The press also wrote about a rumoured return of original Fleetwood Mac members Peter Green, Danny Kirwan, and Jeremy Spencer for a tenth anniversary tour.

The three parties shared production duties, while the more technically adept Caillat was responsible for most of the engineering; he took a leave of absence from Wally Heider Studios in Los Angeles on the premise that Fleetwood Mac would eventually use their facilities.

[13] Christine McVie and Nicks decided to live in two condominiums near the city's harbour, while the male contingent stayed at the studio's lodge in the adjacent hills.

[14] Recording occurred in a six-by-nine-metre (20 by 30 ft) room equipped with a 3M 24-track tape machine, a range of high-quality microphones, and an API mixing console with 550A equalisers; the latter were used to control frequency differences or a track's timbre.

[18] When the band jammed, Fleetwood often played his drum kit outside the studio's partition screen to better gauge Caillat's and Dashut's reactions to the music's groove.

[12] As the studio sessions progressed, the band members' new intimate relationships that formed after various separations started to have a negative effect on Fleetwood Mac.

"[3] Nicks has suggested that Fleetwood Mac created the best music when in the worst shape,[22] while, according to Buckingham, the tensions between band members formed the recording process and led to "the whole being more than the sum of the parts".

[26] Christine McVie's "Songbird", which Caillat felt needed a concert hall's ambience, was recorded during an all-night session at Zellerbach Auditorium in Berkeley, across San Francisco Bay from Sausalito.

The rest of Fleetwood Mac, with Caillat and Dashut, struggled to finalise the overdubbing and mixing of Rumours after the Sausalito tapes were damaged by repeated use during recording; the kick and snare drum audio tracks sounded "lifeless".

Through a pair of headphones which played the damaged tapes in his left ear and the safety master recordings in his right, he converged their respective speeds aided by the timings provided by the snare and hi-hat audio tracks.

After hearing Bee Gees' "Jive Talkin'", Buckingham and co-producer Dashut built up the song with four audio tracks of electric guitar and the use of chair percussion to evoke Celtic rock.

[41] The whole of the band crafted the rest using an approach akin to creating a film score; John McVie provided a prominent solo using a fretless bass guitar, which marked a speeding up in tempo and the start of the song's final third.

Inspired by R&B, "You Make Loving Fun" has a simpler composition and features a clavinet, a special type of keyboard instrument, while the rhythm section plays interlocking notes and beats.

[42][43] The label's aggressive marketing of 1975's Fleetwood Mac, in which links with dozens of FM and AM radio stations were formed across America, aided the promotion of Rumours.

[46][47] The front cover features a stylised shot of Fleetwood and Nicks dressed in her "Rhiannon" stage persona, while the back has a montage of band portraits; all the photographs were taken by Herbert Worthington.

[19] On 28 February 1977, after rehearsing at SIR Studios in Los Angeles, Fleetwood Mac embarked on the Rumours Tour, which visited North America, Europe, Oceania and Asia.

[46] Nicks has noted that, after performing mostly Rumours songs during gigs, the band initially encountered poor reception from fans who were not accustomed to the new material.

[48] A one-off March performance at a benefit concert for United States Senator Birch Bayh in Indiana was followed by a short tour of the UK, the Netherlands, France, and Germany in April.

[53][54] The last two discs were a 140-gram gatefold vinyl edition of the album and a DVD of "The Rosebud Film", a documentary created by Michael Collins to promote the European leg of the "Rumours" tour, with behind-the-scenes interviews, rehearsal footage and live performances.

[59][61][62] Rumours Live was issued in two physical formats: a two-CD set, and a double-LP gatefold edition, pressed on 180g black vinyl, with lacquers cut by Chris Bellman at Bernie Grundman Mastering.

[74] Rolling Stone magazine's John Swenson believed the interplay among the three vocalists was one of the album's most pleasing elements; he stated, "Despite the interminable delay in finishing the record, Rumours proves that the success of Fleetwood Mac was no fluke.

[77] Robert Hilburn was less receptive and called Rumours a "frustratingly uneven" record in his review for the Los Angeles Times,[78] while Juan Rodriguez of The Gazette suggested that, while the music is "crisper and clearer", Fleetwood Mac's ideas are "slightly more muddled".

[79] The album finished fourth in The Village Voice's 1977 Pazz & Jop critics' poll, which aggregated the votes of hundreds of prominent reviewers.

"[64] According to Slant Magazine's Barry Walsh, Fleetwood Mac drew on romantic dysfunction and personal turmoil to create a timeless, five-star record,[81] while Andy Gill of The Independent claimed it "represents, along with The Eagles Greatest Hits, the high-water mark of America's Seventies rock-culture expansion, the quintessence of a counter-cultural mindset lured into coke-fuelled hedonism".

[68] In 2007, the BBC's Daryl Easlea labelled the sonic results as "near perfect", "like a thousand angels kissing you sweetly on the forehead",[82] while Patrick McKay of Stylus Magazine wrote, "What distinguishes Rumours—what makes it art—is the contradiction between its cheerful surface and its anguished heart.

[85][86] It re-entered the Billboard 200 top ten in October 2020 in the wake of a viral TikTok by Nathan Apodaca which showed him skateboarding while "Dreams" played, even prompting Mick Fleetwood, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham to create similar videos.

[98] Pop culture journalist Chuck Klosterman links the record's sales figures to its "really likable songs" but suggests that "no justification for greatness" is intrinsically provided by them.

[100] In 1998, Fleetwood produced and released Legacy: A Tribute to Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, an album that consisted of one cover of each song off Rumours by an act influenced by it, including alternative rock bands Tonic, Matchbox 20, and Goo Goo Dolls; Celtic rock groups The Corrs and The Cranberries; and singer-songwriters Elton John, Duncan Sheik, and Jewel.

It was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2003,[106] In 1998, Q placed it at number three—behind The Clash's London Calling and Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon—in its list of 50 Best Albums of the 70s.

In 2024, sound engineer Ken Caillat sued the creators of the play, alleging that they adapted his memoir Making Rumours: The Inside Story of the Classic Fleetwood Mac Album without permission.