1979 · Behind the Songs
A five-and-a-half-minute ballad about a love affair that broke more than hearts, recorded for the most misunderstood album of the band’s career.
By the autumn of 1978, Fleetwood Mac were the biggest band in the world and the most miserable. Rumours, released two years earlier, had turned private heartbreak into a shared public language, and it had sold in numbers that made everyone in the band’s orbit rich and restless. The question hanging over the sessions for its follow-up was simple and brutal: how do you repeat a miracle without repeating yourself? Lindsey Buckingham, the band’s producer in all but title, had an answer that thrilled some of his bandmates and alarmed others. He wanted the next record to be stranger, rawer, and deliberately less commercial. The result was Tusk, a sprawling 1979 double album that confused radio programmers and eventually won a kind of vindication. Buried deep in its twenty tracks sits ‘Storms,’ a five-and-a-half-minute ballad that may be the quietest confession Stevie Nicks ever committed to tape.
To understand ‘Storms,’ you have to understand what was happening inside the band while Tusk was being made. Nicks wrote the song about her affair with Mick Fleetwood, the band’s drummer and co-founder. She later came to believe that the relationship had helped end Fleetwood’s marriage to Jenny Boyd, and the song carries the weight of that guilt without ever turning it into melodrama. It was the first song Nicks brought to the Tusk sessions, arriving as little more than her voice and a rough piano part. According to Carol Ann Harris, who was close to the band at the time, Buckingham was sharply critical of the demo, and his bluntness set off a fierce argument between him and Nicks. Producer Ken Caillat remembered the demo less dramatically but no less bleakly, calling it a somewhat depressing song built on only a few chords. From that unpromising beginning, ‘Storms’ would become one of the most painstakingly crafted recordings on the album.
That transformation owed everything to Buckingham. He returned to ‘Storms’ in the autumn of 1978 and threw himself into it, spending hours shaping a spare demo into something that sounded both fragile and vast. Decades later, in 2015, he described the song as very strong in terms of its form and named it one of his favorites on Tusk, singling out lyrics he found particularly vulnerable. The session that finally unlocked the track came the day after the band had finished work on ‘That’s All for Everyone,’ another Buckingham-led piece. Nicks had been pressing for ‘Storms’ to get its turn, reportedly insisting on it over dinner, and Buckingham honored the request by treating the song with unusual tenderness. His stated goal was a stripped-back recording, and he later described the final mix as a tactile experience, a phrase that captures how close and physical the finished track feels.
The recording itself is a small masterclass in restraint. The basic track began as an acoustic guitar played against a click track, and that humble foundation was gradually replaced and layered: a fingerpicked nylon-string guitar took the center, joined by two arpeggiated electric guitars, one clean and one distorted, that shimmer and ache around Nicks’s vocal. Christine McVie added a Hammond B-3 organ through a Leslie speaker, then overdubbed a Fender Rhodes piano, giving the song its soft, churchlike glow. John McVie played acoustic bass rather than his usual electric, and Mick Fleetwood started with a reverberating snare and a shaker keeping the downbeats before those parts were swapped for a tambourine and a muted floor tom. In one of the session’s cleverest touches, the engineers took the click track itself and, through equalization, turned it into the kick drum you hear on the record. Nothing on the track shouts; everything breathes.
When Tusk finally appeared, ‘Storms’ drew some of the warmest writing on an album that divided critics. Rolling Stone called it a lovely ballad while complaining that the production went too far, a verdict that now reads like a misunderstanding of exactly what makes the track work. The Los Angeles Times heard an affecting look at romantic discomfort. Billboard’s Ed Harrison named it one of the album’s most memorable songs. Later reassessments have been kinder still: GQ placed it among the best songs Fleetwood Mac made after Rumours, praising Nicks’s downtrodden vocals, and Record Collector went further, calling it the greatest ballad Nicks ever wrote. Paste ranked it ninth on its list of the thirty greatest Fleetwood Mac songs. The song eventually found a wider audience through compilations, appearing on the American edition of The Very Best of Fleetwood Mac in 2002 and the British edition in 2009, and a 2015 deluxe reissue of Tusk included an alternate mix for listeners who wanted to hear the song’s bones more clearly.
What to listen for: start with the guitars. Buckingham’s arrangement keeps pulling the song in two directions at once, the clean arpeggios suggesting calm while the distorted ones smolder underneath, like weather gathering at the edge of hearing. Nicks sings the song almost conversationally, refusing the big crescendos that a lesser singer would demand from this material; the vulnerability Buckingham admired is right there in how little she pushes. Listen, too, for how the rhythm section holds back: Fleetwood, one of rock’s most muscular drummers, plays this one like a man afraid of waking someone, and the tambourine-and-floor-tom combination gives the song a heartbeat rather than a backbeat. The Hammond glow from Christine McVie is the track’s secret warmth, the one element that suggests forgiveness might be possible. And notice what isn’t there: no soaring chorus, no cathartic release, just a storm described from the inside, by someone who knows she helped summon it.
Nearly half a century later, ‘Storms’ feels like the moral center of Tusk, the moment where the album’s experiments in sound serve a plain human story. It remains one of the record’s deep cuts rather than one of its calling cards, which may be why it still feels like a secret passed between the band and its most devoted listeners. Put it on after the hits, late at night, and it does what the best Fleetwood Mac songs have always done: it makes private weather feel universal. The storm in the title never really breaks. It just hangs there, beautiful and unresolved, which is exactly how the people who lived it remember those years.