Fleetwood Mac's 'Dreams' Surges to Biggest Streaming Week Ever After Viral TikTok Video
Courtesy of buzz generated by a gone-viral TikTok video, Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” has captured its largest streaming week ever.
Following the rise of the video’s popularity, the classic 1977 Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hit garnered 8.47 million on-demand streams in the U.S. in the week ending Oct. 1, according to Nielsen Music/MRC Data. That sum is up 125% compared to the previous week (3.76 million).
Previously, "Dreams'" best streaming week came in the week ending Sept. 10, with 3.83 million clicks.
The TikTok video in question has “Dreams” soundtracking a man in a hoodie (Nathan Apodaca) seemingly being pulled on a skateboard, as he drinks from a bottle of Ocean Spray Cran-Raspberry juice and sings along with Stevie Nicks’ lead vocal. The video became so popular, it moved the band’s own Mick Fleetwood to recreate the clip.
“Dreams” also sold 7,000 downloads in the U.S. in the week ending Oct. 1 (up 584%) – its best sales week since the week ending July 24, 2011, when it sold 9,000.
“Dreams” makes moves on the Billboard charts (dated Oct. 10), too, as it re-enters at a new peak of No. 8 on the Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart, climbs 19-1 on Rock Digital Song Sales, and rises 7-3 on Rock Streaming Songs. (Billboard's charts dated Oct. 10 will refresh to Billboard's websites on Oct. 6.)
The cut also impressively enters at No. 36 on the all-genre Streaming Songs chart, a list which is normally crowded with current hip-hop and pop tracks.
On the Billboard Global 200 chart, which ranks the most popular songs around the world, “Dreams” debuts at No. 51. On the Billboard Global 200 Excl. U.S. tally, it bows at No. 161.
“Dreams” was first released on the album Rumours, which was issued in 1977 and spent 31 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart.
Rumours also surges up Billboard’s lists, as it rebounds 47-27 on the Billboard 200 albums chart, marking the first time it’s been in the top 40 since early 2013. The set earned 19,000 equivalent album units in the week ending Oct. 1 (up 56%). The album also inches up 33-29 on the Album Sales chart with 4,000 copies sold (up 45%).
“Dreams” is also featured on the band’s Greatest Hits album, which jumps 169-103 on the Billboard 200 (9,000 units; up 35%) and moves 50-46 on Album Sales (3,000 sold; up 45%).
And finally, the new album The Alternate Rumours – released Sept. 26 exclusively on vinyl the latest Record Store Day Drop – enters the Billboard 200 at No. 165 (7,000 units – all from album sales). It also debuts at No. 12 on Album Sales and No. 6 on Vinyl Albums. The release presents an alternate view of the classic album, with different takes of the album’s tracklist subbing in for the original album versions.
original video guy can now afford a car & place to live
The viral video of that guy on a skateboard lip-syncing to Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams" while swigging Ocean Spray juice has inspired the band's own Mick Fleetwood to recreate the scenario.
The drummer made his own TikTok, in which he glides along while drinking Ocean Spray Cran-Raspberry juice from the bottle and lip-syncing to the song that's, to date, his band's only number-one U.S. hit. Mick captioned it, "@420doggface208 " -- the original guy's TikTok name -- "had it right. Dreams and Cranberry just hits different," and added the hashtag #CranberryDreams.
Posting the video on Instagram, Mick added, "Had way to[o] much fun with this!! More to come."
Ocean Spray commented, "Love this! Hope you enjoyed your juice. We have really enjoyed listening to Fleetwood Mac on repeat lately."
Meanwhile, TMZ tracked down @420doggface208, whose life has now been completely changed by his video. His name is Nathan Apodaca, and he says since the video went viral, people have sent him $10,000 in donations, which he can now use to get a proper place to live -- at the moment, he's living in an RV with no running water, parked in front of his brother's house.
In addition, Nathan, who works at a potato factory, plans to upgrade his car -- that's the reason he was on a skateboard in the first place. He plans to give his mom $5,000, and he gave his girlfriend a washer/dryer and bought some clothes for his daughter.
Nathan's also been contacted by Footlocker, and hopes to get some free clothes out of the deal -- but he tells TMZ he's still waiting for Ocean Spray to call.
Well, here Fleetwood Mac goes again with its signature classic rock hit that absolutely will not be kept down. "Dreams," the U.K.-meets-L.A. group's 1977 chart-topper -- their lone No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 -- has experienced another spike in sales and streams tied to a viral video.
