shawl. they are the apparatus. they are the thing outside myself that allows me to access what is already inside. i am telling you about the arctic tern because i am telling you about the year, about the long migration i undertook and the nesting ground i kept returning to, about the impossibility of staying still when the impulse to flee is always humming beneath my skin.

the harmonies on "the chain" are the sound of four people who cannot look at one another producing something that requires them to be perfectly aligned. the harmonies are the proof that the chaos can be contained, that the dysfunction can be channelled, that the distance between people can be bridged by music even when it cannot be bridged by anything else. i have always loved this about fleetwood mac. i have always loved the way they harmonise, the way their voices interlock, the way the harmonies sound like they are holding something together that would otherwise fall apart. the harmonies are the architecture. the harmonies are the structure. the harmonies are the thing that holds the chaos long enough for us to hear it.

the cocaine was measured in teaspoons on the mixing console. the shawl was draped over the amplifier. the piano was in the corner. the harmonies were in the air. the photograph was taken in 1977 and none of them are looking at one another. stevie nicks is gazing at something beyond the frame, possibly at the future, possibly at nothing at all. lindsey buckingham is studying the floor. christine mcvie and her husband john occupy opposite corners of the image. the distance between them is the subject. the distance between them is the essay. the distance between them is the thing i am trying to write about and the thing i cannot write about directly because writing about it directly would require acknowledging that i am writing about myself.

the essay about drugs and creativity is not an essay about drugs. it is an essay about the distance between things, the distance between the substance and the discipline, between the shawl and the piano, between the cocaine measured in teaspoons and the year i sat in a room and waited for the words to arrive. it is an essay about the particular devastation of realising that the distance cannot be closed, that the apparatus is necessary, that the crutch is required, that the natural channel does not exist. it is an essay about the yearning. the yearning is the thing that connects everything. the yearning is the essay. the essay is the yearning. the yearning is the distance and the distance is the subject and the subject is the only thing i can write about.

the bassline opens "the chain" and it sounds like climbing. the bassline is the sound of something reaching, something grasping, something that cannot quite find purchase. the bassline is the sound of the year i spent trying to write without the shawl, the year the words would not arrive, the year the distance would not close. the bassline is the sound of the apparatus and the discipline, the substances and the silence, the chaos and the collapse and the album that emerged from both. the bassline is the sound of the arctic tern, the long migration, the nesting ground, the return. the bassline is the sound of everything i am trying to say and cannot say directly. the bassline is the essay. the bassline is the yearning. the bassline is the reaching. the bassline is everything.

and the silence after the bassline is everything too. the silence after the final note, the pause before the next track begins, the breath you take before you hit play again. the silence is the space between the year i used the apparatus and the year i did not. the silence is the distance between the shawl and the piano. the silence is the thing i am still trying to access, the thing i am still reaching for, the thing that remains perpetually out of reach. the silence is the yearning. the silence is the essay. the silence is the only honest thing in the room.