“I like to keep each song that I write special. I don’t just reel them off and they become a formula. I could knock off a million songs a week if I felt that way, but I doubt they’d be very good. I’m a believer in quality and not quantity.”

Christine McVie on songwriting

December 1994

“Say You Love Me”

Music and Lyrics: Christine McVie

Producers: Fleetwood Mac & Keith Olsen

“Say You Love Me” peaked at #11 on the Billboard Hot 100 for three weeks and remains one of the band’s best-known songs. It helped the group’s self-titled album sell over eight million copies worldwide. In Canada, Shirley Eikhard covered the song and released it as a single several weeks in advance of Fleetwood Mac.

I read a quote about “Say You Love Me” that said the song came to you quickly—like all of your songs. And this interested me. It said you ‘Write fast and sparingly, only what is required of me.’ Is that an accurate quote and if so, could you elaborate on that, please?

Well, I mean, I’m not particularly prolific. Let’s put it that way. I don’t sit at home and write gazillions of songs, stacking them up unused for years.

I’m actually writing a lot more than I used to because my husband is a musician also and we do a lot of co-writing these days. So, we have a studio in the house. That’s when you see the Quintela popping up, that’s my husband. He knows how to work it and we do end up having a backlog of songs, which is really nice, and we enjoy doing it very much. But in the past, it was always, ‘Oh, we’re going to make a record? Okay. I’ll go in there and write my four songs.’

I read where when you were rehearsing “Say You Love Me” and Stevie and Lindsey joined in on the harmonies the sound was so good it that it took you.

Oh yeah, we all got goosebumps. It was just chemistry at its best you know. Everyone just looked at each other and went, ‘This is something.’