This time, it's due to a TikTok video that took the world by storm late last week, with the enduring song soundtracking a middle-aged man in a hoodie seemingly being pulled on a skateboard, as he swigs from a bottle of Ocean Spray Cran-Raspberry juice and occasionally sings along with Stevie Nicks' lead vocal. The clip's incredibly specific vibe of melancholy chill and absurdity captured hearts across the Internet -- and inspired a massive hike in "Dreams" consumption in the days following its spread.
For the three-day period of Sept. 25 - Sept. 27, "Dreams" racked up 2.9 million on-demand U.S. streams and 3000 in digital download sales -- numbers up 88.7% and 374%, respectively, from their totals in the prior three-day periods, according to Nielsen Music/MRC Data. (The song also climbed as high as No. 24 on Spotify's US Daily chart on Sept. 27.)
The viral bumps are nothing new for "Dreams," which previously enjoyed gains in 2018 following a meme of Alcorn State University's Golden Girls dance team grooving to "Dreams" that took off on Twitter. The spikes two years ago were much more modest however, representing a 24% gain in on-demand streams and a 36% gain in download sales over the week following the meme's debut.
Even when not actively boosted by such social media spikes, "Dreams" has been a regular presence on the Billboard charts in recent years. The song has appeared on Billboard's Rock Digital Song Sales chart for each of the last six weeks, and for much of the year before that, climbing to a No. 5 peak in March. Meanwhile, it's held a place on the Rock Streaming Songs chart since February, hitting a peak of No. 6 in July. And the song has also appeared sporadically on Billboard's all-metric Hot Rock & Alternative Songs listing, reaching a No. 13 peak following the Alcorn State bump in April 2018.
A whopping 43 years after its initial release, "Dreams" remains one of the most consumed rock songs in America on a regular basis. Check back to next week's Billboard charts, dated Oct. 10, where the song is likely to hit new peaks on both charts following its TikTok journey -- and perhaps enter some new ones for the first time as well.
Two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Stevie Nicks chatted with Digital Journal's Markos Papadatos about her "24 Karat Gold" concert film, her live album, upcoming single on October 9, and she shared the key to longevity in the music industry.
Track and field legend Wilma Rudolph once said: "Never underestimate the power of dreams and the influence of the human spirit. We are all the same in this notion: The potential for greatness lives within each of us." Stevie Nicks is a woman that embodies this wise quotation.
Nicks has been hailed by this music aficionado as the perennial "Empress of Rock and Roll," and rightfully so. She possesses one of the most significant and powerful voices in the music business; moreover, she has had an illustrious music career that has spanned well over five decades. She scored six Top 10 albums, eight Grammy nominations for her solo work, and she has sold in excess of 140 million albums collectively as a solo recording artist and as part of the iconic rock group Fleetwood Mac.
She earned several Grammy Awards as a member of the Fleetwood Mac: their seminal studio album Rumours won the Grammy for "Album of the Year" in 1978, and two Fleetwood Mac albums have been inducted into the coveted Grammy Hall of Fame: Rumours in 2003 and Fleetwood Mac in 2016 respectively. Last year, she made music history because she was the first woman inducted into the coveted Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice.
This interview delves into the conscience of Stevie Nicks as a prolific songwriter, vocalist, poet, storyteller, and a song stylist.
Stevie Nicks — 24 Karat Gold The Concert
She will be debuting the "Stevie Nicks 24 Karat Gold The Concert," via Trafalgar Releasing, on two nights only: October 21 and 25 respectively. This concert film was directed and produced by Joe Thomas. Acclaimed guitar player Waddy Wachtel served as the musical director of this tour. It was filmed in Indianapolis and Pittsburgh back in 2017. It showcases her intimate storytelling and her inspirations for some of her most famous and timeless recordings. "Who knew four years ago when I went out on that tour?" she said. "This was one of the most important records that I've ever done, in my opinion. I wanted to go back and pick them up. It had 16 songs that I always planned to re-do because they were all recorded at some point and I wasn't happy with how they originally came out."
"The song 'If You Were My Love' is a ballad that I love to sing so much, and I wanted to make sure that it was perfect. It's the song that I love to sing most on stage with the girls," she said.
