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Originally Posted by elle
The Ledge and Think About Me make that side for me. among definitive standouts on the album full of standouts.
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“The Ledge” has some of the best lyrics on the album, too.
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You can love me, baby, but you can’t walk out
Someone ought to tell you what it’s really all about
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Mr. Buckingham doesn’t often get the credit for crafting a sarcastic lyric, but when he’s firing on all cylinders lyrically, he is up there with the greats, at least in patches—Elvis Costello, Nick Cave, Tom Waits, Randy Newman. In a single line, he can turn a character into a snide little ironist, a perfect bitch. The wittiest moments on Fleetwood Mac albums (such as they are) virtually always come from Lindsey, and those moments are underappreciated or not even recognized; instead, he is consistently characterized as an angry dullard who can only lash out. He once corrected Jim Ladd on the persona behind “That’s How We Do It in LA,” when Jim assumed the song was just a rich rock star taking a trendy swipe at an easy target. But Lindsey said that, no, the song is a critique on one obvious level but also an expression of love on another. And sure enough when you look at the lyrics again and listen to the whack track, you can hear that ambivalence. The proper response to a Buckingham song is, more often than not, to laugh at the musical or lyrical humor. Fans have always been too melodramatic, too serious, as if they were listening to
Romeo and Juliet. Lindsey’s rock and doo-wop instincts are casual and frivolous. If you’re in that spirit, you hear his music in a different light.
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Everything you do has been done
And this won’t last forever
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