Christine or Stevie: Who "writes and sings the tough lyrics"?

[TrueFaith77]

According to Robert Christgau, in his 1977 review of Rumours:

the cute-voiced woman [Stevie Nicks] writes and sings the tough lyrics and the husky-voiced woman [Christine McVie] the vulnerable ones

I don't agree (though I know what he means. . . maybe he's actually referring to who writes the "tougher" songs, musically).

I think Stevie comes off as "vulnerable" in the face of heartbreak: "Gold Dust Woman" being about people overtaken by heartbreak and the cocaine lifestyle; "I Don't Wanna Know" concerning someone of such sensitivity they don't want to confront the craziness that keeps love passing by, that's caused by the effort to just survive; "Dreams" portrays the curse (or represents a crystal vision) that her former lover will endure, to ultimately know that he made a mistake. This represents Stevie's sensitivity, like an open wound, not her "toughness."

Meanwhile, Christine seems "tough" in the face of heartbreak: "Don't Stop" represents sincere encouragement and well-wishes to her former love; "Songbirds" represents the comfort all the members of Mac can find in their musical compatability and ability to express their pain; "You Make Loving Fun" concerns the experience of welcoming love into your life; "Oh Daddy" displays a person taking responsibility for the wrongs committed in a relationship. That kind of self-reflection and getting-over-it strikes me as tough: a blues approach, no?, to healing. Stevie, to me, shows how a person can be wrapped up in heartbreak. . . with only her expressive tools, the magic and the music, to help her in "trying to survive." It's the combination, along with Lindsey's masculine neuroticism, that makes Fleetwood Mac's survey of love and heartbreak so . . . encompassing and compassionate.

[Ghost_Tracker]

Originally Posted by TrueFaith77

According to Robert
I don't agree (though I know what he means. . . maybe he's actually referring to who writes the "tougher" songs, musically).

.

I pretty much agree with much of what you said. But -

"My walls are flamin'? If SHE'S so willing, LITTLE one - - - I won't be stayin!?"
Personally I'd run to Switzerland and hide in a nice cave someplace.


If that doesn't do it for ya, then maybe this:

"Sleeping now the moment is gone
And I stand between him and the world
While I watch no one can touch
While I guard that golden circle
My eyes warn them in all the flashing fierceness of wisdom
Do not enter inside the circle
This man is sleeping, he's peaceful
Stay away."


I've always read that as being intended as a "not very nice" song - she means it as a threat - in other words -
- - - she ain't askin'. I've always felt that it's one of Stevie's "toughest" songs, even if it was just a demo that hasn't been published yet. It's primal!

But here's the thing - - - i.m.o. Stevie's songs can be tough even at their nicest. For example, "Forest of the Black Roses" -

"If this is to be my punishment -
I will live it out, as in a dream.
And go each day to the forest of the black roses;
And stand each night as tall as a tree."


Tough as nails, i.m.o. - just in a "vulnerable" way at the same time. Maybe that's part of her brilliance, come to think of it.

Then of course there's the immortal "I've loved and I've lost and I'm sad but not blue."

k maybe that's not such a good example.

[michelej1]

This NYT review of Chris' album seemed to hit upon the "tough" comparison. For me, it never made too much difference how Chris wrote, because her life itself and her role as a musician in the band was as equal and strong as you could ask anyone, man or woman, to be. Her career exemplified -- well, I wouldn't say "tough" because she never made it look that way.

Stevie would talk about being in Fritz and telling those guys she wasn't about to carry any of the sound equipment and she didn't. Then, she'd talk about Fleetwood Mac, with Christine sleeping on one of the instrument cases in the back of the car and I just got the impression that from 1967 and beyond, Christine not only carried her own weight, but also carried the sound equipment on the road too, if need be.

Her life said endurance, determination, perseverance in the midst of adversity and spoke of such an overriding independence that it really didn't matter how "take me any time you like, I'll be here if you think you might" her songs were. I never could think of her as passive or yielding, because her life always told me more on that score than her lyrics ever could.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpag...51C0A962948260

POP DISKS CONTRAST ROMANTIC STYLES

By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: February 12, 1984

L aura Nyro and Christine McVie represent nearly opposite styles of pop romanticism. Miss Nyro, who became a star in the late 60's while still in her teens, is now 36 but still exudes the mystique of a pop music prodigy. The music on ''Mother's Spiritual'' (Columbia FC 39215), Miss Nyro's first album in five years, is essentially the same keyboard- based, homemade mixture of pop- soul, jazz, folk, and theater music that she introduced more than a decade and a half ago.

