The Ledge - Ken Caillat's Rumours book on april (and thinking in the next.. Tusk?)

Quote:

Originally Posted by WildHearted (Post 1031771)

I'd love to read about either Tusk or Mirage... The recording of Mirage specifically never seems to get talked about a lot by anyone, really.

True, compared to Rumours, Mick doesn't talk enough about the actual recording sessions. He just describes where they recorded, and about the songs:

We arrived as the sun was rising on the day we were to actually begin recording. We pulled up into the drive, looked up, and saw Stevie Nicks peering out of the ancient leaded-glass window of the chateau, looking like Queen Guinevere in the misty early light. It was as if she were waiting for us, being the dawn-type lady that she is.

I had asked the band to record outside the United States, so that as a citizen of Monte Carlo I wouldn't be liable for American taxes...
It turned out that the writers had some splendid new music together, and recording was fun. Le Chateau, the "Honky Chateau" of Elton John fame, was a muchfavored studio of Euro-rock aristocracy private, very red mantle, with great food and stupendous ambience. (We had it redecorated for the girls, spending the usual pile.) Plus it wasn't too far from Paris. So into Paris I'd go, with our crew member Dennis Keen. One morning on the way back from one of these forays, we passed a stable and I decided I had to ride the remaining distance to the chateau through the ancient fog-shrouded countryside. So I got this big grey mare, took a long pull from my everpresent silver flask of good cognac, and rode home, and then right up the stone steps of the house's main entrance.
Quelle scandale! Amidst a grand to-do, Stevie swept down the big staircase, leapt on the back of my horse, and cantered off through the greening orchards, her long cape billowing behind her.

Mirage, the album we recorded in France, was an attempt to get into the Rumours groove again, but updated. Chris's songs, especially "Hold Me," reflected her bittersweet reflections on her relationship with Dennis Wilson, which had almost resulted in marriage but had ended instead the previous December, when Dennis had moved out of Chris's house and her life. Christine had loved Dennis with all her heart (we all did), and he was a fascinating if exhausting episode in her life. I felt some responsibility, because I had introduced them. Dennis was -an utter loon, and Chris was like my sister. I watched in trepidation as Chris almost went mad trying to keep up with Dennis, who was already like a man with twenty thyroid glands, not counting the gargantuan amounts of coke and booze and pills he was always shoving into himself. I was very torn, because Dennis was a friend, and I'd see him ****ing up and chasing skirts and didn't know whether it was my role to say anything to Chris. In the end I didn't have to.
She got tired of spending a fortune and her health on maintaining Dennis on the road to his eventual destiny. In any case, "Hold Me" was a great song, and became the first hit single of the new album.

Stevie's songs including the utterly majestic "Gypsy" were what she had saved for us after recording her first album, Bella Donna, which was about to sell ten million copies and make Miss Nicks the Queen of Rock. Some leftover! "Gypsy" is one of Fleetwood Mac's greatest works of art; for me it really crystallises that whole period of the early 1980s, when we were in our mid-thirties and beginning to look back on our lost youth.

Lindsey Buckingham had also been recording a solo project, which became the Law and Order album. He arrived in France with two good songs, "Can't Go Back" and "Eyes of the World. " Three others, "Book of Love," "Empire State," and "Oh Diane," were written with Richard Dashut at the chateau and in the three other studios in L.A. where Mirage was wrapped up over the next seven months.