Lindsey Buckingham & Rick Vito: Comparing Styles

[David]

Originally Posted by TomBanks147

Tusk is just as much a ‘Jumbled mess’. “the Ledge” and “storms” on the same album? “Beautiful child” leading into “Walk a thin line”? Can hardly say it’s NOT a jumbled mess. Tusk also doesn’t feel like a Fleetwood Mac album (deliberately) but is still IS a Fleetwood Mac album, as is say you will. (Probably my two favourite Mac albums, Tusk and SYW)

How do you work that out? Yes, Lindsey’s work was originally going to be a solo album but during the writing process when it was going to be a solo album Mick was already present just jamming around in the studio.

Stevie wrote her songs for Fleetwood Mac, not a solo album. Lindsey gave his imput towards them and came up with guitar parts. John did the same, working out Bass lines for both Lindsey and Stevie. Lindsey produced a large part of the album.

John and Mick both said themselves that SYW is the album they have been MOST present on out of any Fleetwood Mac album. How can it be anything but a Fleetwood Mac album? Every Mac album has been the moulding together of there songs the various writers have come up with. Conclusion, your just VERY biased. Why, I don’t know maybe you Miss Christine?

No, I think there's something legitimately more to be said about the sense that a few of us have of the disconnectedness among the LB tracks & the SN tracks on Say You Will. It has more to do with the time frame: If you look at the stretch of time involved in the tracking for the album, SYW has by far the longest time frame of any FM album ever recorded. It's approximately seven or eight years, which is just ungodly. The vast majority of the Buckingham songs were tracked seven or eight years before the SN songs, & that extreme disparity is obvious in the sonic environment. The ambience is fundamentally disparate from LB song to SN song. On past albums, that disparateness in environment & ambience didn't exist because the tracks were basically recorded in the same two studios (or single studio in the case of Tusk) within the same time frame, & that makes a big difference in sound.

On Tusk, for example, Lindsey's songs obviously sound different from Stevie's songs, but they don't sound as if they were recorded in a different ERA with a different era's equipment & technology. THAT'S what we're talking about. "Sisters of the Moon" came out of the same aural timespace as "The Ledge" or "Walk a Thin Line" -- in that regard, they're really all of a piece. The disjointedness of Tusk is one of songwriting, not of studio vibe & technology.

But this isn't the case with SYW. Lindsey's songs sound as if they came from different eras & different locales -- they in fact were, & all the mixing & mastering in the world didn't hide that fact. The drummer on 'Miranda' sounds like a 48-year-old drummer, & the drummer on 'Thrown Down' sounds like a 56-year-old drummer, & the two tracks are wholly unrelated in band vibe -- even down to minor things like what the walls in the particular studio were made of & how that affected the ambience. SYW was total patchwork. Tusk is a patchwork of styles & sensibilities, but not of sound & ambience & certainly not of technology.