Quote:
Originally Posted by louielouie2000
Fair enough!  Like Lindsey once said of Stevie: she used to write from the inside out. She's been far, far more literal the past 30 years than she was in the '70s. There's nowhere near as much room for personal interpretation with her MTV era -> present recordings as with her early Mac material. My whole long-winded meandering rebuttal to this is you almost bring up a moot point IMO... aren't all the songs she's recorded in at least the past 20 years of a more pedestrian nature than the Stevie we all fell in love with? Or do you still see flecks of gold in the matrix? Personally, when I hear the banal words to this new snippet from Dave Stewart, it's a bit disheartening. |
For one thing, she hasn't released all that much material over the past 20 years- two FM albums, two solo albums and a handful of tracks here and there. And we probably should discount anything she released during the Klonopin Era (1990-1994) since she was not in her right mind at all. So that really leaves us with one Stevie album (TISL), one Fleetwood Mac album (SYW) and a few other tracks. I think songs like "Trouble in Shangri-la," "Bombay Sapphires," "Love Is," and "Planets of the Universe" (the new verses) are classic Stevie lyric-wise- somewhat mysterious, somewhat allegorical, deeply heartfelt and impressionistic. And on SYW, even seemingly straightforward songs like "Thrown Down," "Everybody Finds Out" and "Destiny Rules" have a mysterious quality about them. Who are these songs about? The lyrics hint at secret trysts, unspoken words, moments of regret about specific events and the inevitability of fate, but the true meanings of the songs are never quite revealed. And there are some truly brilliant lines here and there, e.g., "When love starts out in the darkness, it doesn't do well in the light," "It's not being together, it's just following the rules," etc. Compare the TISL and SYW lyrics to "Desert Angel." "This is the first thing that I've written since I wrote about 'freedom,'"
in which she boldly namechecks another craptacular ditty co-written with Mike Campbell. And how cringe-inducing is "I was born in the desert... so I know how it feels there."
Just inexplicably bad, bad, bad... In hindsight I realize she was under the influence when she wrote this, so I'll cut her some slack. But at the time of it's release, I was seriously wondering WTF???
