Christine McVie Was Always Fleetwood Mac's Greatest Songwriter

It is strange for an artist to have sold more than 120 million records and still be thought of as unsung, but that’s what Christine McVie was. Always. She was low-key in the midst of the chaos that was Fleetwood Mac, off to the side behind a keyboard as a soap opera unfolded at center stage. She was the most consistently great songwriter in a band full of prolific songwriters. She was the one you liked the most, when you really thought about it, but you had to really be thinking about it, because she was the one you thought about least.

She was the steady hand on the steering wheel, the office manager of rock & roll. And if you want to know whether that was the way she wanted it, consider this: her real name, the name she could have gone out into the spotlight with had she not taken ex-husband John McVie’s surname, was Christine Perfect.

Christine had been writing perfect pop songs for Fleetwood Mac for a few years before the band blew up. After a few albums playing with the group, she got a track or two on each of their early ‘70s albums. You know, the ones with the spooky covers that you’d flip past at the record store. The first of these was “Morning Rain,” on Future Games.

Future Games, and the band’s four subsequent LPs, were a scramble of the blues and prog and whatever else the band’s constantly-changing lineup was trying to do. Not the right showcase for pop music like hers, but a taste of what was to come for the outfit. But even in those creatively messy moments, Christine’s sensibility rubbed off on her bandmates. There would be no “Sentimental Lady”—a Fleetwood Mac single in 1972 that was rerecorded and rereleased as a solo track for former guitarist Bob Welch in 1977—without Christine’s influence. She would reach this level of pop greatness dozens more times; Welch mostly would not.

It wasn’t until Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham and their songs (and their story, and their star power) got brought into the mix that Christine’s songs found their perfect milieu. Hers were the beautiful, hopeful ones, the ones you needed after the emotional turmoil of the Buckingham/Nicks songs. She was the soap opera character with the nice storyline, the one you’re relieved to see after the supercouple has yet another fight. And those scenes and songs were arguably more popular at the start: three of the four singles from that first Buckingham/Nicks-era Fleetwood Mac album—“Over My Head,” “Warm Ways” and “Say You Love Me”—were McVie’s.

And then things blew up, in all the ways a thing can blow up, with Rumours. “Dreams” may have had a resurgence on TikTok as the soundtrack to a guy on a skateboard drinking cranberry juice, but “Don’t Stop” popped again as the theme song of the 1992 Democratic National Convention and Bill Clinton’s inauguration. The song signaled that a new generation was taking over, and while we can argue the legacy of the Boomers (and the Clintons), I cannot tell you how startlingly fresh it all felt at the time. (I mean, the ’92 Republican Convention had Pat Buchanan railing about the culture war.)

Lindsey Buckingham took more of a leadership position within Fleetwood Mac after Rumours, and followed that album up with the double album Tusk. Chaotic, angry, bloated and fascinating, Tusk was the Temple of Doom to Rumours’ Raiders of the Lost Ark. And even through the cocaine and ego, Buckingham knew the move was to kick it off with a McVie song.

Christine only released a couple of solo records after all this, the first of which gave 1984— the best year in the history of pop music—two of its best singles: “Love Will Show Us How” and “Got a Hold On Me.”

So here’s to the unsung. Christine McVie died today at 79 after a short illness. She did not want to be a name. She let her songs make a name for her. And her songs were perfect.

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