Earworms: Hold Me by Fleetwood Mac

My favorite record by the wonderfully talented Christine McVie

Certain songs take hold in my head, sometimes old, sometimes new, for reasons which may or may not be obvious. So, I’ll write stuff about them.

I’d actually forgotten it was a big hit – number 4 on the Billboard charts for seven straight weeks back in 1982. Few of the songs I loved that year – and there weren’t many I loved more than this one – made the pop charts at all. “Hold Me” has felt like a private secret, since most of my friends at the time did not share my renewed love for this unabashedly populist band, Fleetwood Mac.

The first thing that comes to mind about this record is the enormous space in which it takes place. On headphones, it’s like your ears are taking in sounds from a giant platform, with multiple vocals, guitars, keyboards, woodblocks, bass, and drums stacked in front of and along side each other with plenty of room in between. Every sound is crisp and clear, nothing bleeds into anything else. This was true of the whole album Mirage but it is somehow even more effective on “Hold Me” than on the other tracks.

Mirage was the follow-up to Tusk, an album that had sold very well but did not carry on the gargantuan success of 1977’s Rumours, which might stand today as one of the most universally beloved records across multiple generations. You can’t duplicate that kind of cultural impact, but I guess the idea was that avoiding songs featuring heavily percussive chants backed by 70 piece marching bands might help. For some reason, Mirage is frequently referred to as more of an adult contemporary record than previous Fleetwood Mac albums, but I find it to be kind of sui generis in its crackerjack production approach and widely varying song styles. Certainly, it doesn’t sound like other records that were popular at the time.

Christine McVie wrote “Hold Me” with Robbie Patton, whose own albums she had produced in the couple years previous to 1982. It’s kind of a wisp of a song on paper. There are four short verses putting the singer in different relations to a lover. Be honest, we’ve got time. There’s nobody else, so let’s get together. You have all the power, I’ll be a fool for you. I’m not going anywhere, I’ll come right to you if you ask. Other than those bits (which honestly, as often as I’ve heard this song over the last forty years, I had to look at the written lyrics to realize what they were), the song consists of two words repeated ad infinitum. Hold me.

Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie had sung together beautifully on the classic “Don’t Stop,” so they decided to try it again with this one. (Stevie Nicks presumably stayed home, although she shows the most charisma in the decidedly surrealistic and strange official video to the song – it’s beyond my power to describe, or my real concern, but you can watch it for yourself.) I love the way they sing without close harmony, as if neither one is concerned what the other is doing. It makes for a nicely ironic touch in a song about enveloping each other. McVie, of course, had the strongest voice in Fleetwood Mac, that rich alto full of honey and emotional depth. Buckingham’s tenor always gets by on sheer chutzpah; he hits the notes fine, but it’s his constant threat to lapse into hysteria that makes him extra effective. Put them together and you’ve got a couple of lovers mixing deep feelings with sexual impatience.

McVie’s gorgeously inviting six-note piano filigree opens the record, repeats, and after a couple vamping chords, Mick Fleetwood slams the snare drum, John McVie’s bass throbs in tandem and around the kick drum, and we’re off to the races. Guitar power chords pump under the first chorus of Hold me’s, as another electric guitar dances a lighter lick locked in with a woodblock, and Christine is adding a harpsichord line. The vocals are each double tracked with Christine and Lindsey bouncing off each other.. Somewhere way in the middle distance chants, “Come on and” before the chorus is repeated again.

For the next verse, Buckingham plucks some light guitar parts, and grunts his way into his vocal part. Almost two minutes in, the vocals drop out, and one of my all time favorite guitar solos comes in, enormously melodic and referencing the rest of the song while feeling erotic and playful. From there, it’s mixing and matching all the elements we’ve heard so far, with Buckingham playing more variations on guitar, and Christine’s harpsichord sound getting a little more presence. Eventually, there’s nothing to do but fade out. This desire for physical connection isn’t going anywhere.

I had every intention of writing about this song in the near future, but it jumped the queue this week because of the unexpected (by me and most of her public) passing of Christine McVie just a few days ago. I had no idea her time with the band went back so far – she actually played uncredited keyboards on some of their earliest records with Peter Green, though she didn’t actually join until 1970 when he left the group. So, she performed on stage with virtually everybody who ever played under the name Fleetwood Mac. She wrote and sang so many enormously effective songs, and contributed excellent keyboard and vocal parts to the works of her compadres. This is my personal favorite by her, but it’s got plenty of competition from her pen.