Drafted in as a teenager to join older brother Tim’s band, beloved New Zealand New Wavers Split Enz, before breaking America and Europe as leader of Crowded House, Neil Finn’s deep but accessible songwriting has carved out a unique place within the musical landscape over the past four decades, earning him famous admirers ranging from members of Radiohead and Pearl Jam to Elvis Costello and Mick Fleetwood.
In this extract from our exclusive interview with Finn in the latest issue of MOJO, he discusses joining Fleetwood Mac in 2018 following the departure of Lindsey Buckingham…
Did joining Fleetwood Mac surprise you?
I was gobsmacked. I was 60 and I’d had a wonderfully diverse musical life when Mick called and said, “We’ve got rid of Lindsey, would you play with us?” I’d just done [2018 album] Lightsleeper with [Finn’s son]Liam so he had a vested interest in my not doing it, but he said, “Give it a shot,” so I auditioned.
What? Neil Finn auditioned?
It’s the only audition I’ve ever done. I went to Hawaii and Mick spent an hour telling me it wasn’t an audition, but it was. I was auditioning them too: I wasn’t sure it was the right thing, I was quite conflicted, but I liked the people and the welcome was universal.
What did you bring?
The naysayers said, “No Lindsey Buckingham, no Fleetwood Mac,” but I brought personality and the ability to sing with Stevie and Christine. I could never be capable of sounding like Lindsey but I put a similar intensity into his songs.
Have you had contact with Lindsey?
No, but I’d really like to have a dinner with him. There’s a lot of ill-will, but I don’t think he bears any towards me and I do think he had prior appreciation of the music I’d made. Hopefully, once he got over the massive disappointment, he’d have thought, “At least someone with something going for them is singing my songs.”
Who’s running Fleetwood Mac these days?
It doesn’t currently exist, but when I was there Mick carried the flag. He always has and he’s the heart and soul. Yet Stevie’s the leader in many ways, because Stevie wants it the way Stevie wants it and that’s the way it’ll be. She couldn’t bear to be in a band with Lindsey any more, but she still wanted to do it exactly the way he would have. It was more difficult for [Heartbreakers guitarist] Mike Campbell: she was really happy with the way it sounded between me and her, but she put a lot of pressure on Mike to be more like Lindsey. Sometimes Mike’s solos would go on and Stevie would get exhausted playing tambourine. She’d be, “Fucking hell, Lindsey only did 12 bars!”
Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours is already one of the bestselling and most successful albums of all time. The set was a massive commercial juggernaut when it was first released nearly 50 years ago, and it’s still performing well to this day.
This week, Rumours rises on five Billboard charts. It also finds its way back to another, different tally, meaning the project is up on half a dozen separate rankings. That’s an impressive showing for any title, let alone one that’s almost a half-century old.
Rumours reappears on this week’s Top Streaming Albums chart. The tally ranks the most-streamed full-lengths and EPs in the United States each frame.
Fleetwood Mac’s masterpiece was nowhere to be found on the Top Streaming Albums last week, but now it’s back. The favorite enters the tally at No. 46, which just so happens to be its best showing.
On the Billboard 200, Rumours returns to the top 40 in an impressive surge of consumption. The set moved another 18,144 equivalent units in the U.S. last tracking period, according to Luminate. That sum is up 5% from the frame before.
Looking specifically at pure purchases–in addition to its streaming success–Rumours is still doing very well. The title lifts from No. 30 to No. 25 on the Top Album Sales chart. This past frame, the set sold another 3,618 copies. It also advances on the Vinyl Albums ranking, where it improves from No. 23 to No. 16.
Rumours appears inside the top 10 on two Billboard charts this week, and it sits higher this frame than it did last turn. Fleetwood Mac’s bestseller is up to No. 7 on the Top Rock & Alternative Albums tally and No. 6 on the Top Rock Albums list.
Our story begins in the late 1970s in Maryland, USA. Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham are hurtling down the freeway, as they often did in those early days; a band used to constant touring. Nicks’ eyes drift up. She sees a sign – literally. It reads “Silver Spring”, the name of a nearby “edge city” in Montgomery County, near Washington. Now, the phrase won’t stop swimming around her mind: Silver Spring, Silver Spring, Silver Spring. “Silver Springs [sic] sounded like a pretty fabulous place to me,” she’d say in 1998, two decades after that drive. “‘You could be my silver springs…’ that's just a whole symbolic thing of what you could have been to me.”
