Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors album is my Station Eleven.
We all have a story, album, film, book that came into our lives and never left us. This creative offering became a talisman for us in our lives; showing up again and again to remind us of significance. Reminding us of our connection to others. Reminding us of connection to ourselves. Reminding us of our value, our love, our art, our journey, our history.
The book and now TV show, Station Eleven, is a story about the power of this kind of creative effort. A seemingly insignificant (only 5 copies were made) graphic novel, written and illustrated by a not yet known author, becomes a prophecy, a tome, a bible, a companion to some of the children who survive a pandemic. Interestingly enough, the pandemic is not the story. It is just a plot device (imagine that) allowing for the remaining population of Earth to be robbed of the internet, plumbing, clean water, and mass civilization. As these children grow up with this story and its art to guide them and in turn to call them home again, the book itself becomes a character in the story.
I was listening to one of my can’t miss podcasts recently, X-ray Vision, and through a soulful conversation with the host of the podcast and one of the lead makers of the TV Show Station Eleven, I found myself presented with the question: what is MY Station Eleven?
These two creatives, Jason Concepcion and Patrick Somerville, got me thinking about the seminal creative efforts in my own life that thread the chapters of my life together. Not just in its presence in my life but also how it shaded, influenced, colored my life by being a part of it.
I thought about Star Wars, my Dad took me to The Empire Strikes back when I was a kid and it 10000% provided me and my Dad with a proxy, George Lucas, through which to have connection. That led to a shared love of Dune; leading us to long, loving wandering conversations about spice and Colonialism when we couldn’t talk about Trump and COVID.
I considered that maybe my Station Eleven is Madonna. I’m not sure I need to say any more about that one. Maybe my Station Eleven is Harry Potter, or Game of Thrones, or the Grateful Dead. Then it came to me. Without a doubt: Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors album is my Station Eleven.
As a Gen Xer, records and radio were the way that I received my education in music. As a child living in rural Arkansas, the radio and records were also where I got most of my exposure to culture (we did have a TV but we didn’t watch it much as small kids). My first memory of hearing the dulcet tones of Stevie Nicks find me as a 5 year old (circa 1979) standing over a heat vent in the floor on an early, cool winter Arkansas morning, watching and feeling the HVAC heated air balloon out my nightgown. I was safe, I was warm, and I was loved.
Rumors was one of the audio cassettes that we owned. That meant it was in heavy rotation on the 45 minute car drive, every other weekend when my Mom would deliver us (me and my younger sister) to my Dad in a small cafe’s parking lot half way between the towns where each of my parents lived. We’d repeat this misadventure 36 hours later in reverse. The soundtrack in my Dad’s car was most frequently Kenny Rogers as he drove us back to our mother who would then return us to our primary household.
When I was fifteen we moved from the modern Confederacy, under the cover of darkness (literally, we flew in in the dark and I had no idea where we were until the sun came up the next day), to Connecticut. It is now 1990 and CD’s are how are are consuming our music. We adopt a weekend ritual in our New England lives; on Saturdays we clean this huge, drafty, old Victorian house that we live in. And the soundtrack? Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors. Also, to be fair, we were listening to a lot of Billy Joel and Lyle Lovett as a family at that time, too. But Stevie was there with me as I dusted and vacuumed while considering who I had a crush on, if I’d done that English assignment, and how I could get my 100 butterfly time down another minute. She seemed to be there, always.
Fast forward through my twenties and you find me singing along to songs from Rumors in all kinds of places: belting out Go Your Own Way through open car windows in Montana, bopping along quietly to You Make Loving Fun while making smoothies at a juice bar in Berkeley, to playing the tape over and over and over again on long bus rides through the Himalayan mountains in India on my yellow Sony walkman, to listening contemplatively to Songbird in front of my airstream trailer in Austin, Texas while smoking American Spirits considering the scale of my professional ambitions.
When I turned 40 my sister (yep, the same sister who shared the traumatizing kids of divorced parents meet in a parking lot experiences with me) gifted me the actual Rumors LP that we’d listened to all those years ago together when we were kids. My teenage son now has his own version of this LP in his room that he listens to on his record player. And so it continues.
Rumors continues to provide me the encouragement to Go My Own Way when I need to hear that. Rumors reminds me that You Make Loving Fun so own that shit. When I am moving on from relationships, habits, jobs: Rumors tells me I Never (had to) Go Back Again. And so much more.
What is your Station Eleven?