"Stevie Nicks 24 Karat Gold The Concert" will be available at select cinemas, drive-ins and exhibition spaces all over the world. With this concert film, Nicks will be taking her fans and listeners on a trip down memory lane, where she will provide them with a virtual front-row seat to her live shows. "The film is coming out soon and this tour that we filmed was the most fun that I've ever had on a tour," she acknowledged. "When you can add six or seven new songs into a setlist, it changes the whole show, and it makes it seem like the whole show was brand new."
Concert setlist: An eclectic program of classic and newer songs
Her setlist for this concert film includes such fan-favorite songs as "Rhiannon," "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around," "Edge of Seventeen," "Stand Back," and "Landslide," among many other classics from her extensive musical catalog. "Even the older songs that weren't on the 24 Karat Gold album become new again because of the six or seven new songs that nobody has ever heard before. When I walked off stage, that whole show felt new to me, and when you watch the film, you can really see that," Nicks said.
"It's always a risk when you add new songs to a show. I hope that my intuition said 'people will love this because I am going to tell them a good story' but my risk factor is definitely there, so when we left the stage that very first night, I was able to look at the audience, and I realized that it worked very well. We had all the confidence in the world to continue on from that moment then," she added.
"When I recorded the 24 Karat Gold album, we were on a break from Fleetwood Mac. I went to Nashville for only two weeks, and then I came home and we finished it at my house. The album was done in five weeks, and I gave it to Warner Bros. and that was it. It was amazing that I actually pulled it off and it actually happened, and I was so excited about it," she said.
"In May of 2020, I went to Chicago to edit the stories of this film," she recalled. "I was a little scared to do it because of COVID, but we took precautions and went to Chicago. We stayed at a house by a golf course where nobody had been since the previous October and we went to a studio where nobody had been for months and I was there for a month and that's where we edited the 46 minutes of stories. That's when I actually started working again.
"Getting this film all done was not easy especially since you couldn't get in your car and go to a studio," she acknowledged. "Everything that we have been doing was done pretty much from home except for the short trip to Chicago. I actually am being creative now, and I am really happy about that."
Chrissie Hynde and The Pretenders served as her opening act for the majority of the "24 Karat Gold Tour." "It was so fun to be o the road with Chrissie Hynde. She and I became really good friends, and Chrissie does not like everybody. She's a badass chick," she said.
After a TikTok where a man lip-syncs to “Dreams” while longboarding and drinking Ocean Spray
Cran-Raspberry Juice went viral, Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 classic has seen a massive spike in streams, enough to enter the Rolling Stone Top 100 Songs Chart.
The track, off the band’s 1977 album Rumours, currently sits at Number 29 on the daily version of the RS 100, which ranks the biggest songs in the U.S. by a combination of sales and on-demand audio streams. An official version of the Rolling Stone Top 100 chart is published every Monday.
With over 16 million views on TikTok, doggface208’s viral video — which won the approval of Fleetwood Mac themselves — caused streams for the song to more than double from Saturday through Monday.
In the three days before the video was uploaded, the 1977 Rumours classic was receiving an average of 490,000 streams a day, according to numbers from Alpha Data. In the three days after the TikTok video was posted, the song has been streamed an average of over 1 million times a day. Sales for the song nearly tripled, up 184% from Saturday through Monday.
Spotify reports that streams were up 127% on its platform with a 242% increase in first-time listeners of the song. Apple reported a spike of 221% in streams, and also reported a 1,137% increase in Shazams for the song, indicating that the song was finding new listeners.
During the weekend, 15% of all Spotify streams of the Stevie Nicks song were first-time plays on the platform, which is a 53% higher average of first-time streams than normal.
“Dreams” has become a classic rock staple on TikTok in recent years; In 2018, the song charted after going viral in a dance video.
A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that the song was receiving 49,000 streams per day. The song was receiving 490,000 streams per day, and increased to 1 million.
This week in the UK, Fleetwood Mac's Dreams re-entered the Top 100 Singles Chart at #85. In New Zealand the song entered the Top 40 Singles Chart at #28 and in Ireleand re-entered the Top 100 at #59.
In the US on the Top Rock Song Sales Top 25 the track is #19 this week moving down from #15 last week.
Stevie Nicks was in her early 30s when her father told her she’d never get married.
She had just released her solo album, 1981’s “Bella Donna,” embarking on a second career that would fill any time she wasn’t spending with Fleetwood Mac. Her music, Nicks’ dad said, would always consume her.
