Emily's Albums A to Z

Listened: Friday February

I’ve been waiting a long time to review Rumours. This album is one of my favorite albums ever – all those people in Rolling Stone saying how good it was all those years were right.

I bought it on vinyl during college and a tape dub of it lived in my car for years. It’s my soundtrack to mischief. Many times I’ve been driving to some big event or night out and have been singing along to it at the top of my lungs and car-dancing to it. It breathes with the feeling of late 70s excesses gone too far and the broken relationships it was born in – a perfect motivator to go out and drink and forget your troubles. It also immediately conveys the unstoppable creativity that must have been involved to bring people together who were having such problems with each other and still somehow put out such a fabulous product.

It’s a very undated album to my ears; it doesn’t telegraph “70s” in its sound. For a while I couldn’t hear Don’t Stop without thinking of Bill Clinton since that’s when I first heard it (it was one of his campaign songs) but I’ve come around to it now. I now own the Deluxe Edition (the album project convinced me I should own it on CD), which has a few extra tracks.  I was initially suspicious of the inclusion of Silver Springs in the proper album, but it fits in perfectly. I love the other Stevie songs on the bonus disc too (Think About It and Planets Of The Universe) – it seems like this was a very productive period for her, before she went off the rails.