Not that one can't be both FM fan and a fan of the member's themselves and their respective solo careers.

I've found the "Preview Post" feature works wonders. Preview it, read over it, hit reply, log out and run away!

...call them Fleetwood Mac songs!

Question for you, elle - how many Fleetwood Mac songs does Lindsey perform on his solo tours/performances? Don't wanna get away from topic, just curious about his solo shows, partly in comparsion to Stevie's solo shows. :cool:

EDIT: didn't want to double post

I made myself a playlist of my favorite Christine and Stevie's, Fleetwood Mac songs.

Christine - 11 songs
Stevie - 6 songs

...so for me twice as many Christine songs made my playlist. I found myself removing Stevie's songs, esp her early Mac and later Mac songs. However the remaining 6 songs, I'm fairly hardcore about. Where as with Christine's, I'm only hardcore about two or three of them. Does that make sense?

one can, sure! but when i listen to FM songs i find myself skipping over most of SN or CM songs. the only studio FM albums i own are Tusk and SYW. other than hits, i barely know other Mirage and TITN songs and when there was a poll comparing 2 albums i had to go on youtube to listen to songs so i can make more-less informed decision. in contrast, i own every studio and live album, DVD and blu-ray LB ever put out solo. so - make your own conclusions :laugh:.

on SWS tour, LB did 6 FM songs, in the 19-song setlist all together.

he said he's trying to keep FM songs to a minimum during solo tours. btw did you hear he will tour SOLO (alone!! with just his guitar) this late spring and summer?! :blob1::blob2:

ok, back to your question: he did NGBA, BL, SHN, Tusk, ISA, GYOW during SWS tour.

how many FM songs does stevie generally have as a part of her solo tours?

sure!:)

For me, Lindsey is a terrific lyricist. I don't think he became poetic until Tusk and then, obviously, SYW began taking that to a whole other level entirely. But even early on, although his words didn't evoke the flights of fancy and dreamy imagination that Stevie's did, their simplicity allowed him to tie them to the emotion of a song and accentuate his tortured vocal, so splendidly.

To me, because ISA's words are so sparse, it feels more like someone who is slipping and falling into despair. And of course, Go Insane is the quintessential example of this. I mean, there are no words that can express what "she's a lot like you" means more than those 5 do, not the way he screams them. Suddenly, you see there's another woman in the relationship and she came out of nowhere, born in that simple sentence. She haunts him. She haunts them. I think the way Lindsey inserts her is magical and the way he delivers the line, tells us all we need to know about his losing battle to escape.

Those things blow me away, as do basic statements like "Fate takes time."

I never thought his lyrics lacked -- well, except for those horrible Family Man type lapses.

Michele

...and when I listen to Fleetwood Mac, I find myself tempted to skip over Lindsey's songs. Its like we are the complete opposite. :laugh:

So about 1/3 of his tour is FM songs. Stevie does about 4 songs - Rhiannon, Landslide, Dreams, and Gold Dust Woman. She typically has a shorter setlist and does about 2-3 cover songs.

Interesting though they both ignore the Post-Mirage songs and concentrate on the white album and Rumours album songs.

A true solo-tour sounds awesome, kinda like a 1-man show.

Also I'd like to add that generally, I'm not a guitar guy. I tend to gravitate to the vocals, drums, and then the keyboards. FM tend to emphasize vocals and rhythm quite well. A lot of their songs actually are "guitar lite". :cool:

it is a 1-man show!

Big Love is from Tango, so post-mirage.

he does both Big Love and Never Going Back Again completely alone anyway - whether with mac or solo. and you can easily argue that acoustic Big Love is a completely different song that he reworked and first started doing acoustically on his 1992/93 solo tour, when he was on a 10-year hiatus from the mac.

NGBA, SHN and GYOW - from Rumours
Big Love - from Tango
Tusk - from Tusk
ISA - from FM

so he did 3 songs from Rumours, and 1 each from FM, Tusk and Tango. but he ignored Mirage and SYW, on the last tour at least.

of course, you can easily argue that most of LB's Tusk and SYW songs are solo songs anyway - since he recorded them either on his own away from the band, or as a solo album in the first place.:laugh:

Got to agree with you on this one. :nod::wavey:


I apologize if this seems rude, but I've got to disagree with you a little bit on Go Insane. Not that your featured line isn't an example of LB's great gift as a lyricist. It is!!!:xoxo: Just for a different reason. I don't think the line you mentioned has anything to do with injecting another woman into a relationship. If you've seen the great video of the original single for GI, that song is all about Lindsey doing self analysis. "She's a lot like you" means "she" is a lot like Lindsey. The back and forth begins with "two kinds of people in this world...winners...losers..." he's talking about himself in both roles. He is also talking about himself when he compares the woman in the song to himself. The winners/losers line applies to her, too. Nothing within the song itself indicates a third party comparison, as far as I can tell. I'm not sure why everyone thinks so, but that's just my take. No biggie. :xoxo:

