[I always liked this SYW concert review below, from Campus Circle which referenced the cover and riffed on the whole "never break the chain" theme that it can be interpreted to embody].
The cover of the new Say You Will has Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks lying prostrate, facing opposite directions with feet spilling off the top and bottom of the shot, in a visual nod to the iconic final image of Masahiro Shinoda’s Double Suicide. Does it seem pretentious for a band whose biggest radio hit is still the sunny "Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow" to draw parallels to the doomed lovers in a classic of Japanese cinema? It shouldn’t because no pop act exemplifies the rock-band-as-suicide-pact so perfectly as Fleetwood Mac. Buckingham and Nicks must glance across the stage at each other night after night, thinking over their years as lovers, as enemies and as mutually-indifferent playthings of fate, and pondering, with alternate bemusement and fury, the full and terrifying implications of the phrase "till death do us part."
This is one of the reasons why it was worth whatever the scalpers were charging in the parking lot to spend two hours and thirty minutes with Fleetwood Mac. But the band had plenty to offer on an individual basis, even divorced from the drama of just having its members collected in one place. It was deeply moving, for instance, to hear Nicks’s increasingly-weathered voice settling into "Gold Dust Woman" and the new disc’s title track with equal grace. And when she pulled out Tusk’s "Beautiful Child," as an unexpected treat, a hush fell over the room like we were hearing a proclamation from a queen, which I suppose we were.
Buckingham, on the other hand, ripped into his guitar with spellbinding passion. The new record is, after all, the solo album he had such difficulty getting released, tucked into a set of slightly uneven Nicks tunes to make it more palatable to record execs. His joy at airing these songs was palpable. Even on an out-of-the-park stunner like "Come," he’s still a middling-at-best lyricist, but as always his songs muddle through a couple of verses’ worth of maddening inarticulateness before exploding into guitar solos that express everything with stabbing precision.
There’s a wistful sense of the valedictory to the band’s shows nowadays that's absent from the record itself thanks to Buckingham’s fervor, which suggests that Fleetwood Mac is reaching the September of its years. But let’s hope that Buckingham’s stubborn refusal to let even chestnuts like "Never Going Back Again" sound dated indicates that he, at least, plans to soldier on for years to come.
–Steven Hanna
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