Quote:
Originally Posted by David
Because Madame Nicks wanted to re-create Josette Day’s scenes in La Belle et la Bête, the Cocteau movie she had somehow discovered in 1978 or thereabouts. Day/Belle rides through the enchanted forest to Beast’s castle on a white horse. She’s dressed in a flowing cape and hood. When Stevie talked to Timothy White in 1981 for her cover story for Rolling Stone, she kept referring to this movie and what it meant to her.
I just finished reading Ray Lindsey’s completely disappointing book on his years as a gear tech for the band, and he devotes all of two or three sentences to recording Mirage. He reports that the band didn’t give a damn about anything at that time. Everybody in the band was no longer interested in the band. It’s amazing that Lindsey and Richard gave any engineering craft to the sessions — without even that, Mirage would have been a total dud as far as leaving any sort of impression. Robert Hilburn (LA Times) thought the album ex was appropriately named because it “practically disappears while you’re listening to it.” For us fans, the album has isolated little sweet spots, like “That’s Alright,” “Can’t Go Back,” and “Hold Me.” Maybe it should have been an EP.
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Hilburn’s commentary is clever but perhaps a bit disingenuous, in my opinion. The album doesn’t so much disappear as one listens but one’s expectations are certainly reoriented—possibly deflated but then oddly reconstructed to suit the album’s almost stubborn attachment to giddy pleasures on a minor scale. Mirage charms; its does not haunt or beguile the way certain songs on the previous three albums do. It also doesn’t seem to spring from the earth. It’s sprinkled with fairy dust.
But I’ve been listening to it lately and believe it could have been quite different had the core trio fought Buckingham a bit more on his “music box” touches. Outtakes and rehearsals from the period show Christine’s piano is chunkier and more aggressive than one might expect, and the drum-bass combo has a real kick to it. “Put a Candle in the Window” suggests the pre-arranged material may have had some muscle…
The “alternate” (really a version before overdubs) of “Only Over You” has this hypnotic groove that I could listen to for hours. That groove is muted or subdued in the mix that ends up on the record. Why?
“That’s Alright” is a killer tune. So good. Stevie at her most lyrically engaging.