[face of glass]

“The battle rages on”, to quote an ill-advised Deep Purple album. Cut my hands off if I write too much, Johnny (especially since you're in the middle of some other argument), but it just happens. It has nothing to do with boosting my ego or something like that.

Originally posted by trackaghost
To begin with lyrics are very important to me personally. I wouldn't say I like a song solely because of the lyrics but even if a song had the most beautiful music with the world's best singer performing it, it would be instantly spoiled if it had bad lyrics. I know I'm not alone here. I'm not saying lyrics make the song, but they are a huge part of it.

I wasn’t underestimating the value of lyrics to different people. I was just saying that they do not matter that much to me; especially when I consider the fact that I don’t have the same grasp of English as most of you do. It isn’t a natural language for me.
Also, your point about a bad lyric immediately rendering a song with “the most beautiful music with the world’s best singer performing it” doesn’t work for me, at least. I’ve always been capable of getting past a poor lyric if there’s something in the song that’s attractive to me; there’s another reason why I’ve never been bothered by Lindsey’s “weak early lyrics”. Remember as well that it isn’t always the lyric itself that matters; it’s the way it’s sung. A poor singer can ruin a great lyric by emphasizing the wrong words while having no understanding of nuances. A great singer can hide all the flaws of a poor or minimal lyric by his/her delivery.

What I think of the following points is basically a repetition of what I wrote on the “FM on Dick Clark’s Primetime...” thread, but since you probably haven’t paid attention to what I said there, I’ll repeat them here, just for you.

Originally posted by trackaghost
I also hate the implication that Stevie's main contribution is the lyrics. I was under the impression she wrote most of her best known songs, music AND lyrics

I’d like to think I haven’t hinted at that. What I have stated earlier is that the only way I can find any value in Stevie’s recent demos is by listening at the performance itself. This includes the lyrics, the songwriting itself and the voice. All of these form this unique relationship with each other. Take one away and the attraction is gone. Especially if that voice is the one to go.

I’m certainly not going to start pretending that I find Stevie a great songwriter these days. She was good in the ‘70s and early ‘80s when her basic, never-changing way of writing music still had its freshness. A lot of those songs (not all of them, though) could be covered by others because they still had certain appeal outside the Nicksian mode of performing. As for the stuff made after that, though, no possibility of that ever happening. You need Stevie’s voice to make the recent demos work. It’s the performance that’s her main focus in making of music; the same way Lindsey pays most attention to the way the overall track will sound like. I haven’t ever thought that Lindsey or Stevie are great songwriters in the traditional sense; they cover up what they lack in that area through other measures and do it admirably.

Originally posted by trackaghost
You certainly give the impression here that Lindsey as producer is writing the music. Even if Stevie is just coming up with the melody then that is a HUGE part of the music no matter what words she is singing.

No, he is not writing the music all by himself; he has Stevie’s basic work to build on. I’ve never believed it’s just the melody that makes the whole thing work. I should quote CarneVaca here:

Originally posted by CarneVaca
It is the dynamic interplay between melody, chord structure and rhythm that makes a song good or bad musically.

And never can you put that stuff on paper adequately. You convey all that in the performance itself. Imagine if someone was to offer Lindsey one of Stevie’s demos but with someone else’s vocal performance. Or Stevie just gave him sheet notes to work with? (Yeah, right, like he could actually read them.) Would he be able to create a great arrangement out of that?

What Lindsey is coming up with is the overall atmosphere. It is he who gives Stevie’s demos their own special identities, so that even those people who are not fans are capable of hearing significant differences. The other producers have been less successful in that in my opinion.

Originally posted by trackaghost
It seems to me the arrangement is what's important to you. Of course a song like Landslide is utter perfection and that's just a voice and an acoustic guitar. There's not really any Buckingham quirks there...
Oh wait Keith Olsen produced that didn't he? (Yeah, yeah I know Linds was involved!)

The arrangement is of huge significance, but of equal meaning to me is Stevie’s singing. The words she chooses to emphasize and the nuances in her voice do it for me too.

It isn’t just any guitar in there! It’s Lindsey Buckingham’s guitar! You think there’s that much production in “Landslide”? It’s always been a “simple” acoustic track. There’s nothing of significance lost in concert. I do think it’s one of Stevie’s best written songs (and obviously so do those who have covered it) but a lot of the fascination comes from Lindsey’s playing and what notes from the chords he emphasizes. I haven’t ever heard that someone would have actually suggested Lindsey to play a particular guitar part (except for the “SOTM” debacle ). He’s coming up with all of that himself. Even Ken Caillat hinted at that in his Q&A. And I certainly don’t believe that Stevie herself would have suggested something in particular with her rudimentary playing skills. Do you remember a confession of hers while talking to the audience on one particular night during the current tour? It was Lindsey who taught her to play “Landslide” without a pick (or that’s how I think it went). So there.

