By Brent Warnken
Fleetwood Mac is gearing up for a spring tour, new album or not! The veteran rock band is currently preparing for their upcoming Unleashed North American tour and using their lack of a new album to their advantage. Drummer and Fleetwood Mac co-founder Mick Fleetwood recently told Billboard, “This is the first time we’ve gone on the road without an album. This is truly a new experience for Fleetwood Mac to go out and play songs that we believe and hope people are going to be familiar with and love.” Singer/guitarist Lindsey Buckingham chimed in, saying that lack of new songs (which the group has been rehearsing since Jan. 5 in Los Angeles) “just allowed you to relax into the situation. We’re not coming off a new group of tunes, a new album…the stakes for that side of it become a little bit lower.”
Vocalist Stevie Nicks denied reports that a new Fleetwood Mac album is in the works, saying “We’re going to get through this tour before deciding what to do with an album.” Fleetwood seemed more optimistic, however, telling Billboard.com that “there have been discussions, for sure, that we would love to make some more music…We hope it happens, and certainly it’s been somewhat loosely touched on…My heart says I believe that will happen. Certainly I know that all of the songwriting department, both Stevie and Lindsey are continually writing…The whole creative bowl is very much intact, so I could love to see what happens.”
Fleetwood Mac will lay hits like “Don’t Stop,” “Go Your Own Way” and “Dreams” on their 46-date tour in addition to playing some material written by former band member Christine McVie. The band considered adding Sheryl Crow to the bill in 2008 and even stepped into the studio to rehearse but eventually the timing didn’t work out in favor of Crow joining the band. Nicks recalled, “We needed Sheryl to come in and just play some music with us. But it was Mother’s Day. She had a brand new baby. She had all her parents and everybody coming and she chose not to cancel that, understandably. She called back, and said, ‘I have to pass,’ and it was over. I said, ‘You’re making the right decision. You have a new baby, you survived breast cancer, you survived Lance Armstrong.’”
The Unleashed tour will be Fleetwood Mac’s first tour since 2004, although the band has been a formidable live act since the mid-’70s, and Fleetwood Mac tickets are sure to be a hot commodity. Guitarists Peter Green and Jeremy Spencer formed the first incarnation of Fleetwood Mac in the late ’60s but fell prey to mental illnesses and the addition of pianist Christine McVie transitioned the group into pop/rock territory. The mid-’70s saw Fleetwood Mac relocated to California with Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks added to the lineup and 1977’s Rumours became one of the biggest-selling albums of all time. Fleetwood Mac continued their wave off success through the early ’80s when Buckingham, Nicks and McVie all launched solo careers, but they reunited for 1987’s Tango in the Night before officially calling it quits in the latter part of the decade.
Just when everyone thought they’d seen the last of Fleetwood Mac, the band forged on and released one more album before Nicks and McVie exited in the early ’90s. In 1993 the classic Fleetwood Mac lineup of Fleetwood, the McVies, Buckingham and Nicks reunited to perform at President Bill Clinton’s inauguration but soon after Nicks left the band (she was replaced by Bekka Bramlett and Dave Mason) and Christine McVie left as well. The new version of Fleetwood Mac hit the road in ‘94 and released one album that failed to garner any attention. In April 2003 Say You Will was the first Fleetwood Mac studio album in 15 years and was the band’s first release without Christine McVie since 1997’s The Dance. Check online for Fleetwood Mac tickets to see the band live this spring!
This article is sponsored by StubHub and was written by Brent Warnken. StubHub.com is a leader in the business of selling Fleetwood Mac tickets, sports tickets, concert tickets, theater tickets and special events tickets.
