In the minutes and hours following the sad death of Christine McVie on 30 November 2022, obituary writers across the globe set about encapsulating the talents that made the prodigiously gifted singer, keyboardist and songwriter of Fleetwood Mac so special.
As a musician, McVie was exceptional, blessed with a soulful blues-infused keyboard style and a profound gift for melody. As drummer Mick Fleetwood once told The Guardian, McVie was “the finest blueswoman and piano player in all of England”.
As a vocalist, McVie stood out for her warm contralto voice, butter-smooth delivery and her raw, emotive blues-based sincerity.
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And as a songwriter, McVie would prove pivotal to Fleetwood Mac. While Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham wrote some of the band’s most iconic songs and got the most media attention, it was the quiet McVie who contributed the lion’s share of the hits.
On the 1986 compilation The Best Of Fleetwood Mac, half the songs on it are written by her.
It was McVie who penned Say You Love Me, a No 11 US hit, which fuelled the ascent of the band’s eponymous 1975 album.
On the massively successful follow-up Rumours (1977), McVie contributed the soaring Don’t Stop, which reached No 3 in the US, and You Make Loving Fun, a No 9 US hit. And although it wasn’t released as a single, McVie also penned Songbird, the beautiful, stately ballad that stands as one of her most abiding and touching compositions.
Another high point in Christine McVie’s rich back catalogue was Everywhere, released as the fourth single from the band’s 1987 album Tango In The Night.
It is a shimmering, joyous composition. Almost 40 years since its release, Everywhere remains one of McVie’s finest and most enduring songwriting achievements.
Tango In The Night began not as a Fleetwood Mac album but as a Lindsey Buckingham solo project. The band had been on indefinite hiatus since 1982, following a world tour in support of the album Mirage.
By the end of ’85, Buckingham – working alone at his home studio in Los Angeles – had three songs finished: Big Love, Family Man and Caroline.
But while Buckingham was busy making music, Mick Fleetwood was busy making plans to get the band back on track.
When Fleetwood Mac reassembled to record their 14th album – the fifth for the Buckingham-Nicks incarnation of the band – the omens were far from good. Mick Fleetwood was almost totally consumed by cocaine addiction and bassist John McVie’s drinking was out of control, a situation that would lead to an alcohol-induced seizure. Stevie Nicks, meanwhile, had emerged from rehab and was free of cocaine yet would soon be addicted to a prescription tranquiliser.
By complete contrast, Christine McVie and Lindsey Buckingham were clean, sober and creatively sharp. Buckingham assumed creative control, devoting himself entirely to the album, which was recorded mostly at his home studio over an 18-month period between 1986 and 1987.
Nicks reportedly rarely showed up at the sessions and when she did, Buckingham was allegedly so horrified by her condition that he banished both her and Mick Fleetwood to the Winnebago parked in his driveway.
When Nicks did go to the studio, she often felt unmotivated, as she told Howard Cohen of the Miami Herald in March 2017. “I can remember going up there and not being happy to even be there. I didn’t go very often.”
Advances in recording technology meant that Buckingham had greater scope when it came to shaping the sound of Everywhere and across the album. He had recently acquired a Fairlight and its sampling capabilities opened up whole new vistas in terms of production.
“Most of the vocal parts were recorded track by track,” Buckingham told the New York Times in 1987. “The voices used in the textured vocal choirs were mostly mine. I used a Fairlight machine that samples real sounds and blends them orchestrally.”
For Christine McVie, working directly with Buckingham in his role as co-producer was liberating. “I loved working with him because he just brought phenomenal production ideas to my songs and improved them,” she said in the BBC Four documentary Fleetwood Mac’s Songbird: Christine McVie.
![Fleetwood Mac - Everywhere (Official Music Video) [HD] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/YF1R0hc5Q2I/maxresdefault.jpg "“He slowed the tape down really slowly and played the parts slowly… When it came up to the right speed it sounded amazing”: How Christine McVie’s pop songcraft and Lindsey Buckingham’s production genius created one of Fleetwood Mac's biggest '80s hits 20")
Everywhere is an absolute masterclass in pop songwriting, with its infectious melody, lush synths and warm lead vocals. In contrast to Stevie Nicks’ mysticism, McVie wrote simple, affecting love songs that brimmed with emotional resonance. She also wrote hits.
McVie reportedly wrote the song quickly in one session and said that the song practically wrote itself.
At its core, Everywhere is a love song and McVie created the track as a pure expression of falling deeply in love. She had recently married her second husband, musician and songwriter Eddie Quintela, and it seems likely that he was the inspiration for the song. Everywhere focuses on the pure, optimistic joy and commitment of wanting to be close to someone.
“That song is like that feeling when you’re walking on the clouds because you’re in love,” noted Nancy Wilson of Heart in the documentary Fleetwood Mac’s Songbird: Christine McVie. “She really has that romanticism.”
