Rolling Stone has included Fleetwood Mac‘s “Dreams,” “Landslide,” and “Go Your Own Way” on its updated list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. The classic songs appears at No. 9, No. 163, and No. 401, respectively.
“Dreams,” which reached No. 1 back in 1977, experienced a massive resurgence during a 2020 TikTok challenge, in which Nathan Apodaca famously mimed “Dreams” as he drank Ocean Spray cranberry juice while riding a skateboard.” The video instantly went viral and helped catapult “Dreams” back onto the charts and boost sales of the sweet Ocean Spray beverage. The viral sensation reached Stevie Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham, and Mick Fleetwood, who all created their own versions of the challenge.
“In 2004, Rolling Stone published its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. It’s one of the most widely read stories in our history, viewed hundreds of millions of times on this site. But a lot has changed since 2004; back then the iPod was relatively new, and Billie Eilish was three years old. So we’ve decided to give the list a total reboot. To create the new version of the RS 500 we convened a poll of more than 250 artists, musicians, and producers — from Angelique Kidjo to Zedd, Sam Smith to Megan Thee Stallion, M. Ward to Bill Ward — as well as figures from the music industry and leading critics and journalists. They each sent in a ranked list of their top 50 songs, and we tabulated the results.
Nearly 4,000 songs received votes. Where the 2004 version of the list was dominated by early rock and soul, the new edition contains more hip-hop, modern country, indie rock, Latin pop, reggae, and R&B. More than half the songs here — 254 in all — weren’t present on the old list, including a third of the Top 100. The result is a more expansive, inclusive vision of pop, music that keeps rewriting its history with every beat.”
Read more at Rolling Stone.
No. 9
Fleetwood Mac, ‘Dreams’
1977
WRITER(S): Stevie Nicks
In the face of a lover telling her to go her own way, Stevie Nicks penned the ethereal “Dreams.” During the Rumours sessions in Sausalito, California, Nicks spent an off day in another room of the Record Plant that was supposedly used by Sly and the Family Stone. “It was a black-and-red room, with a sunken pit in the middle where there was a piano, and a big black-velvet bed with Victorian drapes,” she told Blender.
There she reflected on the thunder and rain of her relationship with Lindsey Buckingham, whose guitar parts slice through the song’s mystical beat. “I sat down on the bed with my keyboard in front of me, found a drum pattern, switched my little cassette player on, and wrote ‘Dreams’ in about 10 minutes,” she continued. “Right away I liked the fact that I was doing something with a dance beat, because that made it a little unusual for me.”
The second single on Fleetwood Mac’s blockbuster album Rumours, “Dreams” would become the band’s only U.S. chart topper, and it would continue to enchant new generations — and even return to the charts — for decades to come.
No. 163
Fleetwood Mac, ‘Landslide’
1975
WRITER(S): Stevie Nicks
“Landslide” is amazing not just because it’s a stunning reflection on aging, but also because Nicks wasn’t even 30 years old when she wrote it. “I was only 27,” she told Rolling Stone in 2014. “I wrote that in 1973, a year before I joined Fleetwood Mac. You can feel really old at 27.” At the time, Nicks was working as a waitress and wondering, as she said later, if the move she and Lindsey Buckingham had made from San Francisco to Los Angeles was a good idea. Decades later, you could still catch glimpses of affection between Buckingham and Nicks when they performed it live.
No. 401
Fleetwood Mac, ‘Go Your Own Way’
1977
WRITER(S): Lindsey Buckingham
“Go Your Own Way” was the sound of a relationship shattering in real time. Lindsey Buckingham, who wrote it while breaking up with Stevie Nicks, said that the razored lyrics came to him “almost as a stream of consciousness,” while Nicks has admitted that they angered her so much that she “wanted to go over and kill [Buckingham]” each time she sang it onstage. For the beat, Buckingham wanted something similar to the way Charlie Watts played on the Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man,” which drummer Mick Fleetwood interpreted into the song’s tension-filled snare-tom thump.