Originally posted by trackaghost
I'm in no way denying Lindsey's talent as a producer or the amazing way he has helped shape Stevie's best songs but if he didn't have good material to work with in the first place then it wouldn't matter what flourishes or studio wizardry he added, it would still be a dudd song.

He doesn’t necessarily have to work on a song. He can do these sonic paintings without having a song to go along with. Sure, he isn’t expressing a traditional emotion. It’s a glimpse of something strange; a disturbing mental picture of sorts where all these various streams join together to create a particular senseless moment. Just like life itself.

Originally posted by trackaghost
The album that everyone holds up as Lindsey's masterpiece, Out Of The Cradle, suffers from too much production and polish for my taste. It's almost like he has smoothed away all the personality of those songs (I still like that record but it stops me from loving it!). I always thought that's why it wasn't a big hit, not because it was too "leftfield" or "not meant for the mainstream", as Lindsey himself might put it, because it's very mainstream.

Dissention did an admirable job in defending OOTC, especially because I agree with those statements but I’d still like to bring up a few more points.
I have to agree that it did feel a bit too mainstream when I first heard it. Some of it could be attributed to Lindsey’s personal growth; he didn’t feel like he would have to do sonic hooliganism all over the album anymore. But it’s also because he was on his own at that point. He knew that he would have to do something that would be somehow reminiscent of FM’s records. He (and Richard) was on his own as a writer; he wouldn’t be capable of the same kind of diversity that there was on the FM records if he was to follow the established pattern of making an album that’s not relative to what FM had done before.
So there’s “normal” stuff on the album; songs like “Soul Drifter”, “Countdown” and “You Do Or You Don’t” are to OOTC what “Everywhere”, “Little Lies” and “Seven Wonders” are to TITN. It just adds to the picture and makes it more complete. Sure, you could say that he desperately wanted the stuff to sell and you could be right. But why did it not sell?

Originally posted by trackaghost
Sometimes a little rawness and a few mistakes here and there add the real personality. That's why I've always loved Tusk, his true masterpiece.

I do feel a certain kind of rawness on OOTC; it’s not like he used dirty tone colours like on Tusk or left on some obvious “flaws”. Sure, it’s polished alright, a result of studio hermit-like existence. But if you say it’s “very mainstream”, I still find that statement a bit false.

Lindsey is, has been since the days of Tusk, in between two different groups of audience. There’s the large masses who want another “Go Your Own Way” and there’s the smaller bunch of elitist snobs who embrace the art rock ethics of experiments, spontaneity and quirkiness (and yes Sharon, I do think that punk rock was an art movement too). When the bands who appeal to the second group achieved some prominence, Lindsey got interested too. It isn’t just because he didn’t want to do another Rumours, it’s because he felt a genuine affection to that music and wanted to do his own skewed version of it. Which is what he did. He’s been struggling between two personalities since then; there’s this side of him that knows how to make a song appealing through manners of traditional musicianship, then there’s this another side that always questions things and wants to add something unusual into the mix. Both sides are at work throughout OOTC too. There’s this guy who puts the “crooner” vocal on the verses of “Don’t Look Down” and there’s this guy who throws these left-field harmonies to the chorus. This “weirder” guy throws in the “tap-dancing” of “Wrong”. He’s also responsible of the “This Is The Time” and the murky depression of “Street Of Dreams”. He’s on every track of the album in my opinion, sometimes “in the shade”, sometimes far more visible. And so he is there on SYW too, even on “Steal Your Heart Away” (but not prominently enough, if you ask me).

You’ll never achieve great success if you’re working in between two target groups; in this case the audience of “adult-oriented” rock and the experimental, hipper circles. It’s the main fascination of Buckingham for me though, that he straddles the fence between the two extremes and never gives in to produce something totally inaccessible or bow to the lowest common denominator. It’s a shame that the elitists are far too interested in what is hip and thus they don’t care for the “corporate rock sell-out” that they think Lindsey is. It’s an equal shame that the mainstream has never picked up on an entire Lindsey album because “it’s too weird and druggy”. I wish both sides could open up their horizons, but that’s still very unlikely to happen.

Originally posted by trackaghost
The other thing that bothers me is the suggestion that if Lindsey had worked on Stevie's solo albums that they would be transformed from albums you "tolerate" to "the greatest albums ever".

That’s not what I was suggesting. I don’t exactly “tolerate” them, I love two of them and like the rest of them. I don’t even think that there ever will be a “greatest album ever”. There are works of art that represent various sides of various personalities. If I recognize something that I can relate to, then I treasure the album. There’s moments like that on Stevie’s albums but there’s also a significant amount of things that speak to me far less than Lindsey’s productions. There’s far less risk involved, and a smaller sense of adventurousness.

