Fleetwood Mac wasn’t entirely unknown to American rock fans when their self-titled album appeared in 1975, but the impressions people had were confused. Fleetwood Mac began in the ’60s as a British blues-rock band fronted by a brilliant guitarist, Peter Green. With his departure began continual lineup shifts with a changing cast of musicians, vocalists and songwriters. By 1975 Mac was best known as the band that sang about UFOs and the Bermuda Triangle.
But that was about to change. For Fleetwood Mac, the band added a pair of Yanks, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, and embraced the sonic perfectionism of the Los Angeles studio sound. On the resulting album, melody and harmony were brought to a platinum polish with memorable hooks and lyrics on the vagaries of love. The hits kept coming: “Over My Head,” “Rhiannon,” “Say You Love Me,” “Landslide.”
The newly issued Fleetwood Mac slipcase package contains the album on remastered vinyl as well as CD. An additional disc of “early takes” isn’t revelatory but suggests how those songs might have sounded live, shorn of some of that studio sheen and sounding more like a band together in the moment.
