Past PERFECT

Mourning the Loss ~ and Celebrating the Gifts ~ of Christine McVie

Christine McVie, the main songwriting force behind one of the biggest bands in popular music history, passed away unexpectedly on November 30, 2022.  Few details were made available; only that she died at a hospital in or near London “following a short illness.”  While fans like me grappled with our sudden shock and grief by scouring the internet for more answers, there was also a sense that Christine may simply have wished to die as privately as she chose to live.  

Fleetwood Mac’s other lead singers, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, have lived infinitely more public lives.  This is partly because of their more extensive solo pursuits outside the band (those by Nicks were particularly successful) and partly because of the public’s fascination with the way the two continued to hurl grenades at each other, both on and off their records, decades after their romantic relationship had ended.  Even drummer Mick Fleetwood had more written about him than Christine over the years, granted much of it by himself in controversial books he penned that were more about the sex and the drugs than the rock & roll.   

Only bassist John McVie, whose marriage to Christine was dissolving around the same time as the Nicks/Buckingham relationship and while they were all working together on the legendary Rumours album, managed to keep a lower profile.  John wasn’t a songwriter and so he couldn’t engage Christine in the kind of song-to-song combat that raged between Buckingham and Nicks.  An even bigger difference between the two couples was that ever since the Rumours dust had settled, John and Christine genuinely seemed to move on and would speak about each other publicly with unqualified affection if at all.  John never met a journalist he didn’t avoid (it became a running gag for the rest of the band to bring out a cardboard photo of him as a stand-in during press junkets to promote their albums).  In the few interviews the record label undoubtedly forced him into over the years, he would be brief but disarmingly open when questions inevitably arose about his ex-wife.  More than once he acknowledged his own alcoholic demons as the main issue in their marriage and pointed to her maiden name, Christine Perfect, as further evidence that any blame was his own.  “She was perfect,” he would say with a bittersweet sigh, “and then she married me.”

Before I go any further, let me pause for a moment to address those fans of Nicks and Buckingham (and for full disclosure I only discovered Christine and the rest of Fleetwood Mac through my own unabashed devotion to Nicks) who may still be fuming over my first sentence.  All three played their parts in turning Fleetwood Mac into a supergroup.  Nicks was the magnetic star who captivated the public with a visual image as compelling as her music.  Buckingham was the innovative production perfectionist who turned all their songs into radio-ready records.  But I stand firmly by my opening description of Christine as the band’s primary songwriting force, and charts like numbers don’t lie.  Between 1975 and 1987, the five studio albums recorded by Fleetwood Mac’s most iconic lineup (Fleetwood, the McVies, Buckingham and Nicks) produced seventeen top 40 hits, a full nine of which were helmed by Christine (compared to five by Nicks and three by Buckingham).  And Christine not only provided the most hits, but the biggest ones as well; more top 20 and top 10 hits than either of the other two writers and more top 5 hits than both of them combined.  It is also worth noting that while Nicks’ “Dreams” may have been the band’s only #1 song, Billboard actually ranks Christine's "Hold Me" ahead of it as their most successful single.  This is due to the latter song's longer residency among the upper echelons of the chart despite never reaching its summit. 

  

Aside from the commercial power of Christine’s songs, they also often served as a critical source of balance on the Mac’s greatest albums.  This was a role that Christine’s childhood may have uniquely qualified her for, as her father had been a disciplined concert violinist and her mother a psychic medium.  Could there be any better preparation for navigating the extreme musical personalities of Buckingham and Nicks?  The directness and relatability of Christine’s lyrics helped ground the ethereal dreaminess of those by Nicks.  The warmth of her musical tracks, which shimmered even during the band’s synthesizer-heavy work in the 1980’s, softened the hyper angst of Buckingham’s.  If this balancing act was tough to see when she was there, it got a lot easier to appreciate when she wasn’t.  The one Mac studio album to feature Buckingham and Nicks but not Christine (2003's Say You Will), had some fascinating moments but ultimately devolved into a remote coldness.  It was more of the duo’s infamous sonic warfare, but this time without the musical mediation Christine’s songs had so often provided. 

Even great songwriters can make mistakes though, or at least so I thought.  Christine’s “Songbird” was not a radio single but nevertheless became an enduring classic that is in many ways her signature song.  “I wish you all the love in the world,” she sings over her own stark piano, “But most of all, I wish it from myself.”  I remember agonizing over those words as a child when I discovered the song on my sister’s copy of Rumours.  I listened to the line over and over, picking the needle up on my family’s victrola and putting it down again back to the beginning of that particular lyric.  “From myself?”  It had to be a mistake.  Surely, she had meant “most of all I wish it for myself.”  The lyric sheet in the record sleeve confirmed “from” but I was still convinced it was an error.  She must have sung the wrong word during what ended up being her favorite take, so she just kept it and then changed the lyric sheet for consistency.  That was my theory, and I was sticking to it.  What did wishing something “from myself” even mean?  Isn’t that just clunky and redundant?  Of course if I’m the one wishing something then it’s “from myself.”  And if I already wished you all the love in the world, then what about me?  I sang my certainly correct lyric over her beautiful voice every time I listened to the song throughout these many years.