Well, that's you, elle, but that's not me. The foundation of my fanaticism for this band is the orchestration of the tracks, and Lindsey happens to be the individual most responsible for those decisions (in several cases, he's also the individual most responsible for the execution of the orchestrative ideas). By orchestration, I mean the common definition: the "layout" of the sounds on a song or an album. That includes decisions about parts (the notes and chords played, which is also called arrangement), instrumentation (the combination of instruments used to generate the intended color), the vocal score, and the mix (applying dynamics and effects to what's on tape in order to create a specific atmosphere).

All this stuff is just as important to the Nicks and McVie tracks as it is to the Buckingham tracks--hence many people's interest in it. In fact, Lindsey himself has said--and I think I agree--that his best work of this sort has been on their songs, not necessarily his own.

I'd conclude that you don't have much interest in Buckingham as an arranger, orchestrator, vocal harmonizer, or guitarist, because all this stuff plays such a major role in Mac albums from 1977 to now. But of course I don't know for certain what turns you on about Lindsey.

beautiful post David - well most of the stuff about orchestration, although why do feel a lot of criticism towards what i may like screaming from the part that i bolded :laugh::shrug:?! are you saying LB puts no guitar, production or arrangement effort in his solo stuff?

i of course don't have nearly the extensive musical knowledge or appreciation that you do (i more/less coasted through music school playing flute and quit when i actually had to put some work and practice into it!:p) but i enjoy reading your dissections. and i just listen to what i like.:nod:

when i first started listening to lindsey's stuff, i was confused how all over the spectrum his music is. my preference and what drew me in was his more rocking stuff, and of course perfect tight little pop songs like SHN. but once i heard the acoustic BL and GI that sealed it for me.

although i love his guitar parts on Mac songs from other singer/songwriters, especially melodic ones on many of stevie's songs (i listen to a drivel like that SYW song just for that simple but melodic guitar part in the middle, and also stand through stevie's nasal singing of DR for that guitar outro - but can't stand gypsy - sorry LB, i know you are proud of it:wavey:). i also love his harmonies especially with christine and the ones he pulled with stevie on the recent tour versions of beautiful child and storms, but to me this is still not enough to entice me to want to listen to their songs as much as his (with the exception of a song like hold me maybe!). there are many other singer/songwriters that would be on my list in between LB and the rest of the Mac members.:sorry: (just to clarify, i'm talking rumours-era mac members.)

see what you started, now i'll hear it from people how i'm being mean again!:eek:

EDIT: just want to add, i respect and can appreciate your preference for the whole mac as a sum of the parts vs the individual members, and complete rounded songs. like you said though, that's you, not me. and that's why this is so interesting, we are all drawn towards and love different things and it's nice to hear different opinions and points of view! great discussion!:wavey:

I don't think you're being mean. Actually you're being quite clear, honest, and refreshing. :)

Obviously Stevie is the favorite of the three. The vote for Christine and Lindsey is mostly split.

I agree. You know, I love Jimmy Stewart, but except for Destry Rides Again (in which I think he was unusually sexy), I have not seen ANY of his westerns. I don't like westerns. I don't watch them. And I'm happy with that, but I realize that it gives me limited insight into Jimmy Stewart. And I always say with, Cary Grant, for instance, "If I didn't know how cold he was in Notorious, then I could never appreciate his wackiness as much as I do in Holiday."

Knowing the full panopoly and range gives me so much more to appreciate. Studying the differences between Cary with Dunne and Cary with Hepburn gives me such insight. The contrasts add so much depth to my understanding of his talent. And I don't have that with Jimmy Stewart. Cuz I don't like westerns.:(

wow, it never ever in a million years occurred to me to think of that line in this way!!?!! really interesting interpretation, and thinking of lindsey's love for double meanings (and his self-centeredness :laugh:), seems to make a lot of sense.:nod:

and, i had no clue that you preferred LB! :wavey:

i agree with the rest of your post, except the bolded part. sorry, but you agree?!?!? [that i don't care about the arrangement, guitar, instrumentation, etc? read my response to David for details]

you are being too nice, but i'll take it! :wavey::angel:

I know what you mean. I think the video for Holiday Road says a lot about Lindsey as well, in keeping with his musical themes. I think the Holiday Road video would go great with his Gift of Screws songs, in fact. However, I don't think it has a lot to do with the song Holiday Road and I guess that's how I feel about Go Insane and its video.

Although I don't disagree that "she's a lot like you" can also mean "she's a lot like me," because I think that unseen "she" and Lindsey are a lot alike. I don't see that as the only meaning. I can't take the line about screaming "your" name as being a self-reference at all.

I'll tell you what this song's neat trick reminds me of, an X-Files called "Little Green Men." The X-Files team has been broken up and Scully is reassigned to Quantico. She tries to maintain a relationship with Mulder, but when they meet in a park he is distant and cool. It's like if they aren't working together, they aren't friends. He runs off to Mexico searching for aliens alone. It looks like he has totally moved on from their work together. While in Mexico, he documents his findings on a tape recorder.

Well, it's not until the end of the show when he's dictating into the recorder that we find out the tape he is making is for Scully, so that she can investigate his findings if he goes missing. They aren't working together any more, but in his mind they ARE still partners. It was like she wasn't there, wasn't a part of him anymore, wasn't on his mind, and then we see she always was. And that's what Go Insane is like to me. This woman coming out of the sub-conscious into the forefront, in an all primeval pain sort of way.

And in the last scene in the X-Files when Mulder meets with Scully again, all of his evidence of aliens and conspiracies has been destroyed. He doesn't have it. He doesn't have the X-Files, but he says offhandedly to the room, more than to Scully, "I've still got you." Sigh.

Michele

I saw your post to David.

Michele

I don't find your posts mean either. I appreciate your honesty even though I'll never understand your distaste of Sara and Gypsy. We all have different tastes and while I certainly respect you for yours I will still be waiting for you in the back of the shed with my shotgun:lol:(I don't own a gun).

that's good.

this whole conversation got me thinking - if you take out the instrumentation, the guitar, and the arrangement, what are you left with for LB's material? the melodies, hooks, lyrics, his voice, lots of raw emotion?!

so to dissect some of that - he certainly can write a great hook, put together and perform some mind-blowing guitar parts (oh but i forget, apparently i wouldn't know that if not listening to SN and CM mac songs :D), some gorgeous verses, some tight arrangements.

the raw emotion he pours into his songs and performances is unbelievable and at times downright scary.

his voice is definitely not my favorite part of LB's music, although as i already said in this thread i do like it much better now than when he was young. but my preference for male voices are more "broken-sounding" voices (like RS), or large range voices (like Bono, or Freddie Mercury), or really deep voices - like Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, and most of all Shane McGowan - they can read the phonebook to me whenever they want! and Shane has that deep emotion too... just born to sing.:nod:

but i have stated a lot more about what i love about LBs music elsewhere, most recently in ongoing polls dissecting his songs by a topic in LB's forum. would love to see you adding and sharing some of your opinions there David!:wavey:

And my entire post was a response to this comment:

The comment didn't upset me or confuse me or elicit any particular emotional reaction. It just made me apply some inductive reasoning. Elle said to draw your own conclusions, so I concluded that she wasn't interested in LB's guitar or backup singing because all the stuff she skips is of course filled with his guitar & backup singing. Yes, she listens to his songs on the Mac albums, but by process of elimination I figured she is drawn to them because of the songwriting or the lead vocal--in other words, whatever qualities those have that are absent on the Nicks & McVie tracks (since she skips those).

My conclusion might be based on a fallacy IF it's Stevie's and Christine's lead singing and songwriting that puts off elle. This is quite common--at least in my world. If I don't want to hear a particularly stupid lyric by Stevie, I may neglect a track with a really cool bass part by John that I'd otherwise want to hear over and over again.

So cancel everything.

;) :xoxo: :lol::lol:

Hi, elle. I'll try, but I usually don't have much to say about lyrics--their poetry or their semantic connotations. Plus, I haven't bought like the last five Lindsey solo albums (!), so I'm largely unfamiliar with all that work. But if you guys talk about a song I know and love, I'll jump in.

oh, it's all good.:nod:

you are orders of magnitude better with words than i am (although i can always pull an excuse that english is not my first language:laugh:) - parts that i bolded in your post are exactly what i was trying to state in my roundabout wordy way in responses to your post.:wavey:

EDIT: to clarify - it is not Christine's singing that puts me off - i think her singing is beautiful, but her songwriting is in most cases too breezy poppy for my taste. but it definitely is some of Stevie's lyrics (yeah particularly stupid parts do come to mind lol), no real or different melodies in many of her songs, and her nasal voice - which is not always nasal, sometimes her voice does sound gorgeously interesting - "tell me lies" bit comes to mind, and i actually like broken-sounding voices as i said above, but Marianne Faithfull or Amy Winehouse type of female voice would be more my taste.

