It begins with a sound like sunlight coming through a window: a bright electric piano figure, a bass line that walks with a grin, and then Christine McVie’s voice, warm and certain, singing about a feeling she had almost stopped believing in. “Sweet wonderful you, you make me happy with the things you do.” When Fleetwood Mac released “You Make Loving Fun” in 1977, it was the happiest song on the unhappiest album ever made — a love song recorded by a band in the middle of breaking apart, written by a woman in the middle of leaving her husband, about a new man who was not supposed to be in the studio at all. It became the fourth Top 10 hit from Rumours, one of the best-selling albums of all time, and the proof that even in the middle of a wreck, Christine McVie could write a song that sounded like a fresh start.
To understand why the song mattered, you have to understand what Fleetwood Mac was in 1976. The band had been through a decade of changes before it found its famous lineup. Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, the British rhythm section who gave the band its name, had kept the group going through years of personnel turnover. Then, in 1975, they added two Americans: guitarist Lindsey Buckingham and singer Stevie Nicks, a couple whose harmonies and songs turned the band’s self-titled 1975 album into a surprise smash. That album reached number one in America, and suddenly Fleetwood Mac was one of the biggest bands in the world. But by the time they gathered in early 1976 to record its follow-up, everything behind the music was falling apart.
Two couples inside the band were breaking up at the same time. Buckingham and Nicks, whose relationship had survived years of struggle before fame, were ending theirs, bitterly. And Christine and John McVie, married since 1968, were ending theirs too. Christine later said that by the time of the Rumours sessions, her marriage had been on shaky ground for years, and that she had finally broken with John during the band’s 1976 tour because she needed to protect her own mental health. She described him, in a 1977 Rolling Stone interview, as drinking heavily and becoming belligerent, saying she was seeing “more Hyde than Jekyll.” Mick Fleetwood’s own marriage, to Jenny Boyd, was also collapsing. The band members were barely speaking to each other off the microphone, and yet they had to spend months together in the studio, singing harmonies about each other’s heartbreaks. It was, as producer Ken Caillat later put it, a soap opera with a large production budget. And somehow, out of that wreckage, they made Rumours.
Christine McVie was, in many ways, the band’s quiet center. She was its keyboardist, its most reliable songwriter, and the voice that gave Fleetwood Mac its warmth. On Rumours she wrote or co-wrote five songs: “Don’t Stop,” “Songbird,” “Oh Daddy,” “You Make Loving Fun,” and, with the rest of the band, “The Chain.” But she almost did not write any of them. She later recalled sitting down at the piano during the sessions and finding nothing there. “I thought I was drying up,” she said. “I was practically panicking because every time I sat down at a piano, nothing came out.” Then, one day in the studio, something broke loose, and the songs came in a rush. “You Make Loving Fun” was one of them, and it was the most personal of the lot, because it was not about the marriage that was ending. It was about the romance that was beginning.
That romance was with Curry Grant, the band’s lighting director. Christine had met him on the road, at a time when she and John were, in her own later words to one interviewer, “as cold as ice to each other.” Grant made her laugh, and in the middle of a miserable year, laughter was no small thing. “I was seeing another chappie at that time, his name was Curry Grant,” she said years later. “He had a great sense of humor, he was always making me laugh. I sure needed that at that time, and I recall that I wrote ‘You Make Loving Fun’ specifically about him and his wonderful sense of humor.” The song is, quite simply, a celebration of that feeling: the opening lines declare that she never believed in miracles until this man came along, and the chorus repeats the title like a woman who cannot quite believe her luck. It is the only uncomplicatedly happy love song on an album full of accusations and farewells, and that is exactly why it stands out.
The problem, of course, was that the man it was about was off-limits, and the man it was not about had to play on it. Grant was the band’s lighting director, which meant he traveled with the group, and his presence on tour was an open secret that made the already tense atmosphere worse. Mick Fleetwood wrote in his memoir that John McVie suspected what was happening, and that he would say to Mick, “He’s doing her, you know,” while Mick tried to talk him out of it. When the affair began to disrupt the crew, Mick confronted Christine, and she acknowledged the relationship. Grant was dismissed from the crew soon after, and the subject was barely mentioned again. But the song remained, and John McVie, the bassist, had to record his part on a song his wife had written about another man — and, as it turned out, he played one of the best bass lines of his career on it.
Christine, for her part, came up with a cover story. She told John, and the band, that the song was about her dog. The dog in question was a Pomeranian named Duster, a regular presence in the studio during the Rumours sessions. “To avoid flare-ups,” as one account puts it, Christine said the song was about Duster. It was a story that asked a lot of its listeners, since lines like “I never did believe in miracles, but I’ve a feeling it’s time to try” are, as one writer later noted, a little intense for a song about a Pomeranian. But in a band where everyone was pretending, for the sake of the record, that they could still work together, one more polite fiction was hardly the strangest thing. Christine herself confirmed the truth in later interviews and in the Classic Albums documentary about Rumours: the song was about Grant, and Grant, for obvious reasons, “was not welcome in the studio.”