Originally posted by trackaghost
I personally disagree. I can't imagine Lindsey producing a song like Edge Of Seventeen or even Stand Back or Wild Heart. I can't! And if he did they would be completely different tracks and I love those songs exactly the way they are.

I can imagine him doing those. Like Dissention said, most of us are probably too accustomed to those tracks and therefore can’t imagine them in other contexts. Sure, I can believe that FM would have wanted to drop a particular verse in order to shorten the track (like they supposedly did with “Sara”). The thing is, would we miss it if we hadn’t heard it in the first place? That’s definitely subjective. It would be more likely that two of those tracks would be classics no matter who released it, FM or Stevie with help from Jimmy & the band. “The Wild Heart” is definitely more self-indulgent and most probably has been "edited" far less than any Stevie song that FM had released at the time, so we can assume they wouldn’t have wanted to release it as such. I love the track but since the amount of such “epics” in Stevie’s solo career can be counted with the fingers of one hand then there really wouldn’t be sense to do anything else solo, if she wanted to achieve the best possible results. But she's put quantity over quality. After these epics everything she put out could be easily given the Buckingham treatment. Sure, he wouldn't necessarily have treated "Stand Back" as a synth-rocker but I'm sure he would approached it as something else than "EO17 synthesized". Just my opinion, of course.

Originally posted by trackaghost
I think those albums show a different side to Stevie, one which wasn't represented in Fleetwood Mac and one which I don't think we would have ever seen if she hadn't decided to make solo albums.

I still think it’s pretty much the same thing throughout. She recognizes this in herself, by stating things like “all my songs are extensions of each other”. The solo career has been definitely important to Stevie; she could indulge in some things that she didn’t have the room to do in FM. Doing epics like the title tracks of the first two solo albums or “Beauty And The Beast” was one of them; another was putting the backing vocalists on stage and going mad with all kinds of clothes. At the same time, though, it made her even more of a laughing stock in the elitist rock circles. Who knows, maybe the tide would have turned on the Rumours era FM and they’d be spoken in the same breath with the Rolling Stones, the Who and Bob Dylan, the Clash and the Stooges if Stevie hadn’t done what she did. I’m not blaming her for this at all, I lift my middle finger in the air for those who always dismiss Stevie with the same old tired arguments. It’s just that I come from these elitist circles and I hate to see the whole thing happening. That’s why I brought it up once again.

Originally posted by trackaghost
The other thing implied is that all Stevie's albums have the same formula or "approach". I don't think they do actually. Jimmy Iovine's "laissez-faire" approach sounded to me like a real band playing live, which is why I always loved his work and also why so many of those songs transformed so well to stage.

I agree with Dissention’s response to this particular point. But there’s something more that I’d like to bring to the table.

Despite all the unbiased approach (hey, I loved FM and Stevie's songs in the band before I even gave her solo albums a chance) that I had towards Bella Donna I still found the record far too samey on the first listen. The same with The Wild Heart. Nothing stood out for me, except for rockers like “Edge Of Seventeen” and “Stand Back”. I seriously thought both albums were boring. Then a few listens more and I’m enjoying both albums pretty much throughout. The thing is, are there people willing to go through more than a couple of listens of each Stevie album. Will they notice the differences that fast? If they will, then they will most likely become fans. I still hold up the fact that Lindsey’s productions for Stevie all have easily discernible different personalities.

Originally posted by trackaghost
Also John Shanks is a good producer because he is a Lindsey wannabe?! Pur-lease!

I wasn’t stating that. I’m sure he has enough experience to do what he wants but he chose this approach which is a bit irritating.

Originally posted by trackaghost
Lastly, I realise that most of Stevie's demos are rough but they are demos for heaven's sake! And some are pretty good too despite being quite minimal.

Put someone else than Stevie to sing them. Change the lyrics if you want, but leave in the basic Nicksian chords and the vocal melody. Then we’ll see what attraction they will have for you.

Originally posted by trackaghost
Funny thing is I have bought plenty of lo-fi records over the years that sound like that as the finished product lol!

Really? I’ve always thought that the ones you mentioned, the likes of Yo La Tengo and Stereolab use non-standard tone colours and it’s this particular “dirtiness” that’s a large part of the attraction, alongside the pretty-sounding songwriting. It’s a different thing than what Stevie’s demos are doing. Those use the same old sounds she’s always used. It’s not like she’s experimenting with them, like the lo-fi artists you mentioned. She’s just drawing a very rough, black-and-white sketch where the lines are so thin that only Buckingham will be able to find all of them and then colour the picture to the maximum effect.

Originally posted by trackaghost
I can see her now, working with the likes of Sebadoh, Stereolab and Yo Lo Tengo.

As much as you and I would cherish Stevie “the indie queen”, I still think that most of the people on these boards would find that kind of work her worst ever.

