Fleetwood Mac

Fleetwood Mac is a recurring musical presence in the narrator’s memories of Buckley and its surrounding social world. Its songs do more than establish a period soundtrack: they give private feelings a borrowed form, attach emotional meaning to particular scenes, and sometimes make an unsettling connection visible. The band’s music accompanies the narrator’s changing sense of himself, his friends, and the threats gathering around them, without resolving the uncertainty that shadows his recollections.

Songs as emotional markers

In the spring and summer of 1981, the narrator hears REO Speedwagon’s “Time for Me to Fly” on a mixtape as he, Thom Wright, and Susan Reynolds leave Windover Stables. He connects the song, which he describes as a ballad about someone finding the nerve to end a relationship, to his own sense of crossing from one realm into another. The stable visit itself has no particular incident attached to it; its importance lies in the afternoon leading into the night when the group first hears that Robert Mallory will join their senior class at Buckley. The song therefore becomes a marker of transition, its farewell lyric carrying an additional meaning for the narrator as the summer gives way to change.

Fleetwood Mac becomes a still more personal reference through “Tusk.” At a video space on Melrose, the narrator sits on the floor in a room with gray carpeting, ashtrays, and no furniture, watching footage of the band recording with the USC Marching Band at a deserted Dodgers Stadium. The video’s empty stadium and the musicians’ on-camera presence make an image the narrator has seen many times suddenly look new. He notices that Lindsey Buckingham, short-haired and dressed in a white T-shirt and sunglasses, resembles Terry Schaffer. The recognition is not a casual resemblance: it changes how he sees Terry, whom he finds newly attractive because of his response to Buckingham.

The video and the recognition of Terry

The resemblance unsettles the narrator enough that he quickly leaves the room. He recalls that Terry had introduced him to Buckingham backstage at the after-party for Fleetwood Mac’s final Hollywood Bowl performance on the Tusk tour. The memory gathers a specific social tableau around the discovery: Terry, Debbie Schaffer, Liz Schaffer, Thom, Susan, and the narrator had sat together in a box, eating Pioneer Chicken and drinking Taittinger from plastic flutes. The band is thus linked not only to a recorded image but to the narrator’s own remembered access to a celebrity performance and the people closest to him.

The narrator’s surprise is sharpened by the fact that the likeness had been available all along: he had seen the video repeatedly without making the connection. His account makes the moment a shift in perception rather than a new encounter with either man. Buckingham’s filmed image acts as an unexpected lens through which Terry becomes newly legible, and the narrator’s sudden attraction follows that visual recognition. Later, hearing “Tusk” again from a boom box at Buckley brings Terry back to mind as the narrator waits for a call about a screenplay Terry wants him to write. The song’s recurrence keeps the association active, joining attraction, anticipation, and the narrator’s creative ambitions.

Music, fear, and imagined scenes

Fleetwood Mac also figures in the narrator’s response to the Trawler murders and the fear they provoke. After the Trawler’s existence is announced, the narrator says that the news lends an atmosphere of evil and melodrama to events around him. He listens to Fleetwood Mac’s “I’m So Afraid” while alone in the empty house on Mulholland, high on Valium and walking along the veranda, imagining that someone is watching. Lindsey Buckingham’s guitar seems to echo across the setting in his recollection. The song gives the imagined surveillance a dramatic frame, but the effect does not last: the narrator soon turns to marijuana to sleep, trying to numb the fear that returns after the lights go out.

This use of music sits alongside the narrator’s broader habit of turning experience into scenes. At the video space, after a disturbing incident in the hallway, he thinks about how to make it darker and more cinematic for the novel he is writing. Elsewhere, a song can make an ordinary afternoon feel like a passage into another life, or turn a familiar video into a revelation about someone he knows. Fleetwood Mac’s music belongs to this unstable overlap between lived experience and the stories the narrator constructs from it: a song can intensify a real fear or rearrange the meaning of a remembered face, but it does not certify what the narrator imagines.

A soundtrack of memory and uncertainty

The band’s appearances are embedded in a wider soundscape where pop music repeatedly accompanies private associations and social scenes. “Tusk” connects the video-space encounter with Terry to a later moment at school; “I’m So Afraid” accompanies the narrator’s isolated fear; and Fleetwood Mac’s recording session becomes the image through which the narrator revises his perception of Terry. These recurrences give the band a distinct narrative function: music becomes a cue that links separate moments, allowing memory to return with a new emphasis.

That function remains personal rather than definitive. The narrator describes how a song changes the atmosphere or meaning of a moment, but his memories preserve uncertainty about what is happening around him and how much of it he is shaping into narrative. Fleetwood Mac therefore stands at the boundary between evidence and interpretation: its songs and images are concrete parts of the scenes, while the emotional meanings they acquire reveal the narrator’s changing perspective. Through that tension, the band’s music becomes one of the ways the novel makes adolescence feel at once vividly staged and difficult to trust.