Best Fleetwood Mac Song

Three different bands have carried this name, and the bracket puts all of them in the same draw. There is the Peter Green blues band of 1967 to 1970, which had a number one instrumental in Britain and then lost its leader. There is the group that Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joined in 1975 and turned into the biggest pop act in America. And there is the long stretch in between, which almost nobody outside the fanbase can name a song from.

That makes for strange matchups. Albatross is a guitar drifting over brushed drums, recorded by a band that thought of itself as playing Chicago blues. Everywhere is a chiming synthesiser figure from twelve years later, recorded by four people who were barely speaking. Choosing between them is not really a musical comparison, and the bracket does not pretend otherwise.

The Rumours songs carry an extra weight, because the band made that record while all three couples inside it were separating, and the songs are partly addressed to each other. Go Your Own Way and Dreams sit on the same side of the same album, saying opposite things about the same breakup, and Nicks had to sing harmony on the first one every night for decades.

Every candidate plays here. Where the band posted an official video it is that; where they did not, it is the label's own audio upload.