Overall, I like Mirage, the songs are tight and well performed. As many have said, the album contains two of the band's best ever songs in Gypsy and Hold Me. Problem is, the other tracks are not even close to the bar set by those songs. Sure, there's some sweet vocals splashed throughout, but with weaker songs, it just doesn't have the impact of the far superior 3 predecessors. My biggest beef though is that its weak spots ruin the flow and firmly take the band off its classic rock pedestal and has the masses questioning the band's relevance (at the time anyways). Lindsey's songs are the weakest on the album and his shying away from his Tusk creativity did Mirage no favours. Christine needed at least one killer ballad to make it work, unfortunately Only Over You and Wish you Were Here were too generic to meet the Warm Ways, Over and Over or Songbird standards. By far the biggest miss was turning away from Smile at You or If You Were My Love, heck even Rock a Little could have been played with... at least two great Stevie songs that needed to be fully Mac realized in the day.
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