Watch Harry Styles Cover Fleetwood Mac’s ‘The Chain’
When former One Direction singer and Mick Jagger lookalike Harry Styles released his self-titled debut album in May, it was considered to be a tribute to '70s classic rock, like Queen, T. Rex and Elton John. Now he's adding Fleetwood Mac to the mix by covering "The Chain."
You can watch his live performance of the song above.
Consequence of Sound notes that Styles' version of "The Chain" comes from BBC Radio 1's Live Lounge, and, in addition to playing the Fleetwood Mac classic, he also performed two of his own songs, "Sign of the Times" and "Two Ghosts."
"The Chain" kicked off the second side of Fleetwood Mac's monumental 1977 album Rumours. It's the only song in the band's catalog to be credited to all five members of the band's classic lineup -- Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, Christine McVie, John McVie and Mick Fleetwood -- and is considered to be a metaphor for how the group stayed together after their well-documented interpersonal history. "The Chain" was also used as the title of a 1992 career-spanning box set from the band.
"The Chain" originally began as "Keep Me There," a song written by Christine McVie from an earlier session that had never been completed. The closing section, which came from Fleetwood and John McVie, was then added.
"We didn't get a vocal and left it for a long time in a bunch of pieces," Buckingham once explained to Rolling Stone. "It almost went off the album. Then we listened back and decided we liked the bridge, but didn't like the rest of the song. So I wrote verses for that bridge, which was originally not in the song and edited those in."
Buckingham then re-purposed a minor-key guitar part from a song written by himself and Nicks, "Lola (My Love)," to give some color to the verse. Nicks then wrote new lyrics after the music had been recorded. "The ending was the only thing left from [Christine McVie's] original track," Buckingham noted. "We ended up calling it 'The Chain' because it was a bunch of pieces."
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