(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sat 14 June 2025 4:00, UK
“The world is a little bit of an empty place without her,” Stevie Nicks said after the passing of her longtime friend and musical partner in crime, Christine McVie. In many ways, that’s exactly what they were—joined together by some inexplicable force that placed them at the core of one of the best bands in history. The Fleetwood Mac flames could never have ignited without her.
This was ablaze from the beginning. After witnessing the “chemistry” of Fleetwood Mac and wanting in, McVie made it her mission to bring a certain romanticism to the operation, maintaining that flair onstage while making sure their experiences in love felt just as palpable. “Kick-ass chemistry,” McVie once called it, telling Mojo that Peter Green was like “Jesus playing out-of-this-world guitar”.
At this point, Fleetwood Mac were strong contenders in the folk-rock battle, a force made up of proficient individual components, all with talent in spades and more than enough potential to make it far. But with the addition of McVie, the pieces of brilliance came together, transforming from a collection of maestros to a fully-formed songwriting group, one built on joint energy and spearheaded by McVie’s eye for emotion.
But it wasn’t just about McVie’s ability to spot magic before even growing familiar with it—which is exactly what happened the first time she met Stevie Nicks—it was her ability to transform these tropes and make them feel warm, hopeful; like all the elements we still cherish about Fleetwood Mac today, and all the ways it worked, even when frayed dynamics and disagreements could have derailed it all.
“We definitely love harmonies, and I’m good at pathos,” she once explained in the same interview, adding: “I write about romantic despair a lot. That’s my thing, but with a positive spin.” Although sometimes overshadowed by the more raucous antics in the band, or against the different kind of romantic whimsy offered by Nicks, McVie provided the mushy core, looking at love and the pitfalls of romance as something to absorb, even when it pains, or makes us feel fractured and scorned.
And that’s because she also knew exactly how to put it into words. Whether the simplicity of falling in ‘Say You Love Me’ or the explosive euphoria of ‘Everywhere’, McVie had a knack for channelling the different hues of relationships with stark simplicity, even when it seemed a little darker at its core, like with ‘You Make Loving Fun’, or straight-up heartwrenching, like ‘Songbird’.
“A little prayer. An anthem for everybody,” McVie once said of ‘Songbird’, saying it was “like a gift from the angels” that extended an olive branch of sorts when Fleetwood Mac’s internal dynamics were at their most explosive. Because that was the heart of McVie’s songwriting: to piece things together and make sense of the chaos, even when everybody else felt distracted by their own drama. Especially then.
This also extended through ‘Don’t Stop’, McVie’s lesson in acceptance and positivity when it comes to relationship breakdowns and the struggle of navigating romantic hardships. Her address of the constant turbulence in the band, mainly between Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, songs like ‘Don’t Stop’ offered a more charged tone about optimism in the crux of the fire, and how, no matter what, the skies will clear, and the heart will feel lighter.
And that was how McVie melded all elements of Fleetwood Mac into one seamless songwriting style. Even in ‘Little Lies’, the message was to keep your soul light when challenges tried to weigh you down, like buying into little lies to keep believing in a better tomorrow, or a warmer, more welcoming today, even when the world outside cracked with all of its glaring flaws and imperfections. Discussing the song, McVie once said the idea was: “If I had the chance, I’d do it differently next time. But since I can’t, just carry on lying to me and I’ll believe.”
McVie’s attitude wasn’t about spinning things into false beauty; it was about creating your own magic from scratch. It was about forming your own world from the small pieces of hope, even if they were harder to find or assemble in the way you wanted. In Fleetwood Mac, these notes manifested as the heartbreak of the entire ship, where owning heartache can feel just as fulfilling as harmony.
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