Trivia / Rumours

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• Celebrity Break-Up Song: Practically an entire album inspired by the split between Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks.
  • Buckingham opens fire on Nicks for her infidelities in "Second Hand News" ("I know there's nothing to say/Someone has taken my place"), "Never Going Back Again" ("You don't know what it means to win/Come down and see me again"), and especially "Go Your Own Way" ("Tell me why everything turned around/Packing up, shacking up is all you wanna do").
  • Nicks returns fire against Buckingham for his callousness toward her in "Dreams" ("But listen carefully to the sound of your loneliness/Like a heartbeat, drives you mad"), "I Don't Want to Know" ("You say you love me, but you don't know/You got me rocking and a-reeling"), and especially "Silver Springs" ("I know I could've loved you, but you would not let me/I'll follow you down 'til the sound of my voice will haunt you").
• Cut Song: "Silver Springs," the B-side of "Go Your Own Way," was cut from the original track listing due to the limits of vinyl, but was added to reissues from 2004.
• Real Song Theme Tune:
  • "The Chain" serves as the theme song for BBC's Formula One coverage.
  • Bill Clinton used "Don't Stop" as the theme song for his successful Presidential campaign in 1992; even managing to get this album's lineup to do a one-off reunion to perform at his inaugural.
• Troubled Production: The album's fraught recording process is the stuff of legend. The sessions were marked by extensive cocaine use, and all five principal band members were having serious relationship problems which found their way into many of the songs on the album.
  • John and Christine McVie had divorced after eight years together, toward the end of which she had been having an affair with Fleetwood Mac's lighting director, Curry Grant. Her songs "Don't Stop" and "You Make Loving Fun" combined a desire to look forward after the demise of her marriage to John and euphoria at her new love with Grant (though she told John during the recording sessions that "You Make Loving Fun" was about her dog, concerned that he wouldn't agree to record it otherwise).
  • But this was nothing compared to the vitriol flying between Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, whose on/off relationship had become certifiably toxic. Nicks' "Dreams" and "I Don't Want to Know" saw her telling Buckingham that while she was happy to let him go, she believed that he would regret abandoning their love one day; Buckingham fired back with "Second Hand News" (the lyrics for which he carefully hid from Nicks until they were ready to record), "Never Going Back Again," and especially "Go Your Own Way," in all of which he wrote of how much she had hurt him and how much happier he was with the women he had been seeing since their breakup. The lyrics "Packing up, shacking up is all you wanna do" from "Go Your Own Way" particularly enraged Nicks, who tried unsuccessfully to get them changed and later said that when Buckingham performed those lyrics on stage, she "wanted to go over and kill him."
  • Mick Fleetwood's marriage to Jenny Boyd collapsed after he discovered she was having an affair with his best friend; Christine McVie has sometimes claimed that "Oh Daddy" was inspired by a short-lived reconciliation between Fleetwood and Boyd,^note The moniker "Daddy" supposedly being a nod to Fleetwood being the only band member with children at the time. but Buckingham's ex-girlfriend Carol Ann Harris and Nicks' biographer Zoe Howe believe she originally intended the song as another love ballad to Grant.
  • Nicks laboured long and hard over "Silver Springs," an acidic Answer Song to "Go Your Own Way" in which she dialled the "You'll regret spurning my love for you one day" attitude of "Dreams" and "I Don't Want to Know" up to full, but when it proved too long to fit onto the album, the other band members replaced it with "I Don't Want to Know" despite strenuous objections from Nicks (who later recalled going into the studio car park and shrieking with rage at the news that the song had been dropped).^note  Fittingly, it was released as the B-side to "Go Your Own Way" in December 1976, but it had to wait until the 2004 CD re-master to take its rightful place on Rumours.
  • There was also turmoil on a technical level. At the Record Plant, it was discovered that the tapes of the album had deteriorated due to constant playback and overdubs, requiring another engineer to come in and transfer the overdubs onto an earlier safety copy of the tapes, a much trickier process in the analog era. This feat saved the album.
• Working Title:
  • "Second Hand News" was just known as "Strummer" for most of the sessions, because Lindsey Buckingham deliberately kept the lyrics under wraps for as long as possible, since he knew Stevie Nicks would find them insulting.
  • "Yesterday's Gone," for "Don't Stop." The album was also supposed to be titled this, but John McVie changed the name because there were rumors that the band were breaking up during the making of the album.

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