Fleetwood Mac keyboardist Christine McVie died Wednesday at the age of 79. She wrote some of the group’s most beloved songs. “You Make Loving Fun” is tied to some drama. “Say You Love Me” is a jaunty tune that has become a mainstay on rock and easy listening radio stations.. “Songbird” has been pointed to as the perfect remembrance of someone lost. “Don’t Stop” proved to be a hopeful anthem for the future, which was so meaningful to former President Bill Clinton that he used it as his 1992 campaign anthem. “I’m grateful to Christine & Fleetwood Mac for entrusting us with such a meaningful song. I will miss her,” Clinton tweeted. “I heard this incredible sound, our three voices … and my skin turned to gooseflesh,” she said of the harmonies on the song in a 1990 interview with Performing Songwriter magazine. “There’ll be no more crying/For you, the sun will be shining/And I feel that when I’m with you/It’s alright, I know it’s right,” she wrote in a 2010 interview with the magazine. “Got a Hold on Me” was the first single off of her self-titled solo album, it sounds like it could be a FleetwoodMac song with it’s buoyant rhythm and the infectious chorus, “Ooh, I got a love/I got somebody/This love got a hold on me.” “The first time I started playing ‘Say you Love Me’ and I reached the chorus, they started singing with me and fell right into it,” she told the magazine in 1990. The song is one of many that have been used to pay tribute to McVIE after her passing. She was famously married to, and then divorced from, their other bandmate, John Mcvie. It was also revealed that she had an affair with the band’s lighting director with whom she was married at the time, and he thought the song was about their dog as the McVies were married. The song was called “Sweet wonderful you/You make me happy with the things you do/Oh, can it be so/This feeling follows me wherever I go,” it turns out the love song was in honor of the lighting director, who was also the band members’ friend and ex-boyfriend. “I’ll Be There for You” was one of the first songs she wrote for her solo album. It was released in 1990 and has become one of her most popular songs, along with “I Can’t Go For It” and “I Will Be There For You” The band is known for, in part, their tumultuous relationships, especially when it came to romantic ones. It’s also known for its “Rumours” album, which includes a song called “I Won’t Back Down” that was written by Stevie Nicks.
Christine McVie, the Fleetwood Mac singer who died on Tuesday, was a songwriter and a singer. Here are five songs to listen to in her honor.
