Readers’ Poll: The 10 Best Fleetwood Mac Songs

If it sounds like "Oh Well" was recorded by some other Fleetwood Mac, that's because it basically was. Sure, drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie have been in the group from the very beginning, but with Peter Green at the helm initially, they were a very different sort of beast. "Oh Well" is perhaps the most famous song of this era.

The blues-rock standard was written by Green in 1969, and it's easy to hear early Led Zeppelin and other 1970s hard-rock bands in the tune. Garage rock bands have been playing it for decades. It's also been covered by everyone from Tom Petty to Ratt to the Black Crowes. The group kept it in the setlist for years, and Lindsey Buckingham did a pretty great job singing Peter Green's parts. 

"Silver Springs" is one of the prettiest songs that Stevie Nicks ever wrote, yet it caused her and the band all sorts of drama over the years. It was cut from Rumours at the last minute because there simply wasn't enough room. Stevie was crushed and a decade later, she quit the group, partially because Mick Fleetwood wouldn't let her use the song on a solo compilation. Another full decade later, she returned to the band on a giant cash-in reunion tour. They performed "Silver Springs" at the TV reunion gig, and released that new version as a single. VH1 played the hell out of the video and it became a regular part of their gigs.

It's a song about how former lovers will never truly be apart, and Stevie has said she derives great satisfaction from singing "You'll never get away from the sound of the woman that loved you" night after night as she stands inches away from Lindsey. 

Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham were going through a very painful and very public end to their eight-year relationship when they began writing the songs on Rumours. They had clung together over many years of struggle, but enormous success proved harder to endure. Stevie doesn't mask any of her feelings in the lyrics to "Dreams," in which she sings, "Listen carefully to the sound/ Of our loneliness/ Like a heartbeat, drives you mad/ In the stillness of remembering/ What you had and what you lost." The group has had many huge hits, but this is their only Number One single. 

Fleetwood Mac's 1976 single "Rhiannon" was the group's first huge radio hit with the Nicks/Buckingham lineup. Stevie wrote the song months after reading the novel Triad by Mary Leader. It's about a woman possessed by someone named Rhiannon, which is also the name of a Welsh witch. Her vocal performance on the song is a tour-de-force, and it only grew more powerful as the years went by. The song become so huge that many people began to associate Nicks with actual witchcraft. She has sung the song at pretty much every concert she's done over the past four decades, but still manages to make it sound fresh each time. 

Stevie Nicks was only in her mid-twenties when she wrote "Landslide" but somehow, she infused the ballad with decades of wisdom and sorrow. She wrote it in Aspen before joining Fleetwood Mac. Her musical career seemed stuck, and things were rocky with Lindsey. As she contemplated quitting music and returning to school, she looked out at the mountains and thought about an avalanche coming down and swallowing up the house.

It wasn't a single in the 1970s, but it quickly became a fan favorite. A live version from the 1997 Fleetwood Mac reunion concert did come out as a single, bringing the song to a new audience. Many have covered it over the years, from the Dixie Chicks to the Smashing Pumpkins. In many ways, it has become Stevie's signature song, and it's only taken on a greater poignancy as she's gotten older. 

The kick-off from Rumours is Lindsey Buckingham's finest moment on the album. Many of Stevie's relationship songs are gentle and sad, but this one is loud and furious. "Packing up/ Shacking up's all you wanna do!" he yells to his ex-lover. Stevie joins him on that famous line though, to this day, she says she resents it, claiming she never "shacked up" with anybody. The song is also a sensational showcase for Lindsey's guitar playing. He's always been drastically underappreciated as a pure player, and this song demonstrates why he's one of the greats. 

"The Chain" is the only song on Rumours that the band actually wrote as a group. "It basically came out of a jam," said Mick Fleetwood. "Originally, we had no words to it. And it really only became a song when Stevie wrote some. She walked in one day and said, 'I've written some words that might be good for that thing you were doing in the studio the other day.' So it was put together. Lindsey arranged and made a song out of all the bits and pieces that we were putting down onto tape." They should have joined forces more often, since the end result is absolutely stunning. It was never a single, though radio has embraced it and it's proven to be one of their most enduring works.