The words became Fleetwood Mac’s “Silver Springs”, a break-up song written by Nicks about the end of a passionate, often tumultuous, on-off relationship with guitarist and singer Buckingham that had began back in high school. It was intended to appear on Rumours, their seminal 1977 album. But the band vetoed it for being too long. “I was so genuinely devastated… because I loved the song and it was one of the Rumours songs,” Nicks told MTV in 1997. “So I never thought that ‘Silver Springs’ would ever be heard of again. My beautiful song just disappeared.”
But it didn’t disappear. Not in the way she thought it might. In 1997, the band performed the song at Warner Bros studio during The Dance tour and it very quickly became a sensation, winning a Grammy Award for Best Pop Performance in the process. And that image, at the song's climactic end point – of Nicks singing the words at Buckingham, her eyes burning into his soul, as if casting a spell, 20 years after writing the lyrics and still meaning them – has become the stuff of legend: “I'll follow you down til' the sound of my voice will haunt you / You'll never get away from the sound of the woman that loves you.”
“Silver Springs” was big in the ‘90s. But in more recent years, the song has gained a surprising amount of renewed traction – particularly among Gen Z, who's parents might not have even been alive when it was written. On YouTube, the performance has a vast 25 million views. And on TikTok, where the collective obsession has reached fever pitch, the search “Silver Springs” has over 100 million views. We're seeing young people lip-syncing the words, mascara running down their cheeks or, as in one clip I saw, kids in class playing the song at their “year 7 exes.” Nicks burning a hole into Buckingham with her words really strikes a chord. As one TikTok user captioned over the clip: “Don't just write a song about your ex, make him play lead guitar and sing it right to his face on stage.”
It's easy to see why it still resonates – it's a captivating, enchanting song that's bolstered by the real-life drama that simmers beneath it. But why now? And why hasn't the hysteria surrounding “Silver Springs” died down? Even I'm guilty of it. It'll pop up on my TikTok and I'll watch it over and over again, on a dopamine loop. It has an addictive quality; the layering of their voices, the pummelling drums, the electric stare-off, how Nicks weaves between vengefulness and vulnerability within the space of a line (“Give me just a chance”). The live version has a particular potency – the recorded “Silver Springs” slaps, but it's not quite the same.
For a lot of people, the “Silver Springs” obsession actually began last year with Daisy Jones & the Six, Amazon's hit show based on the Taylor Jenkins Reid book of the same name which itself was loosely based on Fleetwood Mac. “I remember reading in interviews that Sam Claflin and Riley Keough [who play Daisy and Billie in the show] had been watching ‘Silver Springs’ in preparation, so that got me onto it,” says 19-year-old Eva, who listens to the song when she gets ready for college “at least three times a week.” As she says, “The real thing is even better than the show because it's real, you know?”
This seems to be a running theme. 22-year-old Kai tells me that they wanted to hear the song that “Regret Me” (a song that appears in the show) was based on, which led them to becoming “completely obsessed” with the real thing. Katie, 24, tells me that she didn’t even watch Daisy Jones & The Six, but the song “was all over social media at that time” because of it, which led her down a rabbit hole. “I listened to it so many times that it ended up on my 2023 Spotify Wrapped,” she says. “This was also around the time that my boyfriend and I broke up, so the lyrics held special significance for me.”
Of course the song hits today as much as it always has. But there's something especially 2020s about the romanticisation of drama and pain, the “main character energy” of elevating an on-off relationship to almost mythical status. “Culturally, we’re seeing an obsession with stories about unconventional, years-long relationships (Normal People, Past Lives and One Day),” says Katie. “‘Silver Springs’ has that same theme; Stevie and Lindsay take ‘it’s complicated’ to a whole new level. I think people – especially young people – resonate with this idea of having a relationship like this; a lifelong love. It’s messy, it’s romantic, it’s relatable. I also think there’s something so satisfying about looking your ex in the eye after 20 years and singing your breakup song to them.”
This is also an era in which big, mainstream artists just aren't as open-hearted and unhinged as they used to be. We don't know anything about their private lives beyond what they pretend to let us in on. Even Taylor Swift, a popstar who's forged a billion-dollar empire off writing about her exes, tends to keep her raw emotion behind a shiny, carefully thought-out, manufactured narrative. Harry Styles is one of the biggest artists in the world, yet we know very little about his actual life: his relationships, his hopes, his heartbreaks. There's a truth and authenticity that sits at the heart of “Silver Springs” that might not exist today, at a time when artists don't often allow themselves to step outside of the slick, choreographed version of what a break-up actually feels and looks like (deranged, irrational, messy).
