Songbird

 Learn your instrument. Be honest. Don't do anything phony. There is so much crap floating around. There is plenty of room for a bit of honest writing.

Christine McVie

It is now so many years ago.

I dimly remember the Northeastern University student union in Boston, circa 1977. There was a snack bar, after a fashion. Tables and chairs where people studied, read, chatted. Not only was it pre cellphone, it was pre most music devices, and certainly there was no bluetooth. There was a jukebox.

Finishing my degree by doubling up on classes (including taking a one credit course in first aid from my buddy Joe) I had little time for myself, except the occasional space between lectures. I'd built an eclectic college career - dropped out for a while, gone to a different school for a year, returned to NU to get a degree - and had committed to moving to Denver following graduation, once I made a bit of money and looked for a job there.

Most of my friends had either graduated, or were gone. Joe was still around, and I was living with his parents, running up a big phone bill with a girl I'd met in Kansas. She attended the University of Denver - it's now beginning to make sense, right? I just had to finish college...

From time to time, sitting alone with my thoughts and a newspaper or a book, I'd toss a quarter in the jukebox and play "Go Your Own Way" by Fleetwood Mac. It spoke to the me who had made an easy progression of classes and summer jobs into a complicated game of three-D chess. The me who had traveled cross country alone on a bike without any real bike camping experience. The me who had, through my parents, a million influential friends in Western New York but planned...no, was set on moving to a place where I knew exactly three people. Go your own way.

Stevie Nix and Lindsey Buckingham were the front performers, at times yelling the lyrics to each other in what was, among other things, an angry song that captured the harsh, raw and bitter emotions between the two in response to their break-up as a couple. The energy between them was hardly positive, but to quote musician Randy Newman, at least they got a song out of it. For me, it was an anthem.

And, in the background, playing piano and singing support vocals was Christine McVie. In an era when the brassy and alluring Stevie Nix garnered most of the attention, Christine was a solid presence. She had a beautiful voice, a reassuring stage presence and when the spotlight was on her she was both pitch perfect and elegantly heartfelt. She didn't so much belt out a song as she caressed it gently for the beauty she'd intended when she wrote it. There wasn't the come hither Stevie Nix presented (who performed for a time with a bed as a prop), but then that was not what Ms. McVie was offering. It was not an experience, it was a commitment. She was honest.

Many of Fleetwood Mac's most memorable, catchiest and singable tunes were written and sung by Ms. McVie. Most were inspired by loves won and lost, triumphs and tragedies of the heart. Little pieces in time, with which the rest of us marked our own life's journey.

Christine left professional music for a time, returning in her later years to sing the old songs, perform some new writing and be with her friends. She passed away in England after a short illness, at seventy-nine.

The one incomprehensible fact, in my mind anyway, was that Christine McVie would ever be seventy-nine. That's not how I picture her...or ever will. She will always be young and beautiful, singing songs that told me a whole wonderful life was ahead of me.

It was, and is, going my own way. Thank you so much, Christine, for lighting the path.