She considered the possibility. She certainly was not a woman who liked to be told what to do. Still, the words stung: “No man would be happy being Mr. Stevie Nicks for very long.” Had he doomed her to a life of solitude simply by speaking the thought into existence?
“Nobody,” she laughs now, decades later, “dooms me to anything but myself.”
At 72, Nicks has had a few great loves. Some we know about — Lindsey Buckingham, Don Henley, JD Souther — and many we don’t. She did get married once, back in 1983, an ill-fated three-month relationship with the husband of her best friend, who had just died of leukemia. She would have considered taking another spouse, had she met the right person — someone who wasn’t jealous of her, who got a kick out of her crazy girlfriends. But ultimately, her father pretty much got it right: She has yet to feel more devoted toward a man than her muse.
Which is why, in part, this pandemic has hit her so hard. Two projects due out this month have, she says, offered a vestige of normalcy: “24 Karat Gold: The Concert,” a cinematic version of her 2017 solo show, and a politically minded new single, “Show Them the Way,” which will be accompanied by a Cameron Crowe-directed music video. She’s also decided that she wants to make another solo album and plans to spend the rest of quarantine turning the poetry from her journals into lyrics.
But with touring on hold, she’s bored and depressed, conditions she’s claimed to never before suffer from. She’s cripplingly afraid of catching the coronavirus, fearing that going on a ventilator would leave her hoarse and ruin her voice.
“I have put a magical shield around me, because I am not going to give up the last eight years — what I call my last youthful years — of doing this,” she vows. “I want to be able to pull up those black velvet platform boots and put on my black chiffon outfit and twirl onto a stage again.”
It’s 9 p.m. on a Saturday when Nicks first calls from her home in the Pacific Palisades, where she has been sequestered with a close friend, her assistant and her housekeeper.
She has always been a night owl, but has recently become nocturnal, typically going to bed around 8 a.m. She attributes the change in her sleep pattern to the news, which she says she watches constantly. Usually, she likes to open the French doors to her bedroom, but tonight it’s dark outside because of the wildfires — “and not like, foggy, romantic dark. It’s just weird dark.” The smoke and ash in the air triggers her asthma, so she is not even venturing into her backyard.
Nicks is speaking from a landline. She has a personal line that she dances around when it rings, wondering “Who could it be? Is this a two-hour call? Is this going to be a tragedy?” and an emergency line to which her assistant attends. She does not have a computer. She does have an iPhone, but it doesn’t have cellular service and she uses it only as a camera.
Despite her distaste for social media, Nicks has gone viral a few times in recent months. Earlier this week, the internet discovered a TikTok video in which “doggface208" skateboards while singing along to Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams,” swigging from a container of cran-raspberry juice and generally living his best life.
After the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Nicks paid tribute to the Supreme Court justice, admitting her into the “Rock and Roll Hall of Fame of Life.” (Nicks is the only woman to be inducted twice into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, first with Fleetwood Mac in 1998 and then on her own in 2019.) The reactions to the RBG post were largely positive, but she saw one comment that ignored her sentiment entirely and instead lambasted her for her band’s interpersonal drama.
“They didn’t even care about what I had written about Ruth and went right to the breakup of Fleetwood Mac and Lindsey Buckingham,” she says. “I was like, ‘We’re talking about the death of a great Supreme Court judge, and you are yelling at me about something that happened two-and-a-half years ago? What are you, insane?’ I’m reeling from it. But I’m also like, OK: I can never be on social media.”
Nicks’ troll was referring to the highly publicized 2018 firing of Buckingham, who joined Fleetwood Mac as a lead guitarist and vocalist alongside then-girlfriend Nicks in 1974. The group’s tumult is the stuff of music legend: After ending her on-off again relationship with Buckingham, in 1977 Nicks had a brief affair with then-married drummer Mick Fleetwood. Singer Christine McVie, meanwhile, was in the midst of her own clandestine relationship with the band’s lighting director, ultimately leading to her divorce from bassist John McVie.
With the exception of a decade-long hiatus to focus on his solo career in the ‘90s, however, Buckingham remained with Fleetwood Mac until January 2018, when he claims he was unceremoniously let go. Together, they’d made an indelible mark on music history. Hits like “Dreams,” “Rhiannon,” “Landslide,” “The Chain” and “Gypsy” are now rock canon. 1977’s “Rumours” was No. 1 in the U.S. for 31 weeks, and subsequent tours over the decades showcased not just an incomparable baby-boomer songbook but the scars left from the band’s never-ending soap operas — Buckingham and Nicks frequently shot eye daggers at each other in front of packed stadiums during renditions of breakup anthems like “Go Your Own Way” and “Silver Springs.”
