Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams”: The Strange and Beautiful Life of a Breakup Classic

Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs list is one of the most popular — and most-argued over — features the magazine has ever produced. It’s a trip through eight decades of pop music, from Elvis Presley to Elvis Costello, Aretha to Ariana, hip-hop to art-pop, and beyond. Its rankings are hugely influential, and — if you disagree enough with them, at least — infamous. In the first episode of Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs podcast, hosts Brittany Spanos and Rob Sheffield dive into the history, significance, and weird quirks of the list, zeroing in on its most recent version, from 2021. 

 

The hosts are joined by special guest and Rolling Stone staffer Angie Martoccio as they pivot to “Dreams,” the iconic 1977 Fleetwood Mac song that finished 9th on the most recent version of the 500 Greatest Songs list. In recent years, the Stevie Nicks masterpiece found new life — and a new audience — as a tik-tok mainstay and Gen-Z touchstone, but its history runs deep. The hosts delve into the fascinating story of the song, placing it within the context of the nonstop romantic drama that was Fleetwood Mac in the 1970s. Amazingly, Nicks wrote the song “in about 10 minutes,” as a mystical elegy to her fading relationship with Lindsey Buckingham. But its legacy is so much greater than that story would suggest — it’s a testament to making great art amid turmoil, and to the singular, shawl-clad sorcery of Stevie. “Dreams” sums up everything we love about her in four brilliant minutes. 

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