Dreams

Stevie Nicks wrote “Dreams” on a black velvet-and-mirrors bed in a studio at the Record Plant in Sausalito, during the sessions for 1977’s Rumours – an album being recorded while nearly every romantic relationship inside the band was simultaneously ending. Nicks and guitarist Lindsey Buckingham had just split; bassist John McVie and keyboardist Christine McVie were divorcing during the same sessions. “Dreams” is Nicks’s side of that wreckage, delivered with a strange, floating calm rather than the anger a breakup song usually reaches for – “thunder only happens when it’s raining,” sung almost as consolation rather than accusation. It became Fleetwood Mac’s only Hot 100 No. 1, in 1977, off an album that would go on to sell more than 40 million copies worldwide.

Then it did what most 1970s singles do: it became a classic-rock radio staple and otherwise left the charts, for 43 years. In September 2020, an Idaho factory worker named Nathan Apodaca filmed himself longboarding to work, drinking straight from a bottle of Ocean Spray Cran-Raspberry, lip-syncing to “Dreams” after his truck broke down – posted with no particular ambition beyond documenting an ordinary commute. The video’s loose, sun-lit calm matched the song’s own mood closely enough that it spread across TikTok by the millions, and Fleetwood Mac’s 43-year-old single re-entered the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 21 that October, logging its best-ever weekly streaming numbers in the process – more plays in a single week than it had likely received at any point since its original chart run.

What the moment captured, more than any one song’s staying power, was how little a 1977 recording needed to change to feel current again. Nobody remixed “Dreams,” sped it up, or repackaged it for a new audience – a longboarder with a bottle of juice simply attached himself to it, and the song did the rest, because the specific, unhurried calm Nicks built into the recording forty-three years earlier turned out to still be exactly the mood a viral video needed.

Greatest of All Time. Fleetwood Mac’s only Hot 100 No. 1 – and the oldest song, by far, ever sent back into the chart’s top 10 by a single viral video.

Hero image: Fleetwood Mac, 1977, courtesy of Warner Bros. Records. Public domain in the United States.