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Old 12-06-2018, 04:50 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by cbBen View Post
Just listened to the whole album. Scratch what I said about production above. This narrative that the band sacrificed record sales to do something experimental now makes sense to me.

There is nothing even close to a "Go Your Own Way" "Dreams" or "You Make Loving Fun" among these songs. "Over & Over" is too slow to have been a hit.
Isn't that kind of the point of the album? When the band said it wanted to confound expectations among the public and radio programmers, it wasn't just spewing empty words. That's exactly what was meant—we don't want to create another batch of ultra-accessible, radio-ready singles. We don't want to be forever regarded as a singles band. Like Tusk or hate it (or be indifferent to it), it isn't supposed to be a collection of independent singles for media owners and executives to use as measuring sticks for Christmas sales or hit parade charts. The tracks don't follow "rules." The drums and bass don't sound the way drums and bass are "supposed" to sound on the radio, and neither do the vocals or the guitars. Nothing fits the formula: nothing sounds like Rumours or the white album, nothing lasts the "correct" amount of time (Tusk tracks are either too short or too long), hooks don't grab you the way they're "supposed" to, and even the track list jumps all over the place without the formulaic narrative rise and fall of the late seventies concept albums. Tusk is designed to jar you. The intent is to make you very, very aware of its differences from the swamp of music on the radio in 1979: No More Tears by Streisand, Babe by Styx, Escape by Rupert Holmes, Heartache Tonight by the Eagles, Rise by Herp Albert, Sad Eyes by Robert John, Love You Inside Out by the Bee Gees, Reunited by Peaches & Herb, and so on.

There isn't a single song on Tusk that isn't more playful, more inventive, more suffused with a sly and ironic sophisticated musicality than that batch of garbage on the radio. If Warner Brothers and the radio programmers tell you to deliver another batch of Rumours classics every few years until you disband, you tell them to Tusk themselves.

Attitudinally, this was Fleetwood Mac's best moment since the band's 1968 debut album.

Quote:
"Not That Funny" may be the worst song on the album. Making a single of that song baffles me.
I appreciated just how snotty it was on vinyl, and then I really turned on to the band's extended jamming at the tail end of the Tusk tour. Their most inventive and tightest live playing was on Not That Funny in August and September 1980. They were doing things that no other pop-rock band had the cajones or the skill to do, especially Lindsey, Mick, and John.

Quote:
But however it was produced, this album was not going to be a bigger success with this set of songs.
The band was trying to teach us that there are different kinds of success. Commercial success is just one kind. There's also the supremely refreshing success of teaching listeners that they don't really need to hear the Say You Love Me redux (dressed up slightly differently) for the next thirty years. That way, if all goes well, when the band does the album after Tusk, nobody knows what to expect at all—you've turned everyone into a tabula rasa.

Quote:
"That's All For Everyone" is a masterpiece.
It's like what they said about the Pray for Guidance segment of DW Suite: It's the best thing Brian Wilson never wrote. It's haunting, absolutely gorgeous. Did you ever hear the live rehearsal run-through of it?
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