When Buckingham was axed from the group, he sued for lost wages — claiming he would have collected between $12 million and $14 million in two months of touring with Fleetwood Mac. (He was replaced by Mike Campbell of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Crowded House’s Neil Finn.) In legal documents, Buckingham says his firing came days after the band’s appearance at the January 2018 MusiCares Person of the Year ceremony. He alleges that he was later told that Nicks thought he’d mocked her on stage at the event while she was delivering a speech; she was apparently so upset that she told the rest of Fleetwood Mac she’d walk if he wasn’t cut from the band.
Nicks is reluctant to discuss the details of that night, though she admits it was the “straw that broke the camel’s back.”
“I never planned for that to happen,” she says hesitantly. “Any time we re-formed to do a tour or a record, I always walked in with hope in my heart. And I just was so disappointed. I felt like all the wind had gone out of my sails.”
There’s melancholy in her voice when she discusses the split, which she describes as a “long time coming.” She was always hopeful that “things would get better” but found herself noticing she was increasingly sad with Fleetwood Mac and more at peace in the “good, creative happy world” with her solo band.
“I just felt like a dying flower all the time,” she says. “I stayed with him from 1968 until that night. It’s a long time. And I really could hear my parents — I could hear my mom saying, ‘Are you really gonna do this for the rest of your life?’ And I could hear my dad saying in his very pragmatic way — because my dad really liked Lindsey —‘I think it’s time for you and Lindsey to get a divorce.’ It’s a very unfortunate thing. It makes me very, very sad.”
She says she hasn’t spoken to Buckingham in a couple of years, though she did write him a note after his February 2019 heart attack: “You better take care of yourself. You better take it easy and you better do everything they tell you and get your voice back and feel the grace that you have made it through this.”
Nicks has cataloged the ups and downs of her life in journals — she estimates she has roughly one per year of her life — and she plans to leave many of them to her goddaughters, of whom she has 11 or 12; she can’t be certain. She chose most of her goddaughters at birth — asking their parents if she could fulfill the role — and relishes the way they keep her “totally young and up on everything.” She loves to spoil them all with gifts imbued with meaning, like a pair of pink strappy heels she found at a store in Australia and deemed “Cinderella slippers.”
Tokens are important to Nicks. In 1977, she began having gold moon necklaces made to give as gifts to those she felt needed them. Over the years, she’s bestowed them to celebrities (the Haim sisters, Taylor Swift, Tavi Gevinson), soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Make-a-Wish recipients. Members of the coven — her “Sisters of the Moon” — are told the moons are lucky charms and to pass them along to another in need, should the moment arise.
Nicks is wearing the signature necklace in “24 Karat Gold,” the concert special slated to play in theaters for two nights only, Oct. 21 and 25. (A CD version comes out Oct. 30; streaming plans for the film have yet to be determined.)
In May, Nicks flew to Chicago, where Joe Thomas, the film’s director, was finessing a cut of it. The final version features 17 songs, only four of which are Fleetwood Mac hits. The show emphasizes Nicks’ solo career — MTV standards like “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,” “Stand Back” and “Edge of Seventeen.” Performing music from her “dark, gothic trunk of lost songs,” she tells the audience, makes her feel like she’s a 20-year-old embarking on a new career. “This is not the same Stevie Nicks show you’ve seen a million times,” she explains, “because I am different.”
September 25, 2020 -- Rock & Roll Hall of Fame drummer Mick Fleetwood released today a new recording and video for Mick Fleetwood’s Da*da*ism “These Strange Times,” available on Rhino Records. Originally released on Fleetwood Mac’s 16th studio album Time in 1995, the song was re-recorded adding thirty seconds of Peter Green’s “Albatross” to the end of the song and set to a brand-new video.
Inspired by an eighteenth-century painting, the newly released video and accompanying single artwork are centered around the idea of something greater than us, which lies at the core of our very human struggle to be our best selves.
“The project is about the energy of choice, of deciding if you want to be a part of the dark or the light when push comes to shove, which seems very apropos at this moment in history,” Fleetwood says. “It’s about how you read things, which is very important today. Everyone needs to be carefully paying attention to the information coming our way. There is subtext to everything and we need to be aware of that. When I first encountered the painting that inspired the photoshoot, it was a soul-searching exercise that I was driven to do but I didn’t know when would be the time to release it. Now I know why: the when is now.”
