(Credits: Far Out / Album Cover)
Tue 7 April 2026 2:30, UK
Not many people remember the limbo period of Fleetwood Mac, which limped on between the exit of Peter Green and the discovery of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks.
They were something of a confused band at that point, abandoning the gritty blues rock roots that Green helped establish and instead moving towards something a little bit more experimental. But the result was somewhat muddled, aching between the two sounds and never really having a discernible identity.
Bob Welch was trying to lead the band into new sonic territory, with the support of Christine McVie, who at that time was vastly underutilised as a vocalist. Later records would showcase just how brilliant a songwriter she was when given the room to explore her ideas, but in ‘73, the space for her to be the band’s leading woman simply wasn’t there.
So Welch shared duties with Dave Walker, as Mick Fleetwood watched yet another vocal pairing from his drum kit, desperately hoping it would shoot the band to stardom. The outlook for the most part was relatively bleak, until Welch pulled one song from his armoury that would subtly inform the successful dream rock direction of the later formation of the band.
“‘Hypnotized’ was first a ‘shuffle-time blues rocker’ for singer Dave Walker when Fleetwood Mac had Dave on board as a band member for a (very) short while,” Welch explained of the song, but he continued, realising that if anything, it served as the nail in the coffin for Walker.
(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Elaborating, “When we realised that Dave was not fitting in musically with what we were trying to do, I hurriedly re-wrote the lyrics in Christine McVie’s upstairs living room.”
Welch put together this sultry soundscape that was in keeping with the song’s enchanting title. Vocal harmonies swirled around Mick Fleetwood’s beat, and reverberating guitar licks were intermittently dropped into the ether to create a song that represented the infinite depths of space and time.
Ultimately, that was the source of inspiration for Welch, who later explained that his deep interest in UFOs and extra-terrestrial travel was the blueprint for the song.
He explained, “I was (and still am) interested in the paranormal – UFOs, the Carlos Castaneda books about the Yaqui Indian ‘sorcerer’ Don Juan. So I incorporated a lot of these themes and references into the song. The ‘place down in Mexico’ refers to Castaneda’s Yaqui sorcerer, Don Juan, who is presumably doing ‘astral’ travel.”
Adding, “The ‘strange, strange pond’ with ‘sides like glass’ refers to a strange anomalous depression in the North Carolina woods near Winston-Salem, North Carolina, which a friend told me about, which, at the time, freaked him (and his dirt-biking buddies) out.”
It may have seemed wildly irreverent to the founding members of the band, Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, who, up until that point, had been used to the charming lyrics of Peter Green’s love-fuelled blues rock. But little did they know that this small step into esoterica would actually open the door for a future line-up, led by the mythically charged Stevie Nicks, who would make them the definitive spiritual band.
