25 Years: The Chain (1992) 


 

Disc One
  1. Warm Ways
  2. Say You Love Me
  3. Don't Stop
  4. Rhiannon
  5. Walk a Thin Line
  6. Storms
  7. Go Your Own Way
  8. Sisters of the Moon
  9. Monday Morning
  10.Landslide
  11.Hypnotized
  12.Lay it All Down
  13.Angel
  14.Beautful Child
  15.Brown Eyes
  16.Save Me a Place
  17.Tusk
  18.Never Going Back Again
  19.Songbird
  
Disc Two
  1. Save Me
  2. Goodbye Angel
  3. Silver Springs
  4. What Makes You Think You're the One
  5. Think About Me
  6. Gypsy
  7. You Make Loving Fun
  8. Second Hand News
  9. Love in Store
  10.The Chain
  11.Teen Beat
  12.Dreams
  13.Only Over You
  14.I'm So Afraid
  15.Love is Dangerous
  16.Gold Dust Woman
  17.Not That Funny
  
Disc Three
  1. I Believe My Time Ain't Long
  2. Need Your Love So Bad
  3. Rattlesnake Shake
  4. Oh Well, Part 1
  5. Stop Messin' Round
  6. The Green Mnalishi
  7. Albatross
  8. Man of the World
  9. Love That Burns
  10.Black Magic Woman
  11.Watch Out
  12.String-a-Long
  13.Station Man
  14.Did You Ever Love Me
  15.Sentimental Lady
  16.Come a Little Bit Closer
  17.Heroes are Hard to Find
  18.Trinity
  19.Why
  
Disc Four
  1. Paper Doll
  2. Love Shines
  3. Stand Back
  4. Crystal
  5. Isn't it Midnight
  6. Big Love
  7. Everywhere
  8. Affairs of the Heart
  9. Heart of Stone
  10.Sara
  11.That's All for Everyone
  12.Over My Head
  13.Little Lies
  14.Eyes of the World
  15.Oh Diane
  16.In the Back of My Mind
  17.Make Me a Mask

 

Fleetwood Mac’s storied and often fragmented history presents an inherent challenge for any career-spanning compilation. With most bands, a box set serves as a convenient summary or celebratory retrospective. With Fleetwood Mac, however, the very concept becomes a logistical nightmare. This is, after all, a group that effectively operated as three distinct bands across three different decades—each with its own sound, lineup, and audience. Trying to unify that into a single package is ambitious. Trying to do so without any clear narrative or structure, as The Chain attempts, is something else entirely.

It’s not that the music is subpar—how could it be, with a catalog like this? But the presentation is so muddled, so lacking in basic chronology or thematic cohesion, that the entire set ends up feeling more like a shuffled playlist than a curated anthology. The only through-line here is the rhythm section of Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, who have anchored every iteration of the band from British blues to California soft-rock. Unfortunately, a solid rhythm section does not a coherent box set make.

The most perplexing decision lies in the sequencing. Instead of dividing the set into sensible phases—say, disc one for the Peter Green blues years, disc two for the Bob Welch transitional period, and discs three and four for the Buckingham/Nicks era—they opt for a strange shuffle. The “early” material is confined largely to disc three (why not disc one, chronologically?), and even then, it’s a patchwork. There’s too much stylistic variation crammed into one place for it to function as an effective primer. The band’s first seven years—already marked by enough lineup changes to require a flowchart—deserved a clearer, more linear presentation.

To its credit, The Chain does include a fair number of unreleased tracks, alternate takes, and rarities, some of which are genuinely worthwhile. Disc four, in particular, contains a few strong “new” songs that help anchor the project in something fresh. But even these inclusions feel haphazard. It’s unclear why certain songs were chosen over others, and there’s a lingering sense that the track selection was driven less by logic and more by a dartboard—or perhaps the need to meet a deadline.

For a band with as rich and complex a history as Fleetwood Mac, this was a missed opportunity. Rather than telling the story of the group’s evolution—from haunted blues to lush pop and beyond—it offers a fragmented scrapbook. There are moments of brilliance, yes, but they’re buried under a format that never quite decides what it wants to be.

For longtime fans, this does provide a decent catch-all for deeper cuts and hard-to-find material. For newcomers, it may serve as a curiosity—a confusing but tuneful introduction. But as a definitive document of one of rock’s most fascinating and fractured journeys? It falls short. Fleetwood Mac’s legacy deserved a more thoughtful, better structured telling. Instead, this box set feels like a half-finished essay—full of good points, but lacking an argument.


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