VA - Legacy: A Tribute To Fleetwood Mac's Rumours (1998)

Fleetwood Mac's Rumours is one of the handful of genuine blockbusters in pop/rock history, selling over 40 million copies around the world in 20 years, which means that most musicians have heard it at least once, even if they were not influenced by it. Keeping that in mind, it would seem that Legacy: A Tribute to Fleetwood Mac's Rumours -- a track by track re-recording of the album by contemporary artists -- had the potential to be a collection of diverse reinterpretations of familiar songs. Instead, it's a bunch of adult contemporary and adult alternative pop/rock artists primarily sticking to the original arrangements. Some groups do shake it up a bit -- Matchbox 20 recasts "Never Going Back Again" in minor chords, the Goo Goo Dolls rock up "I Don't Want to Know" -- but for the most part, the interpretations follow the original recording. That's not necessarily a bad thing -- Elton John's "Don't Stop," Shawn Colvin's "The Chain" and Duncan Sheik's "Songbird" are all pleasant -- but it doesn't make the album particularly interesting, either. Of course, it would have been hard to record a new version of Rumours that betters the original, but this tribute is so predictable that it's a little numbing.~Legacy: A Tribute to Fleetwood Mac's Rumours Review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine