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06-21-2004 12:55 PM |
I find very little wrong in Lindsey's share of the Mirage tracks. "Oh Diane" (note to Nancy, isn't "love is like a grain of sand/slipping through my hand" similar to another masturbation reference in "The Ledge"; "slipping through my fingers, watching how it grows"? ;)) may be the "Steal Your Heart Away" of this album in that its quirks aren't noticeable but it's still enjoyable and has the same attention to detail as the rest of them. "Can't Go Back" is reminiscent of the early Beatles but its atmosphere simply comes from a different place. "Eyes Of The World" takes a minimal beat and puts the verses of "Stephanie" into the Tusk context. "Empire State" is classic Buckingham, eccentric fun with the harp bringing in ye grande sophistication for this intentional attempt to win back the East Coast fans after "That's How We Do It In LA". :cool: Hate the track if you wish but to me it doesn't seem to be anything else but a matter of that harmony grating on some people's nerves. No problems here though. "Goodbye Angel" is a darn moving beauty of a thing that should have been on the album but obviously Mr. Mastermind thought that the lyric would have been too close to the Rumours format.
Finally, "Book Of Love". This song seems to encapsulate nearly everything about Lindsey's work from 1981 to 1983. You have your usual '50s I-IV-V chord structure but the delivery is really angry and yet in the chorus he is laughing at himself for some weird reason. Why on earth is that? The usual answer that I have to this is that it's Lindsey doing the sonic painting thing again. He has two very different emotions there put together, both in '50s doo-wop ballad for chrissake! And yet it still doesn't confuse me. It feels very natural, in fact. By laughing at himself he proves that he's trying to put himself above the heartbreak. He's trying to survive, he's trying to move on. Maybe it's self-deception as some people think, though. ;)
Quote:
Originally Posted by seteca
I always thought it was funny how a lot of people (including Lindsey) claim that Mirage was deliberately made more "mainstream like Rumours" after the "failure" of Tusk, and yet ALL of his songs blatantly have his "left of field" signature sound.;)
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It's really interesting that Lindsey has been disappointed with the album in retrospect because his material isn't all that different from Law And Order or the National Lampoon songs. Why should he have felt the pressure then? Everything he's done since Tusk, including his own solo albums, is a compromise between Rumours and Tusk so what is the difference with Mirage? "Hold Me" and "Gypsy", the two big hit singles, own a lot of their idiosyncracy to Lindsey so he probably wasn't told to keep his production quirks off them. "Eyes Of The World" is intentionally underproduced so that it wouldn't be the "Go Your Own Way" of the album. In fact, Tango In The Night seems somewhat closer to the "big sellout" than Mirage; "Everywhere" and "Mystified" are so minimalistic that they're approaching inoffensive muzak. "Little Lies" and "Seven Wonders", two great songs, don't have the quirks on the larger scale. And yet he still thinks Tango was a more satisfactory work for him.
Maybe he was disappointed with the fact that there was some need to return to the Rumours format, in that the band was forced to play together on nearly every song (for the sake of that all-important group chemistry) and still it didn't result into a similar commercial success. Yet he still eliminated Stevie's and Christine's contributions from his own songs almost totally (Chris is obviously on "EOTW", but is she anywhere else?). Now was it so important for him to keep Mick and John away from his songs? Maybe he appreciates Tango more because they're practically him solo while the Mirage songs are not? Who knows. But I don't think Mirage is any more lackluster or weaker than anything else he's done within FM. Point finally made. :confused: :) |