On ''Christine McVie'' (Warner Bros. 25059), the sometime keyboardist and featured singer in Fleetwood Mac offers a subdued contrast to Miss Nyro's passionate eccentricity. Miss McVie has brought an aura of quiet wistfulness to Fleetwood Mac's harmonized folk-rock. In the group's tangled romantic ethos, she has usually played the passive victim of love to Stevie Nicks's erotic adventurer. If Miss Nicks is the star of the group, Miss McVie's dark, lovely folk-pop alto with its understated blues inflections and dignified elocution represents Fleetwood Mac's vocal center.

On their new records, both Miss Nyro and Miss McVie try to add to their established images by being more extroverted, and neither fully succeeds. Miss Nyro's ''Mother's Spiritual,'' a cycle of dream songs addressed to a child, offers an earnest but garbled feminist critique of the world. The songs exalt a mystical ''psychedelic'' feminism with archetypical nature imagery. In Miss Nyro's vision, women, children and nature exist in a biological harmony imminently imperiled by patriarchal world politics.

Miss Nyro and a strong studio ensemble have translated the idyllic aspects of this vision into an appropriately ''organic'' musical style. The singer's simple, pop-gospel pianism supports fluid, jazzy guitar-based arrangements whose light, flexible rhythms don't impede the spontaneity of her wailing vocals. These liquid instrumental textures, along with Miss Nyro's restless harmonics and blurred song structures really do suggest a natural paradise of brooks, trees, and moonlit communions between people and supernatural forces. The album's best songs - the springy lullaby ''To a Child' and the dreamy title song - rank among Miss Nyro's loveliest pantheistic hymns.

But only the most devout believers in the album's earth mother sexual mysticism are likely to be moved by Miss Nyro's wilder, rhetorical excesses. In ''The Right to Vote,'' the singer stridently sermonizes against patriarchal religion and dreams of escaping nuclear war in a spaceship. Elsewhere, she consults trees, because ''trees know what every Zen master needs to know.'' Instead of developing her ideas, Miss Nyro consistently contorts them with her febrile, quasi-biblical diction and preachy broadsides.

A similar view been expressed more coherently and compassionately by Cris Williamson, the popular West Coast feminist singer-songwriter. While Miss Williamson lacks Miss Nyro's musical sophistication, her lyrics at least try to establish a sense of human community before staking out the enemy. It will be interesting to see how effectively a major record company like Columbia will market the album. Were Miss Nyro not a pop music legend, ''Mother's Spiritual'' could only have been released on one of the small independent ''women's music'' labels like Miss Williamson's company, Olivia.

''Christine McVie,'' by contrast, is aimed directly at the mass market that has made Fleetwood Mac one of the best-selling groups of the last decade and Stevie Nicks a rock and roll princess. But since Miss McVie's charm lies in her beguilingly enigmatic calm, her debut as a solo rock star in the same popular idiom as Miss Nicks falls somewhat flat.

Miss McVie is technically a better singer than Stevie Nicks, but she lacks the scrappy feline energy and the melodramatic temperament that enabled Miss Nicks to step out confidently from Fleetwood Mac and become a star. ''One in a Million,'' Miss McVie's duet with Steve Winwood on the new album, tries to capture the sassy give-and-take that Miss Nicks found with Tom Petty, but there's no sense of heat or struggle. The energetic high point, ''So Excited,'' owes more to the producer Russ Titelman's skillful fusion of power-pop and rockabilly than to Miss McVie's friendly understated singing. A key problem with the album is the blandness of the songs, eight of which were co-written by the guitarist Todd Sharp. Describing typical cat-and-mouse romantic games in the terse, cliched vocabulary of late 70's Los Angeles pop, they don't give Miss McVie the room to do what she does best, which is to meditate quietly in acoustic folk-blues settings.

Miss McVie's most distinctive songs with Fleetwood Mac - ''Over My Head,'' ''Warm Ways,'' and ''You Make Loving Fun'' - came as sweetly plaintive romantic oases on the group's albums. Sung against a hushed tapestry of gossamer vocals and spare instrumental solos, they retained a vestigial English folk quality that linked Miss McVie to Sandy Denny, the late British folk-rock singer from Fairport Convention. In presenting Miss McVie as a tougher, more contemporary, more American rock singer, this aura of timelessness has been sacrificed and with it much of what made Miss McVie seem special.