“This Is Really Boring”: The No. 1 Single Stevie Nicks Had To Plead With Fleetwood Mac to Record

One of the most valuable tools an artist has at their disposal is their creative intuition, and this is especially true of the No. 1 single that Stevie Nicks practically had to beg Fleetwood Mac to record. The song was written solely by Nicks in about ten minutes in a room that was said to belong to Sly Stone of the funk-rock group Sly and the Family Stone. When Nicks eagerly showed the rest of her bandmates her new track, they brushed it off as boring.

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But she kept pushing, advocating for the song, begging her bandmates to give it another chance. Thank goodness she wore them down.

Stevie Nicks Had to Beg Fleetwood Mac to Record Her New Song

In the early spring of 1976, Fleetwood Mac was recording what would become their seminal album, Rumours, at the Record Plant in Sausalito, California. At one point, Nicks broke away from the rest of the group and found a quiet room with a massive, black velvet bed in the middle. The room supposedly belonged to Sly Stone of Sly and the Family Stone, but as it was unoccupied at the time, Nicks let herself in and made herself comfortable.

Sitting on the bed with an electric keyboard, Nicks searched through the programmed drum beats until she settled on a grooving dance rhythm. She switched her cassette player on and began playing. In ten minutes, she had written “Dreams.” “Right away, I liked the fact that I was doing something with a dance beat because that made it a little unusual for me,” Nicks later recalled in a 2005 interview with Blender. Although Nicks thought her song was unusually upbeat, the rest of the band disagreed.

“When Stevie first played it for me on the piano, it was just three chords and one note in the left hand,” McVie recalled in the same interview. “I thought, ‘This is really boring.’” Nicks shared similar (if not a bit kinder) sentiments in a later discussion, saying, “They weren’t nuts about it. But I said, ‘Please! Please record this song. At least try it.’ The way I play things, sometimes, you really have to listen.” Ultimately, Nicks’ persistence paid off for everyone.

A Solo Idea Turned Into A Group Effort

If any band had mastered the ability to put their ego and emotions to the side for the sake of the band, it would be Fleetwood Mac. Between breakups, hookups, and the drug-fueled chaos of the late 1970s rock ‘n’ roll scene, the British-American pop-rock band had to make a conscious effort to give each other breathing room for their creative processes. Nicks had songs scrapped in favor of others before, but “Dreams” was different. She truly believed that the song had something special. She just didn’t know what yet.

In an ironic twist of fate, Lindsey Buckingham would be the one to help bring Nicks’ idea to fruition. Nicks described “Dreams” as her musical response to Buckingham’s “Go Your Own Way,” which was rather plainly about his failed relationship with Nicks. Despite the emotional background of the song, Buckingham worked to flesh out Nicks’ idea, transforming a three-chord song into three distinct parts to keep it interesting and decidedly un-boring.

“Dreams” was the only Fleetwood Mac single to reach No. 1 on the U.S. charts, cementing its place as one of their most iconic songs. If Nicks had let her bandmates’ hesitations dissuade her—or, perhaps, even if Sly Stone had been occupying his red and black velvet-clad room at the time—the career-defining song might have never seen the light of day.

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