Another friend and fellow author, Alan Light, who has penned insightfully entertaining books on Prince’s Purple Rain and Leonard Cohen’s Halleluiah, (both of which have been reviewed here) has done it again with Don’t Stop: Why We (Still) Love Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. What? Another book about a massively popular over-hyped album? Why? Forget what you know about these types of stories, Light blows your expectations away. This is a book worth reading for the past, the present and the future of pop culture, musical evolution, and the human emotions that create it.
What Don’t Stop does that is different from the focus-on-one-album projects (something I did over ten years ago) is its concentration on the effects of the music, the lore, and the people who made it: How these converging aspects all work to keep Rumours alive and well in the public consciousness through social media, film, television, and influences on current artists, etc.
Much of what Light uncovers about this album and Fleetwood Mac, a band made up of couples breaking up, writing scathing songs about each other and getting together to record them, is mind-boggling. Somehow, beyond other classic albums from the 1970s classic-album-era, Rumours has transcended mere popularity and has embedded its purpose and longing, pain and redemption into people’s lives and philosophies, engendering a place of pure expression that oddly out-distances the most powerful music from any time.
Adding Millennial and Gen Z voices to incredible real-life stories of how Rumours continues to pop up in the strangest places to reemerge in the zeitgeist, Light frames it all with a humor and respect, assisting readers in understanding the power and promise of music.
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