When Nicks wrote “Silver Springs”, who knows whether she really thought that Buckingham would never get away from the sound of the woman that loves him. But it's nearly 50 years later, and the song is still playing, on a loop. Last year, 74-year-old Buckingham posted the “Silver Springs” guitar solo on TikTok alongside the caption: “I hear we're talking about that ‘97 ‘Silver Springs’ again…” “You know damn well that's not the part we mean,” reads the top comment. He's never gotten away. Neither have we.
The Official Top 300 most-streamed songs (in the Uk) from the 70s, 80s and 90s
Greatest Hits Radio has revealed the UK's Official Top 300 most-streamed songs from the 70s, 80s and 90s. Fleetwood Mac have 8 tracks in the tally with two in the top 5.
Songs
#
Title
Artist
Year
3
EVERYWHERE
FLEETWOOD MAC
1987
4
DREAMS
FLEETWOOD MAC
1977
11
THE CHAIN
FLEETWOOD MAC
1977
18
GO YOUR OWN WAY
FLEETWOOD MAC
1976
113
LITTLE LIES
FLEETWOOD MAC
1987
135
LANDSLIDE
FLEETWOOD MAC
1975
138
EDGE OF SEVENTEEN
STEVIE NICKS
1981
250
DON'T STOP
FLEETWOOD MAC
1977
260
RHIANNON
FLEETWOOD MAC
1975
With the first quarter of the year over, The Official Charts in the UK have revealed the biggest albums so far in 2024. "50 Years - Don't Stop" is No.6 and "Rumours" is No.25.
The Top 40 biggest vinyl albums of the year so far.
"Rumours" on vinyl is a constant seller, not surprised to see it place within the top 10. So far this year it's at No.6 on the top 40 best selling vinyl albums in the UK.
Dr. Raven Baxter was 30 years old when she heard Fleetwood Mac for the first time. She says she barely slept for 48 hours afterward.
The molecular biologist, science communicator and podcaster went viral for live tweeting her reactions to Fleetwood Mac's 1977 album "Rumours."
It all began when Baxter took a seat at a bar hotel in Nebraska.
"I was trying to get some work done after I finished the day, and there’s music playing in the background," she tells TODAY.com. "I’m on my second margarita. I’m typing away at my computer, and I’m hearing this (guy) singing his a-- off. I’m like, 'There’s something going on. I gotta like at least look up the song and see who is this person?"
Baxter says this was the first time she actively heard Fleetwood Mac's "Go Your Own Way," a hit led by the band's lead guitarist, Lindsey Buckingham.
To have a better listen, Baxter says she gathered her setup at the bar and went back up to her hotel room.
"I unpacked everything, and I was like, 'OK, we're doing this,'' she explains.
RUMOURS is part of the first wave of releases and comes with Dolby Atmos, DTS HD 5.1, and DTS HD Stereo mixes. Considered by many to be among the greatest albums of all time, winning the Grammy® Award for Album of the Year in 1978. The album includes the band’s first No.1 smash, “Dreams.” RUMOURS has been certified Double Diamond by the RIAA, selling more than 40 million copies worldwide.
Dolby Atmos is revolutionizing audio technology with its immersive, three-dimensional soundscapes. By precisely placing sounds in a space, it creates an unparalleled sense of realism and depth, setting a new standard for audio excellence. Rhino’s Dolby Atmos series will draw upon Warner Music Group’s extensive catalog to create truly extraordinary listening experiences.
Jason Jones, Sr. Rhino Director of A&R, says: “It’s always been crucial for music fans to immerse themselves in what they are listening to. I think of being in my bedroom with my headphones on and being caught up in the swirl of what I was listening to. With the advent of Atmos, I’ve been transported back to that original feeling. They stay true to the original mix’s intention while taking advantage of the full capabilities of the immersive format, with the added bonus of being sourced from the original multi-track master tapes.”
Patrick Milligan, Sr. Director of A&R, stated, “Immersive audio is here to stay, and it's a wonder to hear it on a full surround system. This is our first set of releases of Atmos on Blu-ray, and we're excited that for most of these titles, we are also offering 5.1 Surround Sound mixes. If you've only heard Atmos in your headphones, hearing these releases on a home theater system is dramatic and envelops you gloriously in the music.”
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