The Chain
by Fleetwood Mac
- 76
- BPM
- D major
- Key
- 10B
- Camelot
- 55
- Danceability
- 1
- Acousticness
"The Chain" by Fleetwood Mac was stitched together from pieces of other songs. It began as Christine McVie's "Keep Me There," the first track the band recorded for Rumours, tracked on February 2, 1976. On the band's third run-through that day, John McVie played the bass line that ended up in the final version. The ending section was the only part of the original recording the band kept.
Later they reworked the song with new verses. Lindsey Buckingham recycled the intro of "Lola (My Love)," an earlier duet with Stevie Nicks from their 1973 album. Nicks had written lyrics for a different song, one with the words "if you don't love me now, you will never love me again." Buckingham asked her to donate them for the verses, and she agreed. A Dobro supplied the verse riff. Buckingham said it was retitled "The Chain" because it was a bunch of pieces, and much of the assembly was done by splicing tape with a razor blade at the Record Plant in Sausalito, California, with engineers Ken Caillat and Richard Dashut.
It is the only song credited to all five members of the Rumours lineup. Nicks maintained it was mainly her song. In Britain its instrumental section became the theme tune for the BBC and Channel 4's Formula One coverage. It has more than 1.5 billion streams on Spotify.
The Chain runs at 76 BPM, the tempo of soul, trip-hop and half-time hip-hop. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 3.16 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 789 ms. It is in D major, Camelot 10B, which shares its notes with B minor and mixes cleanly with G major and A major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.