The recording itself shows how the band worked at its best, even when it was at its worst. Early tracking of the song was done, according to Christine, in the absence of Lindsey Buckingham, which gave her the freedom to build the song on her own, around her own vocal and keyboards. The session that shaped the finished track took place on February 8, at the Record Plant in Sausalito, California, one of the studios where Rumours was made. Mick Fleetwood was on drums, Stevie Nicks played tambourine, and Christine played a Rhodes electric piano sent through a Stratoblaster, a device that boosted the instrument’s output by 15 decibels. John McVie’s bass part was re-recorded, and Christine overdubbed a Hohner Clavinet fed through a wah-wah pedal — an awkward combination to play, since the pedal had to be worked while she played the keys, so Fleetwood got down on the floor and operated the pedal with his hands while she played. Buckingham arrived at the studio in the late afternoon and chose a Gibson Les Paul guitar for the rhythm parts, plugged into a rotating Leslie speaker, and a Hammond organ was overdubbed before the session ended at six in the evening.
Then came the detail that shows how perfectionist this band could be even in chaos. Buckingham wanted accented tom-tom beats in the chorus, but Fleetwood was unwilling to try the idea, so Buckingham played the tom-toms himself. And then there were the backing vocals, where the band’s private lives collided with its professional discipline in the most extraordinary way. Caillat recalled that during the backing vocal sessions, Nicks and Buckingham were engaged in what he called “vicious name calling” between takes. “The tape would start rolling and they’d sing, ‘Yooooooou make loving fun,’ just beautiful, two little angels,” Caillat said. “The tape would stop and they’d be calling each other names again. They didn’t miss a beat.” That is the sound of Rumours in a single image: people who could not stand each other, singing like angels, on cue.
Rumours was released on February 4, 1977, and it became a phenomenon unlike anything the band had seen. It spent 31 weeks at number one on the Billboard 200, sold more than 40 million copies worldwide, and produced four Top 10 singles in America — “Go Your Own Way,” “Dreams,” which reached number one, “Don’t Stop,” and finally “You Make Loving Fun.” Christine had wanted her song to be the album’s third American single, but “Don’t Stop” was chosen instead, so “You Make Loving Fun” became the fourth and final single, released in September 1977 with “Gold Dust Woman” on the B-side in the United States. It entered the Billboard Hot 100 in the issue dated October 15, 1977, at number 73, climbed steadily through the autumn, broke into the Top 10 in the issue dated December 10, and peaked at number 9 the following week, on December 17, 1977. It spent 14 weeks on the chart in total, with two weeks inside the Top 10. It also reached number 7 on the Cash Box Top 100 and the Canadian chart, number 28 on the Adult Contemporary chart, and number 45 in Britain, where it has since been certified platinum.
The critics heard what made the song special right away. Cash Box praised McVie’s “magical words,” the “angelic backing vocals,” and the “pulsating backbeat reinforced by her own electric keyboard.” Record World called it “a light rocker with a compelling love lyric.” Years later, Billboard’s ranking of every song on Rumours placed it at number 2, calling it the album’s “secret weapon,” and The Guardian and Paste both placed it in the top 15 of their lists of Fleetwood Mac’s greatest songs. It is the song on Rumours that people hum without quite remembering why, and then remember, and smile.
The song also became a permanent part of the band’s live life. It was a concert staple, played on every tour that included Christine McVie from 1976 until 1997, the year before she left the band and retired from touring. When she rejoined Fleetwood Mac for the On with the Show tour in 2014 and 2015, the song came back with her, and it was played again on the 2018–2019 tour. For audiences, the song’s meaning had long since outgrown its scandalous origins. It was simply the bright spot in the set, the moment when the band’s most turbulent album sounded, for three and a half minutes, like pure joy.
There is a final poignancy to the story that only time could add. Christine McVie died in November 2022, and the tributes that followed kept returning to this song and to her gift for writing happiness without sentimentality. In March 2024, the country band Lonestar covered “You Make Loving Fun” as a tribute to her, and Mick Fleetwood praised their version, saying, “Christine will be smiling!” The same year, the singer Jewel covered it for Legacy: A Tribute to Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, the Mick Fleetwood-produced 20th anniversary tribute album. The song has outlived the marriage it was written in the shadow of, the affair it celebrated, and the band lineup that recorded it. What remains is the thing Christine McVie put into it in a Sausalito studio in February 1976, while her band was falling apart around her: the sound of a woman who had found, against all the odds, something to be happy about, and who decided to sing about it before the feeling faded.
That is why “You Make Loving Fun” endures while so many other hits of 1977 have faded into oldies-radio background. It is not a song about a perfect relationship. It is a song about a real one, begun in the middle of a mess, by a woman who knew exactly what it was costing everyone around her and sang about it anyway, with a lightness that made the whole complicated story sound simple. Rumours is remembered as the breakup album, and rightly so. But it is also, thanks to Christine McVie, an album about what comes after a breakup: the first laugh, the first new love, the first morning when the sun comes through the window again. “You Make Loving Fun” is that morning, set to music, and it still sounds like a new beginning.
Watch the video below and listen for the moment the backing vocals lift the chorus. It is the sound of a band that could barely speak to each other, singing in perfect harmony about the one thing they all still believed in.