[face of glass]

Originally Posted by Hippocampus

I understand what he was going for but the overall effort comes off to my ears as wanting to be experimental for the sake of it, to steer away from the "Rumours formula" to prove he's more than "corporate rock".

For me there’s nothing “experimental for the sake of it” attitude in Tusk. Yes, Lindsey did state that he loved recording those vocal tracks on his knees “because it sounded weird!” but in the rest I truly can not see it.

But that’s because of my background; after years of listening to the underground acts and the experimental de-rigeur, I can safely say that everything Lindsey does on Tusk is accessible and, although it might not find its audience from the average Rumours-buyers, it would find its audience from the underground, from the new wave that was emerging at the time. The freakish guitar onslaught of “Not That Funny” is child’s play when compared to anything Sonic Youth did in the ‘80s. So the experimental attitude didn’t jump at me first. What worked for me was the emotion that he managed to convey through the tunes.

He didn’t want Chris or Stevie to harmonize on his songs for a long time because he wanted to believe that they could be successes without them. And it was one of the biggest reasons for Rumours’ success, as were the biting lyrics. The lyrics on Tusk may be more biting for some but in my opinion they’ve been intentionally shrouded and sung so that some of them are incomprehensible. Clearly the focus is not just on the lyrical message.

This is clearly not a team effort, it's complete self-indulgence and I can understand why the others told him it would be the last time he'd go solo on the band's time.

Let’s not forget that there was an example for this in Fleetwood Mac already, what with Peter Green recording their “ultimate classic” “Oh Well” solely on his own with only the recorder solo being played by his girlfriend.

[Ponders a theory for a while. It’s not self-indulgence if he doesn’t credit it for himself, it’s self-indulgence if the album sleeve said: -Fleetwood Mac with seven tracks of Lindsey Buckingham solo- or –Lindsey Buckingham featuring Fleetwood Mac-. But now that he’s releasing it as a Fleetwood Mac album he gets more sales and gets to be self-indulgent secretly. HA! What a genius!]

Ok. I don’t believe that. Lindsey spoke of getting to more esoteric places when he recorded the material on his own. And I believe that he was right in taking this direction.

The tunes on Tusk are all about himself; his childishness and his naïve belief in the artistic expression. Their clumsiness and their self-centeredness are what make them so charming for me. The man appears more human in there than any group player and that was his way to take all that room. For many people Stevie Nicks was the main focus point in her own songs; they ignored the group playing that very often gave Stevie all the room to shine. Lindsey doesn’t have such performance abilities so it was natural for him to take up all that space in the recording sphere wherein his main weapon lies.

If Lindsey had started to play fast solos, ridiculously complex drum patterns (which he couldn’t do anyway) etc, then that would have been far more self-indulgent for me.

He chose this way because he always does what he thinks is the best for the song itself. Not because he wants to show us his instrumental prowess.

Originally Posted by sodascouts

I think my opinion was a "Mainstream" one and that most casual listeners felt the same way. I believe they didn't give the album the second chance I did, and didn't get over that initial shock that colors the whole album.

While I agree with the crux of your post, in that Rumours is more accessible than Tusk in certain ways because its instruments are stated with more clarity where necessary, I still insist that Tusk is in no way totally inaccessible or “weird-for-weird’s-sake”. What it suffered from was mainly the fact that FM had established a core audience all of which could never have given Tusk a proper chance. The recording approaches and the quirkiness came from the punk/new wave bands and in those circles Tusk would have been perfectly accessible. It was just released by a band that was supposed to be the anti-thesis of punk, that’s all.

Anything on Tusk is worthy of “Go Your Own Way” in songwriting, it’s just been recorded and arranged in a different way.

If FM had put the popularly appealing stuff first and then gotten into the rest, it would have been better. Of course perhaps Lindsey was afraid no one would ever play the last half of the album, so he had to intersperse his more unusual stuff throughout, lol. And I believe they've made the same mistake on SYW - putting Murrow and Illume first was idiotic, IMHO. First impressions are the most memorable.

And this is another thing I don’t approve of. I understand your intentions but I personally love it when all the diverse-sounding material is sitting there next to each other. That’s what made the Rumours FM stand out for me first; that they can make their records sound real smooth and there’s still this quirkiness going on. That they can have “WTWCT” and “Murrow”, “Peacekeeper” and “Come”, next to each other and make it seem like it’s natural changes of mood in the human mind. I dislike the fact that albums should be like radio stations in that people shouldn’t be shocked by anything in there, that there should be certain boxes the music should be put into. Albums should reflect life itself, which is never about one or two certain moods. I’m glad Lindsey still thinks that way but then again you can all fight back with your programmable CD-players.