Which one is your favorite? - LVIII -

This week's song is coming from one of my favorite bands.  It is a song by Fleetwood Mac from their eleventh studio album Rumours released in 1977. In the US, the song reached the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100, the band's only number-one single there; it sold over a million copies. In Canada, it also reached number one on the RPM Top 100 Singles chart.

Here is the song for this week;

"Dreams"

During the sessions for Rumours, everyone in the band was going through a breakup (Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham with each other, John and Christine McVie with each other, Mick Fleetwood with his wife Jenny Boyd) and doing a lot of drugs. They were able to work together, but most of the songwriting was on an individual basis. Stevie Nicks wrote this one in the studio next door where Sly Stone was recording. He had a big, semicircular bed and red velvet all over the walls - a great vibe for a song about romantic entanglements.

The line, "Players only love you when they're playing," was directed at Lindsey Buckingham. Stevie Nicks was not pleased when he brought "Go Your Own Way" to the sessions, which was clearly about her. Stevie told Q magazine June 2009: "It was the fairy and the gnome. I was trying to be all philosophical. And he was just mad."

Stevie Nicks recalled to The Daily Mail October 16, 2009: "I remember the night I wrote 'Dreams.' I walked in and handed a cassette of the song to Lindsey. It was a rough take, just me singing solo and playing the piano. Even though he was mad with me at the time, Lindsey played it and then looked up at me and smiled. What was going on between us was sad. We were couples who couldn't make it through. But, as musicians, we still respected each other - and we got some brilliant songs out of it."

Christine McVie said in a 1997 interview with Q: "'Dreams' developed in a bizarre way. When Stevie first played it for me on the piano, it was just three chords and one note in the left hand. I thought, This is really boring, but the Lindsey genius came into play and he fashioned three sections out of identical chords, making each section sound completely different. He created the impression that there's a thread running through the whole thing." 

Christine McVie played both a Hammond organ and a Fender Rhodes electric piano on this track.

The song returned to the Billboard charts in 2018 after a meme went viral. A Twitter user named @bottledfleet edited parts of "Dreams" over footage of Alcorn State University's Golden Girls cheerleaders dancing to an overlay the song to prove that Fleetwood Mac is not boring. The video was posted on March 22, 2018 with the caption: "'Fleetwood Mac's music is so boring, you can't even dance to it."

The song got another boost when the TikTok user Doggface208 (real name Nathan Apodaca) uploaded a video of him skateboarding down a road while drinking Ocean Spray juice and lip-syncing along to "Dreams" on September 25, 2020. On October 4, Mick Fleetwood made his own TikTok re-creating Apodaca's video. Fleetwood posted: "@420doggface208 had it right. Dreams and Cranberry just hits different."

Here are the 6 versions I picked for you;

• The Corrs - "Dreams"

• Lissie - "Dreams"

• Dianne Reeves - "Dreams"

• The Kills - "Dreams"

• Yo La Tengo - "Dreams"

• Richie Havens - "Dreams"

Now the floor is yours, go ahead and make your comments (here, Instagram, Facebook wherever you feel like...).

nb. Please note that I intentionally do not include the original versions of the songs as it would be a little unfair to the artists covering the songs, and I am sure that sometimes you will be surprised to see that the songs you thought were the originals are just covers.