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Originally Posted by GateandGarden
I was hoping you'd go into a long-ass explanation instead of simply saying, "Earlier because her newer music is crap." 
One thing I really don't get is how you say her music is not as universal now. Who can't relate to "Say You Will" and "Love Is"? But who feels they can really relate to "Sisters of the Moon" or "Bella Donna"? I imagine some listeners are too busy trying to figure out what the hell she's talking about in the last two I mentioned. But that is why I really like her earlier writings, because they are wonderfully vague and I come up with my own interpretations. They mean whatever I want them to mean. (Is this starting to sound like one of her lame Q&A answers?  ) I am tempted to say that her earlier lyrics have more depth, but do I just have it in my head that ambiguity and inimitability automatically equals depth? I'm not sure. I know that her earlier writings generally mean more to me because "Outside the Rain" can be about a number of things, some of which I have experienced, whereas "Everybody Finds Out" can really only be about a guy and a chick who are having an affair and the chick is angry with the other chick the guy's with. (I suppose EFO does fall into that category you mentioned diss, since it is one that doesn't have that universal appeal).
Now, it seems presumptuous to me to say that she needs to lose the Lindsey obsession. Do you really know that all those SYW songs are about him? I don't know; maybe it's common knowledge that they are and I'm just fooling myself in saying that they might be about someone else. But it pains me to think that EFO could be about Lindsey. How hurtful would that be to Lindsey and Kristin and eventually, their children? It's hard for me to fathom Stevie being so thoughtless and self-absorbed. I don't know; maybe it's all part of the game, just like how they insist on being affectionate on stage because, as Stevie has put it in articles, that's what people come to the concerts to see. I find that disturbing as well. 
And I thought she wrote "Trouble in Shangri-La" twenty years ago? I thought it was an old demo. Am I wrong? Whatever the case, I agree that if she came out with more songs like that one, it would be beyond awesome. I'll take more of that over "Love Is," "I Miss You," and "Say You Will" any day. (I still don't think "Say You Will" is "junk," as you say, but then I'm not going to agree with a lot of what I see as your over-the-top negative language in that post).  
Hillary
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I gave a long ass explanation a few weeks ago:
http://ledge.fleetwoodmac.net/showpo...&postcount=248
I think that the big reason I'm not a big fan of a lot of her later work is because, for me, something about her writing started to awry in the late eighties and the songs became much less relatable than they were before. I think she's at her best when there's a large sense of ambiguity to her songs. When she started to write songs like "Ghosts," "Two Kinds of Love," "That Made Me Stronger," "Sweet Girl," "Silver Girl," "Welcome to the Room Sara," and others along those lines, the songs became less universal and too personal in detail for me to enjoy very much. I know that I, personally, really have no desire to know how Stevie's depends on her music like a husband or how she talked to her famous friend last night. I don't know the woman, and never will, so it just strikes me as TMI and it begins to cloy. Others like that stuff and more power to them if they enjoy it, but I enjoy her work that doesn't explicitly refer to herself and her career and her dinners with friends about her songwriting. I can't get into them because I have a hard time relating. I like Silver Girl because it's quite vivid, but I don't enjoy it on the same level as something like Sable On Blonde because I'm not a girly-girl, I'm not lost in a hardcore world, and I don't have or look like a million bucks. It may just be me, but I listen to those songs and really don't give a fiddler's fig. Unfortunately, that's the turn her writing took and I don't enjoy it as much as I did before. I think she's a master at taking incredibly personal feelings and emotions and writing them into songs everyone can relate to, but I think she lost a bit of that over the years. Doesn't mean she can't be good when she wants to be because she can still knock her material out of the park, but I think it's come to point where for every fabulous song she records, she records a stinker to go along with it. Maybe she's run out of ideas or maybe I'm just a cold prick with no empathy or emotion, who knows. But those are the reasons I, personally, don't enjoy her new material that much.
As for the rest of your post:
1. Trouble In Shangri-La was written in 1995, which is amazing to me.
2. EFO is a good song, but it's another one of her "me songs." And those are the ones I absolutely despise, normally. Thankfully, she doesn't go as overboard as she does on songs like That Made Me Stronger, which makes it listenable.
3. No one knows if all the SYW are about Lindsey, half the time I think that the two of them are just bull**** artists who continue to create the "drama" and "romance" to sell albums and make cash (that's certainly their onstage schtick). But the fact that she still writes songs (Thrown Down) about this particular guy after their relationship ended almost 30 years ago is just odd to me. If she wants to do so that's fine, but I've lost interest in those particular songs for the most part.
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