Is Everyone Else Listening To A Lot Of Fleetwood Mac Lately?

I'm 30 years old, so I can't definitively say when I first heard Fleetwood Mac. But I can tell you when the first time I listened to Fleetwood Mac.

Last fall, I was walking home from the grocery store, feeling the mix of emotions you normally would on a Monday after working all day in an industry that is jogging towards death and also making you go insane. Through the serendipity of algorithms, Spotify played Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide." Depression can sometimes turn your mind into a dry sponge, ready to absorb the first thing you present to it and ascribe it some over-inflated sense of catharsis. In that moment my brain sopped up every single one of Stevie Nicks' words. "Can I sail through the changing ocean tides? / Can I handle the seasons of my life?" I sure hope so.

Hearing Stevie Nicks describe the banality of suffering in such an elegant way — tides to navigate, seasons to endure — in a song from a pop band that earned endless praise and untold legions of fans in the '70s, well, it made a lot of sense. Although Nicks was only 27 at the time she sang "Landslide", hearing it in 2017 felt like being bestowed some hard-won knowledge about the way life works.

Thus began a yearlong slow wade into the Fleetwood Mac catalog; starting with curious revisting of known quantities ("Dreams," "Gypsy," "Rhiannon") with this new lens of "maturity," morphing into discovery and love of the deep cuts ("You Make Loving Fun," "Silver Springs," "Sarah") and finally, a year later, a reluctant appreciation for the more divisive material ("Tusk").

All of this was bolstered by the sense that, as I was revisiting and discovering Fleetwood Mac anew, everyone else I knew was somehow doing the same.

Road trips with my girlfriend were suddenly almost exclusively scored by the band Mick Fleetwood, Peter Green and Jeremy Spencer originally formed in 1967. The office Sonos was commandeered for days on end by the group Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham transformed through their love, and crucially, love lost. My Twitter feed, the sole arbiter of taste in my life, was now littered with jokes referencing one of the most important albums of the 20th century. Heck, I witnessed not one, not two, but three viral video cycles that used Fleetwood Mac music — one so powerful it catapulted "Dreams" back into the top 20 of the Billboard rock charts earlier this year.

Why was Fleetwood Mac showing up everywhere? The most obvious answer, and one that made me wonder if I was just suffering some sort of anxiety-induced delusion, is that Fleetwood Mac is an insanely popular band. It's hard to say that you and the rest of your millennial cohort are unearthing some hidden gem when that hidden gem went double-platinum in 1982.

Still, I listened, and still listen, to a lot of Fleetwood Mac. And knowing the things that their songs touch upon — optimistic sadness, existential anger, supernatural revenge — it's hard to shake the feeling that it wouldn't ring uniquely true with a generation that is working through some real shit.

"Stevie Nicks's music is timeless: She frees that word from overuse and turns it into something strange, forceful, and a little bit spooky. Her songs are in communion with the eternal," writes Lindsay Zoladz wrote in the Ringer last year. "They are about the heart's ancestry, the force of the natural world, and the lovestruck sob into the void that comes echoing back 20 years later at an alarming volume."

While we all have our stable of sad songs, the mystic croon of Stevie Nicks — more so than the saccharine trappings of Christine McVie or unremarkable anger of Lindsey Buckingham — just seems so well attuned to a generation that was put on the back foot before most were even able to graduate college.

"This, more than anything else, may be the reason that Nicks's work has endured — why listeners turn to her for consolation, especially now, when many feel wounded and the radio remains rife with confrontational whoops," The New Yorker's Amanda Petrusich wrote in 2016. "To be Stevie Nicks is to offer shelter."

Which seems more likely? That Fleetwood Mac's mega-popularity hasn't dipped in the decades since 1977's "Rumors," or that an entire generation has somehow coincidentally landed on the same critically-acclaimed '70s pop group within the past couple of years or so? I'm not really sure!

And so I sought out what I've been seeking my entire life — in grade-point averages, in resume bullet points, in internet points and in traffic — the numbers. The internet has brought us much sorrow, but it has delivered us metrics, a useful check on your own sanity.

Spotify sports a handy counter of monthly listeners on artist pages. And so at the end of September, I logged the monthly listener counts. Oh boy, you are going to love this.

Steely Dan is, in its own right, a contemporary of Fleetwood Mac. It enjoyed some 2.5 million listeners last month. Hall & Oates, the Philly pop phenom, might have arrived a little bit after Fleetwood Mac peaked, but I'd hazard a guess that if you can get down with "Seven Wonders" you can go for "I Can't Go For That." 8.6 million listeners in September. The Eagles? They cracked 9.4 million. Now, what about Fleetwood Mac? 11.4 million listeners.

I know! Now, while Spotify users might skew a little younger, it certainly doesn't prove that millennials are suddenly clamoring for tickets to the Fleetwood Mac tour that started this week. So, I reached out to Spotify to see if they saw the bump I was, anecdotally, seeing. According to Eliot Van Buskirk, a data storyteller at Spotify, I'm not crazy. Over the past three years, adjusted for user growth, Spotify as seen Fleetwood Mac streams increase 16%, Buskirk reports.

And the group driving that?

"Overall, the under-35 crowd is now listening to a whopping 58% more Fleetwood Mac than they did two years ago," he says. "The over-35 crowd, which already knew about Fleetwood Mac, now listens to a more modest 3% more Mac."

Now, it would be very millennial of me to claim that a revived interest in Fleetwood Mac is unique to only millennials. It's happened before. The Onion joked about it in 1998. In 2013, which honestly feels like 20 years ago at this point, the Telegraph pinned Fleetwood Mac's perennial interest amongst young folks to current music trends. "What started in the late-2000s with US folk-rock revivalists such as Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver has built up a head of steam," writes James Lachno. "Last year saw the release of fine albums from trendy US acts such as Best Coast and Sharon Von Etten [sic] that bore the unmistakable influence of Fleetwood Mac's classic Seventies period, as did work from blockbuster pop artists Mumford and Sons and Taylor Swift."

Regrettably, the best explanation I've found isn't from my fellow millennial cohort. Before I had any inkling of what true disappointment could feel like, NPR's Bob Boilen cracked the Fleetwood Mac trend nut in an essay that, predictably, was about why he never really liked "Rumors."

"It has happened over and over again in the past few years. Someone in their 20s tells me how much they love Fleetwood Mac," he writes "It's all relative. In 2013, the lockstep dance beats — the heart of electronic dance music — and the drummers playing to click tracks — the heart of pop — make Rumours feel organic. … back then they seemed like hippies dressed too well. These days it seems like a painting from a long ago past, almost Renaissance."

And maybe that's just the thing. We never got a chance to experience Fleetwood Mac in their original context. We get to invent our own.

Most writing about millennials reduces them to their purchasing power (or lack thereof), or depicts them as this cool amorphous blob of monocultural whiteness, but just like Stevie Nicks, my generation's relationship with Fleetwood Mac is delightfully hard to pin down. Months ago, in discussing this story, the Digg edit staff came up with a myriad of explanations — it makes them feel closer to their parents, it's tied into the resurgence of witchcraft, they saw Stevie Nicks in "American Horror Story: Coven" — all more or less valid.

"Time cast a spell on you / But you won't forget me" Stevie Nicks sings in "Silver Springs." She wasn't singing about us. But she's right.​