Deep Dive: Fleetwood Mac, FUTURE GAMES

Today we celebrate the birthday of the late, great Fleetwood Mac guitarist/vocalist Danny Kirwan, and to commemorate the occasion, we thought we’d take a deep dive into the band’s catalog and revisit one of the early ‘70s albums which featured Kirwan in the lineup.

Produced by the band members themselves and engineered by the legendary Martin Rushent, FUTURE GAMES was recorded at London’s Advision Studios between June and August 1971, and the fact that it was released on September 3 of the same year shows just how quick the turnaround was. In addition to Kirwan, the album also stands out as being the first Fleetwood Mac album to include Christine McVie as a full member as well as the first to feature Bob Welch, but it’s also notable for being the band’s first album without Jeremy Spencer.

When Fleetwood Mac turned in FUTURE GAMES, Reprise Records said that they wouldn’t release it with only seven songs, so the band popped back into the studio and laid down “What a Shame,” doing so as a jam, hence the songwriting credits including every member of the band. The album’s lone single, “Sands of Time,” failed to chart in either the U.S. or the U.K., but one tune has managed to find a tremendous audience over the years: the title track, penned by Welch, which is by far the most streamed song on the album.

FUTURE GAMES may not have been a gargantuan hit in America, topping out at #91 on the Billboard 200, but it did kick off a trend for a few albums where each album did better than one that preceded it, with 1972’s BARE TREES hitting #70 and PENGUIN hitting #49, so it still furthered Fleetwood Mac’s fanbase in the States.