Quote:
Originally Posted by Macfan4life
I may need some help with adjectives here. The music to Why moves me so much. It moves my soul and is the most beautiful track Fleetwood Mac has performed like Oh Daddy but more solemn. Bob Weston's slide guitar at the beginning is so lonely. He starts to play and almost trying to find a good melody. Then the piano kicks in and joins the solemn guitar and gives the song direction. Chris's singing is pure blues but the music is her full partner in this song. When the strings start echoing the guitars is so moving. I dont know how to describe it. It fits/sounds like the lyrics perfectly. We feel Chris's pain and her heartbreak. So could there any other song that the music feels like the lyrics? Early Fleetwood Mac with strings? Clearly they were going for an effect and it sucks you in.
I wish we could have had a round table of Chris and both Bobs and the rest of the band about this song. I want to know who came up with these ideas.
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I believe the strings were Christine’s arp string ensemble, which she played herself. I could be wrong. Certainly, the ase is frequently used on Heroes.
The effect of matching riffs, first played by the guitar and then by strings is a kind of call-and-response unison—and it’s very powerful here. That was often used by Green and Kirwan (ie: Like It This Way, World in Harmony, portions of the Madge jams). And, on Rolling Man from Mr. Wonderful, the horns and guitar play off one another this way, too.
In his Penguin Q-A, Weston breaks down a bit of his contribution to Why. He wrote the intro and claims to have arranged the guitar riffs while Christine was focusing elsewhere in the studio on “a trifle concerned with her part.” He believed he should have received partial arranger’s credit for the song.