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Farewell to Fleetwood Mac's songbird, whose sultry voice and sharp lyrics
were the backbone of one of the most influential bands of all time.

By Rachel DeSantis in People

hristine McVie lived through several iterations of Fleetwood Mac in her five decades with the band, but it was the magic she made with Stevie Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood and ex-husband John McVie she treasured most. "My best beautiful days were when we were [with them]," she told Rolling Stone in June. "That was the best to me."

When the 79-year-old singer-songwriter and keyboardist died in a hospital on Nov. 30 following a brief illness, those very bandmates -- long known for the ways in which their turbulent interpersonal relationships inspired their music -- were united in grief. Nicks called McVie her "best friend in the whole world," while Fleetwood said "part of [his] heart has flown away." Buckingham, with whom McVie released her final album in 2017, called her "a soulmate [and] a sister." Their words were a final farewell to a voice and a pen that shaped the influential Fleetwood Mac with enduring hits like "Don't Stop," "Everywhere" and "Say You Love Me."

The daughter of a concert violinist and music teacher father and a psychic medium mother, the British McVie joined the band (which featured then-husband John McVie on bass) in 1970 after a brief stint in the blues band Chicken Shack. Nicks and Buckingham came on board four years later, and in 1977 Fleetwood Mac released the instant classic Rumours , featuring "Songbird," which McVie would later say was her proudest writing moment. The emotional turmoil that inspired the record was anchored in part by the McVies' crumbling marriage; lore has it McVie wrote "You Make Loving Fun" about her affair with the band's lighting director and told John it was about their dog. Even so, McVie said she played peacemaker amid frequent chaos that also included a brief relationship between Fleetwood and Nicks (Buckingham's former partner) and the group's collective cocaine habit -- though she admitted she "did enjoy the storm."

McVie and John divorced in 1976 but maintained a lifelong friendship. She dated the Beach Boys' Dennis Wilson before marrying keyboardist Eddy Quintela in 1986. (They divorced in 2003.) In 1998, the same year Fleetwood Mac was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, McVie left the band, opting instead for a "normal, domestic life with roots" in rural England. But by 2014 she'd returned, and a 2019 tour with nearly 100 dates featured McVie back where she belonged, on the keys and mic. "It's just such a joy," she told Rolling Stone in 2014 of reuniting with her bandmates. "It's an affirmation of something so magical, there's just a chemistry between us that's just phenomenal."  

Bruce folds his own story into music history
on an LP of vintage soul covers.

By Jonathan Bernstein in Rolling Stone

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
Only the Strong Survive
SOUL/R&B (Columbia)

t's been a decade of reminiscence and reflection for Bruce Springsteen. He's revisited classic albums on tour, retold his life story on the page and Broadway stage, and written songs about late childhood friends. Even when he released 2020's Letter To You, his first proper E Street Band record in years, he used some of his earliest Seventies songs as source material.

Only the Strong Survive , his new album of reverent soul and R&B covers, arrives in the same spirit of nostalgic recollection for the 73-year-old. The album's first words: "I remember." Most tunes are from the mid-to-late Sixties, the formative few years after the 15-year-old Springsteen received his first electric guitar, and started carving out his musical identity.

The record puts a fine point on an argument he's always made about his influences: "If you played in a bar on the central New Jersey shore in the Sixties and Seventies," he once said, "you played music."

It's a shame, then, that apart from a few horn players and a Sam Moore cameo, none of the soul-steeped musicians from Springsteen's past are found on his R&B love letter. Only the Strong Survive is a product of backyard-studio sessions during lockdown, with longtime producer Ron Aniello playing all the basic backing tracks by himself. Adding to the album's retro-soul pastiche are Aniello's occasionally thin arrangements (see his take on Chuck Jackson's "Any Other Way") that recall the forgotten latter-day LPs where soul greats like Sam & Dave and Percy Sledge released sterile rerecordings of their greatest hits.

But even if the arrangements occasionally feel static, Springsteen's voice shines and sparkles. Here, he uses that voice to inhabit many roles: crate digger (Frankie Wilson's "Do I Love You"), forgive-me repenter (William Bell's "I Forgot to Be Your Lover"), elder memorializer (The Commodore's' "Nightshift"), blue-eyed interloper (Jerry Butler's title track), and canon redefiner (to this Jerseyite, Frankie Valli is just as soul as Stax).

Then there's the moment in the Aretha Franklin/Ben E. King classic "Don't Play That Song" when Springsteen strays off-script: "I remember those summer nights down by the shore," he ad-libs before the final chorus: "As the band played, with you back in my arms, and we moved across that floor." It's part of James Brown showmanship, part boardwalk reverie, part camp; and if it sounds like something he once might have done onstage with one of his own songs, that's his whole point. He's finding a new way to fold his story into American music's living history.  

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