Seems like a dream

Before Buckingham and Nicks, there was Bob Welch — and “Hypnotized”, from Mystery to Me (1973), is the best five minutes of his Fleetwood Mac. Welch was deep into Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan books and collecting strange stories from friends, and he poured all of it into this: a song about unexplainable things, floating on one of the calmest grooves the band ever laid down.

The details in the lyric are real, or at least really borrowed. The “place down in Mexico” is Castaneda’s sorcerer country; the “strange, strange pond” with “sides like glass” came from a friend’s story about an eerie, perfectly-formed crater in the North Carolina woods that spooked him and his dirt-biking buddies. Welch later said this was the song of his that he stayed fondest of — the one that had the magic.

Listen to how little it does: Mick Fleetwood keeps a single unhurried pulse, two guitars circle each other, and the chorus just shrugs — “seems like a dream, they got me hypnotized.” Then it fades out like it was never quite there.