Originally posted by trackaghost
I'd like a Stevie record with a bit of rawness and a little grit! Rubin can definitely do that.

I’m still wondering whether she’s willing to do that after all these years. It’s that huge change that happened between the RAL and TITN tours that’s partly responsible, of course.

Originally posted by dissention
And I always thought the reason she needed to do solo stuff was to release more of an output.

I think so too. I don’t think she’s ever transcended the border between honest artistic expression and audience-pleasing banality; those artistic instincts are still present in her writing. It’s the producers who tend to cross that line occasionally.

Originally posted by trackaghost
I do love OOTC, but I still reckon it's too slick and shiny and I would like it more without the blinding sheen!

What you’re speaking of as the “blinding sheen” is something that has been referred to as “homogenous sound”. It’s the thing that gives the record its unity; it doesn’t sound like it’s a bunch of scattered pieces put together in the same package. SYW is far more scattered. It depends on which approach you prefer though. ChiliD, for instance, has expressed criticism towards the running order of Say You Will, whereas when he was discussing OOTC a couple of years ago he stated that it’s one of the few albums where he doesn’t feel the need to change the tracklisting at all.
As for me, I’ve never necessarily needed the perfect running order or the homogenous sound. I like the approach on SYW where the changes in sound are almost schizophrenic.

Originally posted by Johnny Stew
But, having said that, I don't think Stevie's other producers were necessarily taking the easy way out, or following in Lindsey's footsteps.

My opinion is contrary, as you already know. However, they most definitely knew how Lindsey had treated Stevie’s work before; there was already a certain kind of pen that they very rarely stepped outside of. It’s not like Stevie was going to adopt the approach of Patti Smith or Kate Bush all of a sudden.

Originally posted by Johnny Stew
I think that the way in which Stevie writes, somewhat dictates the progression the songs will take on their way to being a finished product.

From someone who’s a big fan and who’s capable of seeing all the subtle differences I can understand that statement. But Stevie’s stated herself that FM could have had any song of hers that they wanted. I don’t when she stated that, whether it was in the ‘80s or much later but I still think there was a particular point when she would have given them anything. Of course, maybe not during the making of TITN anyway.

Originally posted by Johnny Stew
"Sisters Of The Moon" is a good example: Lindsey approached the song in a dark, moody fashion, and his electric guitar touches throughout are perfect.
But... in the piano demo of the song, Stevie is clearly playing the basis of those guitar parts. Albeit, in a slower fashion, and with less finesse.

I’m not denying that. In “Sisters Of The Moon” the lines in the original Nicksian sketch are more obvious than in many other demos. She came up with that riff for sure. She wouldn’t have had the skills to turn the song into a rocker though. Nor would she have had the skills to add the “left-of-center instrumental touches” or the certain tone colours. But yes, the basic idea comes from her and this time it’s stronger than usual. The thing is, this is the only song that I've seen fans use as a basis for their argument of "Stevie contributing a lot to the arrangement". It still appears to be an exception and not that big.

I think that if there was a particular idea into which Stevie would like a particular song to develop, she’d draw stronger, more obvious lines into her sketches. “SOTM”, which still went through a metamorphosis, seems like a rare exception. If she doesn’t have the instrumental skills to express everything, she could always get one of her friends in and try to convey what she wants to him/her. But nah, whenever there’s a rough Nicks demo with Stevie on her own, I feel that there’s still a “long way to go”. I like the more arranged recent ones, like “Space Needle”, but even those things are not entirely a product of Stevie’s mind. Sure, she may know what she wants but she just doesn’t know how to get there. She would’ve managed to do one or two good albums on her own in the ‘70s as a singer-songwriter but no more than that.

Originally posted by strandinthewind
For me, I think SOTM is one of the songs , probably with SN's approval for all we know, somewhat ruined for me. the Tusk version is just too produced (albeit brilliantly) for me. In any event, I still like the Tusk version.

No, it doesn’t entirely dive into the same pool of emotion as the live versions but that’s somewhat understandable. FM played it during the very tail end of the Rumours tour as an encore; it was obvious that it would be a showcase on the level of “Rhiannon”. Of course Lindsey recognized this and since Tusk wasn’t about repeating the formula of Rumours and the White Album, he wanted to undermine some of its potential.

I appreciate the way LB approached it in the studio. He knew that no matter how hot a studio take they might get out of it, it would still be exceeded by the live versions because of the looser environment. It would be comparable to some live takes by The Who and Deep Purple, in that the band would completely annihilate the studio version of a certain song by exceeding it completely. LB approached “SOTM” differently, he didn’t want to do a milder studio counterpart; he gave the song a subtler treatment with harmonies that the band wasn’t capable of pulling off live.

Finally, I apologize to those who actually have the interest to wade through all this stuff. This particular manner of participating in threads is mainly dictated by the current situation in my life. Not all dancing on the roses, that.