Quote:
Originally Posted by MikeInNV
That's exactly right. Fleetwood Mac could have done anything in 1979. They did not have that luxury in 2003. The songs had to be radio friendly in order to have even the modest success that they did.
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My point got slightly misinterpreted. In what way was
Say You Will (the song) radio friendly in the 2003 market? It's a song that chugs along sweetly in 4/4 with all its pat ingredients from 1978 firmly in place: the sing-along chorus, the insta-sugar sentiment of the lyrics, the chiming acoustic guitars, the safe and sane electric lead right out of the session hack's playbook, the cloth-rich harmonies, etc. Everything was lifted right out of three decades earlier. What did kids in 2003 care about any of that?
How did
Say You Will "fit" with what
we were all listening to in 2003?
In suggesting
Come and those other songs, I was trying to think of anything on the album that would have gotten some attention owing to its more contemporary sound.
Say You Will fooled no one. If people heard it at all, they heard it as intentionally retro blandness. It's been Fleetwood Mac's curse ever since the mid-seventies, when THEY were the measure of what radio hits should sound like, to try to regain that stature by going deliberately retro. But the only time I can think of when that approach worked for them (commercially) was with the 1997 reunion -- and there were peripheral reasons for that particular victory.