Rumours

In February 1976 the band settled at the Record Plant in Sausalito with the engineers Ken Caillat and Richard Dashut, who shared production with them. The working title there was Yesterday's Gone. John McVie suggested the title because the members were writing journals and diaries about each other. Buckingham took charge of the sessions with the aim of making a pop album.

Delays followed. Recording resumed in Los Angeles after a ten-day tour, but the Sausalito tapes had been damaged by repeated use, and a specialist used a vari-speed oscillator to bring the damaged tapes back into time, and the mix used an Aphex Aural Exciter to restore lost top end. Christine McVie's Songbird was recorded in an all-night session at Zellerbach Auditorium in Berkeley. Release slipped from September 1976 to 4 February 1977, with an advance order of 800,000 copies, the largest in Warner Bros. history to that point.

Reception and legacy

The album went to number one in the US, the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, and won the 1978 Grammy Award for Album of the Year for the band and co-producers Caillat and Dashut. Robert Christgau of The Village Voice called it more consistent and more eccentric than its predecessor, and John Swenson of Rolling Stone wrote that it proved the success of Fleetwood Mac was no fluke. Jessica Hopper of Pitchfork reviewed the 2013 reissue and described it as a template for pop with a gleaming surface and something complicated, desperate and dark underneath.

It entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2003 and the National Recording Registry in 2017, and Rolling Stone placed it seventh in its 2020 list of the 500 greatest albums. Fleetwood has called it "the most important album we ever made". Rumours was reissued with Silver Springs and outtakes in 2004, in a super deluxe box in 2013, and Rumours Live, recorded at the Forum on 29 August 1977, appeared in 2023.