Future Games

It's a song about mauvais-fois. For those who didn't take four years of high school French, that's that feeling that you get when you're lying in bed at night and you're mind fills with all these neurotic possibilities about the ways you've screwed up in the past and the ways that you could screw up again, but ultimately, it's exciting too, because you look at all the different ways your life could go. So it's about excitement mixed with apprehension.

This is one of the best songs from the "Welch" years.

great seductive sound to it. What i mean by seductive is that it traps the listener in a parallel world almost. great stuff by the legendary fleetwood mac!

Bob Welch had a bit of a thing for the occult in those days (Hypnotized, Bermuda Triangle, Future Games, Night Watch, The Ghost). He is careful not to say what the "thing" was in this song - Ouija board? Pendulum? Trance channeling? Reading chicken entrails? Sex magic? who knows? except that he did it in the dark.

At any rate, Bob's presumably female partner (babe) seems to have been spooked by the future, and Bob is reassuring her that we all wonder about the future, and to some extent that we have some voice in our future, even if too many, as in the chorus, sit through the chance to do so.

I wonder if it was perhaps that hideous cover for "French Kiss" that spooked her? To imagine that in 1970 would scare nearly anyone.

And I agree with the other comments that, as with much of Welch's best work with Fleetwood Mac, much of the meaning is in the sound and feel of the songs. The occult is a good subject for his softer style.

This tune has a very "dream-like" feel to it, and there is basically alot of things within this tune that are revealed as some kind of "truth" and/or "hope", like...

1. we all have these kind of dreams/feelings ie. "I'm not the only one.."

2. the future is ours to shape and mold ie. "You invent the future that you want to face"

3. the future will turn out "ok" ie. "All of the wild things tomorrow will tame"

Looking up the lyrics to Future Games introduced me to this Website, and now to this comment page...waaay back in my childhood I had to transcribe these lyrics myself by rewinding a cassette tape over and over and OVER again, trying to figure out what the bleep Bob Welch was saying. This song was haunting me so much I had to come read the lyrics, and play it over and over again. aaaahhh, childhood memories!

Fleetwood mac iterations that exited PRIOR to the blasphemy of those two dreadful Americans are the ONLY Fleetwood Mac, in my personal opinion. (a sentiment/comment I plan to repeat for any song lyric posted for fleetwood mac... you read it here first!)

Future Games is a song that relates a Mystical LSD Experience of Divinity to the songwriter's situation in the World, in Time, Present, Past and Future, and how that ultimately relates to everything else, including Divinity.

The comments above are great. I always found the most meaning in the final words, which I always heard as "we are not the only ones" but the text says "I know I am not the only one" This song came out the same year as John Lennon's "Imagine" which says, "you may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope some day you will join us, and the world will be one". Future Games taps into the sense that I am not the only one dreaming these dreams; it is communal too, or least it was in those times, as well as reminding us of the games we play around our fears for the future. And in this song the sounds and melodies of these future games are incomparably more evocative and visionary even than in "imagine".

Great comments here. I LOVE this tune. It's so sweet and spooky. Poor Bob was a really nice mix of Rock and Jazz and stuff... Very ethereal and hypnotic... and very Other Worldly. I can't think of many Songwriters that filled this same Musical and Lyrical Vein.

My very good buddy, Al, did a nice transcription of this for anyone who wants to learn the Guitar Chords He says he's not exactly sure he got the lyrics right. : )

https://tabs.ultimate-guitar.com/tab/fleetwood-mac/future-games-chords-3489227

[Edit: Mistake]