The spoken-word poem at the center of the song finds the narrator, Fleetwood, questioning his feelings and his thoughts, as he has found himself stuck between the dark and the light. The video is meant to be as thought provoking as the song is hypnotic, as the lyrics detail the struggle of the narrator.
“I hope the song conveys that life is about choice,” Fleetwood says. “God is everything, no matter what your belief system is. Being in love is God, no matter your creed. There’s a rejoicing at the end of the song when the narrator chooses the side of the light. The song is about all of us making that choice ourselves and the relief we feel when we are no longer caught in the middle.”
“This is something I wrote many years ago,” Fleetwood says, “and I want it to be nothing more than thought provoking. I want people to see and hear what they will in it. My hope is that by haring these thought-provoking moments in my world that I can somehow open the eyes of others to things in their world and to the existence we all share, which is more and more endangered with each passing day.”
Song Credits:
Title: These Strange Times
Artist:
Mick Fleetwood’s Da * da * ism Composers:
Mick Fleetwood, Ray Kennedy and Peter Green Executive Producers:
Mick Fleetwood and Carl Stubner Produced by:
Lynn Peterson, Mick Fleetwood, John Jones and Ray Kennedy Recorded and Mixed by:
Lynn Peterson and John Jones Additional Engineering:
Jimmy Hotz Recorded in the USA
Vocals:
Mick Fleetwood & Bekka Bramlett Lead Guitars:
Rick Vito Acoustic Guitars, Drums & Percussion:
Mick Fleetwood Bass Guitar:
John Jones
Keyboards:
Ricky Peterson & John Jones Background vocals:
Lucy Fleetwood
GOD IS NOWHERE/GOD IS NOW HERE
This statement is the essence of the artistic journey at the heart of Mick Fleetwood’s new single, “These Strange Times.” The song isn’t about God in any conventional way according to the tenets of any particular creed. Rather, God represents the divine, in other words, the idea of something greater than us, which lies at the center of every religious belief in one way or another and is at the core of our very human struggle to be our best selves. “The project is about the energy of choice, of deciding if you want to be a part of the dark or the light when push comes to shove, which seems very apropos at this moment in history,” Fleetwood says.
Inspired by an eighteenth-century painting, the photographical homage included in the album art addresses subtext and language. The phrase “God is nowhere” has been drawn on a blackboard by a devil-disguised Fleetwood, but interpreted by his pupil, an innocent child, as “God is now here.”
“It’s about how you read things, which is very important today,” Fleetwood says. “Everyone needs to be carefully paying attention to the information coming our way. There is subtext to everything and we need to be aware of that. When I first encountered the painting that inspired the song and the photoshoot, it was a soul-searching exercise that I was driven to do but I didn’t know when would be the time to release it. Now I know why: the when is now.”
The spoken-word poem at the center of the song finds the narrator, Fleetwood, questioning his feelings and his thoughts, as he has found himself stuck between the dark and the light, a condition he regards as a living hell. The beautiful video that accompanies the song juxtaposes images from nature evoking light and dark, the best and worst elements of man’s impact on Earth and the legacy we are leaving for future generations. It is as thought provoking as the song is hypnotic, as the lyrics detail the struggle of the narrator, lost and yearning to be in love, as he is led to the light in the end by the angelic voice of a child showing him that God is in fact now here.
“I hope the song conveys that life is about choice,” Fleetwood says. “God is everything, no matter what your belief system is. Being in love is God, no matter your creed. There’s a rejoicing at the end of the song when the narrator chooses the side of the light. The song is about all of us making that choice ourselves and the relief we feel when we are no longer caught in the middle.”
We are caught in strange times indeed, growing stranger and harsher with each passing day. It is a time for looking within to find answers, and to make sense of the world around us. “This is something I wrote many years ago,” Fleetwood says, “and I want it to be nothing more than thought provoking. I want people to see and hear what they will in it. My hope is that by sharing these thought provoking moments in my world that I can somehow open the eyes of others to things in their world and to the existence we all share, which is more and more endangered with each passing day.”
Mick Fleetwood Releases Apt Video for ‘These Strange Times’
Nineties Fleetwood Mac track gets new recording featuring sample of “Albatross”
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