Christine McVie has announced that she will be releasing a new solo album featuring re-imagined versions of her biggest hits with Fleetwood Mac. The album will be titled Songbird, after one of the singer's solo compositions on Rumours.
Although no official release date for the album has yet been confirmed, McVie says it will emerge in June.
Exactly which compositions have been reworked for Songbird has not yet been disclosed. Some of McVie's hits with the group include Say You Love Me, You Make Loving Fun, Everywhere and Little Lies.
According to the vocalist, as disclosed in a new interview with Gary Barlow on BBC Radio 2 show We Write the Songs, the project was produced by legendary English studio veteran Glyn Johns (The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, The Who) and features input from Grammy-winning composer and conductor Vince Mendoza.
“I’ve just finished an album which is a compilation of my biggest hits,” she explains. “But they’ve all been produced again by Glyn Johns [with] Vince Mendoza on strings, who does this fantastic version of Songbird. We’ve just now actually re-cut it with a complete string orchestra and it sounds beautiful.”
McVie says that all the re-imagined Fleetwood Mac songs on the album "sound completely different" to their originals.
When asked if she would consider touring the album, the singer/keyboardist replies, “That I daren’t comment on yet! I’m very cagey about things like that.”
The Fleetwood Mac star last released a solo album in 2004 with In The Meantime, and issued a joint self-titled project with bandmember/guitarist Lindsey Buckingham in 2017.
Discussing her reunion with the band in 2014 following a 16 year hiatus, she explains how she rekindled her relationship with her fellow band members. “I just needed to get away,” she said of her departure in 1998.
“I was quite happy for the first eight, 10 years, just living my life in the country in Kent. I had a big old rambling manor house that I lived in, and I was loving my life.
"Then I just started to kind of miss the band again, and it was actually me who tackled Mick [Fleetwood] and said, ‘How would you feel if I were to come back?’ And he went and spoke to all the other guys because they’d all been still playing this whole time.
"You can quote Lindsay as having said, ‘Well, she better bloody well mean it. If she wants to come back, she better bloody well stay!’ Or something like that. But I did. I went back, and it was great – those final years were great.”
When host Barlow asks whether Fleetwood Mac's most recent tour was their “lap of honour", McVie disagrees.
"None of us know what’s happening with Fleetwood Mac," she notes. "With COVID and everything else, we’ve got to all of us be very careful. But you know, this is not necessarily the end of the tale, so maybe the lap of honour is yet to come."
