“Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac

"Dreams" is Stevie Nicks's song from Fleetwood Mac's 1977 album Rumours, the band's eleventh, and she wrote it and sings it in a voice that sounds half awake and all knowing. Warner Bros. sent it out as the second American single in March 1977; Britain got it as the third, that June.

It's soft rock at its most hypnotic. Mick Fleetwood's drums shuffle in a hushed, steady trance, John McVie's bass pulses underneath like a heartbeat, Christine McVie's keyboards and synthesizer hang in the air like mist, and Lindsey Buckingham's guitar keeps to the shadows until it's needed, with Buckingham and Christine McVie lending their voices to Nicks's lead. Ken Caillat and Richard Dashut engineered and co-produced it with the band. For the promo, they simply filmed the band playing it on stage.

In the US it sold more than a million copies and gave Fleetwood Mac their only number one on the Billboard Hot 100; it topped the RPM Top 100 in Canada too. Then, in late 2020, it came back from nowhere when Nathan Apodaca posted a TikTok of himself skateboarding to work, sipping Ocean Spray cran-raspberry juice with "Dreams" playing, and the song went back onto national charts. In 2021 Rolling Stone ranked it ninth among the 500 greatest songs ever.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.