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Originally Posted by SteveMacD
So, other than Oh Well, the more listenable songs.
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(insert David chuckle here)
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Still trying to figure out how Over & Over, Not That Funny and Never Going Back Again ended up on that over Second Hand News, Tusk, and You Make Loving Fun and maybe a few other songs, like Songbird and I Know I’m Not Wrong. It’s a bit too much.
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Right after they released that album (or maybe a few days before), one of the trashy rock mags (
Circus maybe) ran an article that brought up the choice of tracks for the release, wondering why “Station Man” and “The Chain” and “Tusk” were not on it. Mac wasn’t interviewed for the article, so no response was given — the question was just rhetorical. With the album, the band may have been going for weird just to avoid putting out “yet another hit-laden live album,” which they had been known to complain about.
I think that album has plenty of highlights from both eras — certainly “Go Your Own Way” introduced people to a side of the band they would not have known unless they had attended one of the shows — but the decision to use these pseudo-soundcheck performances of “Don’t Stop” and “Dreams” was bizarro. I bet the album was pulled together quickly and hasty non-decisions were made. The tour ended in early September with the plan to release that last show — and on December 8, the album was out. That’s f***ing fast for Fleetwood Mac. You might even call that album a rush job. Imagine someone scrambling around in all those tour stops from the past five years, grabbing songs from here and there. It could not have taken more than a few weeks to do all that work. I don’t even know when new vocals were added (or where). Actually, the only new vocals I can hear are “Sara” (a very bizarre decision to redo the vocal on nearly the entire song) and some backing vocals on “Over and Over.” We’ve always said that the album has a lot of post-production sweetening, but I don’t think it does. There simply wasn’t time. A December 8 release means that mixing, mastering, artwork, marketing, etc., has to be done in November or October. At some point in September, the band reconvened to do the new tracks. Mac left themselves no time to get this Christmas release out the door. Maybe they should have waited until spring but figured that the tour hoopla would have been dead by then.