In the first verse, McVie evokes the giddy, nerve-shredding sensation of a new relationship. “Can you hear me calling out your name?/You know that I’m falling and I don’t know what to say.”
On the second verse, McVie acknowledges that even her closest acquaintances don’t fully grasp the depth of her feelings: “Something’s happening, happening to me/My friends say I’m acting peculiarly.”
As with many great songs, the chord structure is deceptively simple: E-B-E-B/E-B-C#m-A on the verse shifting up to B-C#m-A-B-C#m-B-A-B on the chorus.
At which point the whole thing just soars, with McVie’s voice gliding seamlessly above the richly layered backing vocals. “Oh, I,” sings McVie in warm, blissfully airy tones, “I wanna be with you everywhere.”
It’s a stunning hook, as Jim Beviglia noted in American Songwriter magazine in 2023. “No matter what else goes on in the song, that moment alone is enough to sell Everywhere, as it epitomises Christine McVie’s ability to be the steadying musical force within a tempestuous band.”
Instrumentally too, the song is a tour de force, thanks primarily to Lindsey Buckingham’s prowess and inventiveness in the studio.
The glistening backing track is brimming with Buckingham’s deft production touches.
The twinkling sound in the song’s intro and middle section was created by Buckingham playing arpeggiated motifs on acoustic and electric guitars, recording them at half speed and then speeding them up.
“He slowed the tape down really slowly and played the parts slowly and then when it came up to the right speed, it sounded bloody amazing,” recalled McVie in the documentary Fleetwood Mac’s Songbird: Christine McVie.
The speeded-up guitar parts played a significant part in the open, spacious feel of the song.
“When you record something really slow and you speed it up, all the harmonics get shifted up,” said Greg Droman, engineer on the Tango In The Night album, in an interview with Salon in 2017. “You end up with this high end, this tinkly little high end, that wouldn’t exist [otherwise]. There’s not another way you could get that, at least back then.”
Buckingham underpinned the high-end speeded-up arpeggios with simple pads on synth brass and strings.
16 seconds in and the bass and drums enter the mix, a lean spacious groove from John McVie and Mick Fleetwood, which is bolstered by percussive pizzicato-style sounds on the Fairlight. There are some impromptu vocal cadences from Christine McVie before the first verse begins.
There’s a wonderful depth and richness to McVie’s vocal delivery and phrasing. It’s warm, blues-soaked and seeped in emotion.
Throughout the song’s 3:42 running time, there’s a real breadth to the sound. “Every note is surrounded by open airiness,” said Richard Dashut, the co-producer of Tango In The Night, in the documentary Fleetwood Mac’s Songbird: Christine McVie. “The space becomes as important as the actual notes in that song.
In many ways, Everywhere is a relatively straightforward composition, yet it’s the emotional nuances that McVie brings to the song that really make it fly.
“When you inspect it from a songwriting perspective, there’s nothing too fancy going on with Everywhere,” observed Jim Bevaglia in American Songwriter magazine. “There are some basic rhymes (shout/out and heart/start), as well as a one-line refrain that’s repeated twice in the chorus with the same melody. And yet McVie manages to sneak in notes of excitement, fear, anxiety, and vulnerability, all aided by the natural warmth and longing in her vocals.”
Everywhere was released in November 1987 as the fourth single from Tango In The Night. Critics lauded this dreamy, uplifting song from McVie, and its popularity would only grow in the ensuing years and decades.
In a retrospective review of the album in The Guardian in 2017, Alexis Petridis described the song as “peerless”, the result of “bulletproof songwriting” by McVie.
Ivy Nelson from Pitchfork concluded that Everywhere was the best song on Tango In The Night, and that it “responds with warmth, empathy, and buoyancy, describing a kind of devotion so deeply felt that it produces weightlessness in a person”.
Elsewhere in the publication, Everywhere was ranked among the 200 Best Songs of the 1980s, and praised for its “carefully crafted, spare, and meticulously-produced” sound.
![Fleetwood Mac - Everywhere (Live) (Official Video) [HD] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/HB9Y2LHIT24/maxresdefault.jpg "“He slowed the tape down really slowly and played the parts slowly… When it came up to the right speed it sounded amazing”: How Christine McVie’s pop songcraft and Lindsey Buckingham’s production genius created one of Fleetwood Mac's biggest '80s hits 22")
After finishing work on Tango In The Night, Lindsey Buckingham quit Fleetwood Mac because he didn’t want to tour. It would be a decade before he returned, but he left on a real creative high.
Despite all the imploding trauma and chaos within the band, Buckingham’s intuitive use of synths and his tasteful, sparing production ensured that Tango In The Night was an outstanding album.
Everywhere is arguably its creative high point. And it’s a song whose joyous spirit and deep emotional yearning resonate strongly to this day.