Until this year.  Just months before her death, Christine released a new orchestral version of “Songbird.”  Would she finally correct her mistake from 45 years ago?  I pressed play and held my breath as that line of the song approached.  It passed, I exhaled, and then I burst into tears.  She had not changed a word, and suddenly I understood that all these years the only mistake had been in my own selfish perspective.  Perhaps it was the new arrangement, with orchestral strings swirling around her voice and piano.  I prefer to think it was the new version of myself, older and wiser, that finally understood what Christine knew all along.  How many times have I wished someone well, or given someone my best, or sent someone love?  We’re kind of supposed to do that, right?  But to look into the deepest part of myself and make a wish like that for someone else without somehow making it also about me?  That’s not redundancy.  It’s humanity.  I’m so glad I was able to receive that message from Christine before she took her leave.  

That lack of selfishness, or even self-consciousness, was what made Christine such a great artist.  When male journalists would ask her repeatedly over the years about the challenges of having two women in a band and if she felt any competitiveness with Nicks, she always seemed genuinely puzzled.  They may have both been women, but any similarities ended there.  “We’re so completely different,” Christine would reply, “What would we even compete about?”  Nicks expanded on this in a 2011 interview where she said, “I’m a performance artist.  Christine was always happy to be on the side behind her keyboard.  She wanted to be one of the boys.”  After that last word had hung uncomfortably in the air perhaps a moment too long, Nicks stammered a bit and then quickly continued, “…In a good way, because she was the only girl that was the great musician that was one of the guys and that was as much respected as the Eric Claptons and the Lindsey Buckinghams and the Mick Fleetwoods.  She was one of them.”

Now it sounds cluelessly outdated or even offensive to discuss great musicianship in the context of women and men (let alone girls and boys).  But in fairness to Nicks, she was talking about another era and the revolutionary role that her friend and bandmate had played in changing it.  Female singers who were also accomplished musicians in major contemporary music had been mostly confined to the folk-pop, singer-songwriter space inhabited by greats like Joni Mitchell, Carole King, and Laura Nyro.  Mainstream music always had non-playing female vocalists (“girl singer” is another term of its time that has thankfully been retired), and they could even be found in rock bands that predated Fleetwood Mac’s rise to global prominence with Nicks center stage (including Janis Joplin of Big Brother & the Holding Company, Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane, and Tina Turner of the Ike & Tina Turner Revue).  But a woman in a major band who was playing instruments and writing songs as well as singing?  Imagine if one of the Beatles or one of the Eagles had been a woman.  Without exaggeration, that is what Christine McVie did in Fleetwood Mac.  If gender stereotypes about musical ability in rock & roll no longer exist, it’s because Christine knocked them down.  And if any remain, more young women need only follow the footsteps of the trail she blazed and keep knocking them down. 

Even if they do it with love songs.  It’s not a coincidence that lost love was the most common thread in the songs of Fleetwood Mac; perhaps because they were all often writing about loves that had been lost, as they had been found, so close to the home of their own brilliant but incestuous musical family.  This often took Nicks’ songs to a place of loneliness and longing, and Buckingham’s to one of paranoia and anger.  But Christine always found a way to make her heartbreak beautiful; often even happy.  It was a gift she never lost, as proven by the new songs she wrote for a duet album with Buckingham just five years ago.  She was 74 years old by then and had recently ended years of self-imposed exile following a second collapsed marriage.  But her eternal optimism and youthful ability to see loss through a lens of beauty remained undiminished by time and disappointment.  The quintessentially-Christine “Red Sun” finds our poet wondering if an old flame is also having trouble moving on.  Over a bouncingly melodic chorus, she asks “Do you ever think about me?”; before confessing it was hardest for her at night “…when the red sun kisses the sea.” 

Perhaps more than any other songwriter, in or out of her famous band, Christine McVie understood that even lost love is still love.  She understood that you will never completely separate the joy from the pain because in the end each becomes the proof of the other.  I am receiving that message from her now too, and I needed it.  More details about her death, if they ever become available, will not help our grief.  I have stopped searching the internet for answers and am instead soothing the pain of her loss by celebrating the joy of her gifts.  The proof of both is there for all of us in her music.      

Because, just like those songbirds she wrote about, Christine really did know the score.  And it was always perfect.