If we had to converse in French, you'd laugh at me.

Makes sense to me...... gracias.

Liddy Buck! The other two are good but they're best when Lindsey's producing them.

This is a common sentiment, and it probably used to be true, but I'm not so sure anymore. I really think Stevie would have come off better on Say You Will if they had used an outside producer. I think the last big favor LB did for SN was "Gypsy."

Honestly, this. And frankly, Stevie's SYW songs weren't all that fabulous to begin with either. I think Lindsey did the best he could do. We will never know whether an outside producer would have made them "better" unless she takes all her original tracks and decides to release an album with all those songs done by a different producer. :shrug:

I became a FM fan mainly from that period, but I was really mostly impressed with Lindsey's songs on that album. They were stellar. Some of Stevie's were good to me, but on a whole I think quite forgettable.

That's disheartening, because I wanted you to tell me whether One Take was about his mother's passing and if you thought he was channeling Yeats. Also, I wanted to hear you say that his voice has aged beautifully and discuss how many hours you could listen to it acapella.

Michele

thanks, please do! whether you like or dislike the song that you know. we are trying to group his songs around topics, mostly to create some discussion and also not to poll by the overused by-the-album way. however lyrics are not the focus of those discussions - any and every aspect of the song is, so from reading some of your posts in the past i think you'd have tons of different and interesting insight to add.

Where is the fainting icon??? :eek:

:lol: :shrug: :wavey:

:lol::lol::lol:

Well, I don't like the Gypsy video. That might be blasphemous as well.

As for the song, maybe Lindsey should do it on his upcoming tour. I know he had the 3 guitars for AHI, but let's see how one sounds on the song. When he introduced the tune, he could tell his version of the mattress on the floor story that Stevie gave us so often on the Unleashed tour.

I will say that I am a little miffed with the song right now. Last June, I went into this room to sign a contract and the tail end of Gypsy -- the guitar solo -- was playing through the speakers as I entered. I was sure that this was a good omen. That it meant it was the right decision for me. Now, just 9 months later, that agreement went down the drain and rather acrimoniously. I feel that I was misled by FM and Gypsy both!

Michele

Nah. That's not nearly as blasphemous. I would like the video better without Stevie dancing in the leg warmers in "present day". I could deal with sticking to one era and since I love anything retro, the black and white scenes win out for me.

Oh, you're singing my song with this idea! Remember how he gave her his two cents at the end of the tour in NZ? Priceless. :laugh:

Well, I can't blame you! Sucks! :( :sorry:

He should have kicked at her legs and threw his guitar at her for old times sakes.:lol:

That's the best thing Hejira has ever done for us.

The funniest thing for me is imagining the look on Stevie's face, when he said that. But it had an impression. I bet she won't say he had his drummer call her up anymore.

Michele

Viv!!! :distress::laugh:

Poor Bob. Hard being the middle man in the fuzzy memory haze of those two minds...

i don't know. for me, the story about what LB said to tease SN during the concert, however much fun it may be, does not nearly measure up to recording for posterity and sharing with us 3 vids - RAB, IAW, and BL - at 92Y.:nod:

Yes, we take pleasure in different things. It is true. Michele

Stop that!

What other rock video pays stylistic tribute to three Hollywood studios of the Golden Age: the Warner Brothers social-realist dramas, the sparkling Paramount romantic comedies, & the Fox musicals in three-strip dye-process Technicolor?

And what was that about anyway? I thought James Cagney was going to run out into the rain, grab Stevie and try to help her organize independent ballet dancers into a union.

And if Cagney had spoken Yiddish, would Stevie have understood him?

Michele

I guess I don't really rate my favorite artists in terms of "quality." Quality is an adjective I save for things like toilet paper and car upholstery. As far as musicians are concerned, however, I know what excites me and makes me swoon as a fan. I know what art moves and compels me. Chris has never done that for me. I like some of her stuff, in fact, I LOVE her stuff on Tusk, but for the most part I think she's rather flat and boring compared to the other two songwriters in the band. Stevie and Lindsay may be erratic in their highs and lows as songwriters and performers, but at least they are interesting and keep you on the edge of your seat. In fact, I guess that's why I love them so much. And you're right, when Stevie's hot she's hot, when she hits a slump, well, I still love her. I would much rather listen to Stevie's weakest solo stuff over anything Chris has done solo, but that's my preference. And I won't apologize for it! :D

That's interesting. I always thought this song was about Carol Ann, but if it's interpreted the way you are saying, it might be about Stevie. "She's a lot like you" etc. I could see that.