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Originally Posted by SteveMacD
The “covers” are songs from the new guys’ past works.
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In Fleetwood Mac, they're covers, not covers with quotation marks (just as
Jumping at Shadows was a cover).
Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveMacD
But, really, look at some of the early 1975 set: a Chicken Shack cover, a Duster Bennet cover, two Buckingham Nicks covers, and a Curtis Brothers cover.
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Absolutely fine. Nothing wrong with covers. Some adventurous bands are famous for their covers. It's nice to approach a cover with a little more personal voice than Fleetwood Mac sometimes shows. But more important, my issue is not with covers (I often love covers) but with a core of hits and concert songs that remains static tour after tour. This current configuration of the band had every judicial opportunity—and every reason—to invent a new core and throw the stale past to the wind. It did not. It opted to once again deliver
The Chain,
Dreams,
Say You Love Me,
Everywhere,
Rhiannon,
Gypsy,
Landslide,
You Make Loving Fun,
Gold Dust Woman,
Go Your Own Way, and
Don't Stop with the same performance approach and even the same spatial place in the set.
The new stuff—
Black Magic Woman,
I Got You,
Tell Me All the Things You Do,
Don't Dream It's Over,
Free Fallin',
All Over Again—was mildly refreshing. But it was obviously presented as addenda to the old set, not a substitute. The 2018 set was created because it was
familiar to audiences, not because it was new to them.
Bands don't just exist onstage, too. What's with the latest CD anthology? Actually, Lindsey's anthology is also stale (but less so because his material is less familiar). I don't see the point in these things. They're repackagings and they serve a marketing purpose, not an aesthetic purpose. How many years does one need to rehash one's own contributions to pop culture before one is satisfied?
After casting off an iconic member and hiring two new members, Fleetwood Mac had every good reason to reinvent itself. It did not. It's merely pretending to be what it has been for forty years already. With this band mindset, we'll see whether a new album comes out of all this—new albums generally come out of a collective desire to forge ahead down some other road, the road less traveled.