Wish list for Behind the Mask Deluxe Edition

[Netter75]

Originally Posted by Macfan4life

Your statement about an eerie twisted mood more describes the Wild Heart tour version. The 1989 version is a cheezy keyboard mess IMHO

Gotta admit, sometimes I get in the mood and really love a little 80s keyboard mess .



That horrible doorbell sound will forever hold place in my heart

[Justin Reach]

You've got to have Lizard People on a deluxe edition, it's better than half the album!

[Conga]

"Pain in the balls.... of your feet"

I unironically love Lizard People.

[jbrownsjr]

Originally Posted by Conga

"Pain in the balls.... of your feet"

I unironically love Lizard People.

I want the 20 min version of Lizard People.

[David]

My wish list for Behind the Mask involves it never having happened.

[secret love]

Originally Posted by David

My wish list for Behind the Mask involves it never having happened.

Right.

Let's wipe away Behind the Mask and Skies the Limit and all the rest - even the one Stevie soft spot The Second Time.

Heresy!

[David]

Originally Posted by secret love

Right.

Let's wipe away Behind the Mask and Skies the Limit and all the rest - even the one Stevie soft spot The Second Time.

Heresy!

To push my iconoclasm in everybody's face, I actually rather like Second Time. Stevie drops her pretensions and poses, and lets us hear her at a vulnerable moment. It truly feels much more authentic to me than Freedom or Affairs of the Heart - I'm not bluffing. By 1990, I was really bored with the Stevie Nicks mystique and wanted something different. I wanted to scrape off all that "moon spirit" crap (which was a lot less charismatic in a zonked-out singer in her mid 40s than it was fifteen years earlier) by then and see a rebirth of Stevie's artistry, whatever it actually looked like. And I suppose there are other moments on the album that are good enough - good hooks, good drumming, good vocal harmonies (because Rick and Billy were superb harmony singers, which they never got any credit for in Fleetwood Mac). But the album was mostly a throwaway. People have accused me of coming to that conclusion only in hindsight, but that's not true. I haven't changed my mind about it since 1990. The sound of it isn't even desperately commercial (the way Say You Will or Mirage always sound like they're trying to "tap in" to something in the radio audience), but it's the sound of a band that has kind of given up and just wants to take the road most traveled. It has that air of grabbing anyone who walks by that we were talking about in another thread. I don't think there was much inspiration in the people who made Behind the Mask, including songs, instrumentation (it's very impersonal - none of those quirks you came to associate with the instrumentalists in Fleetwood Mac from 1967 to 1987), cover art, and so on. Even the B sides are hopeless. The decisions the band made about almost everything give me the sense of having been drawn out of a hat quite at random. It's a good lesson for Fleetwood Mac and other bands: If you're not feeling particularly inspired, keep the work low key. Don't try making a "statement." That's the beauty of the band's next album, Time. It isn't any more brilliant or any less generic, but it's low key and modest, and that gives it a little charm.