Everybody Finds Out

[David]

I love the lyrics on “Everybody Finds Out.” How does it go again?

When love starts out in the darkness
It doesn’t do well in the light
Affairs of the heart that start out in the dark
Usually stay with the night

When nobody sees them
At least not together [weird line, that]
She rarely goes out
She spends every day waiting for the day
When everybody finds out

I have no problem with the songs on the Say You Will album. They’re good songs and some of them are great. (I’m not going to list which songs are great because some of you will jump down my throat.) But there are producer choices I dislike: the flange and phase effects on the vocals, which is really excessive; the tin-horn EQ (done deliberately in the style that was popular at that time to accommodate heavy subwoofers in automobiles); and the smack engineering which gave me Meniere’s syndrome or destroyed several million inner-ear hair cells with all that pan and delay. Question for Mark Needham: does Fleetwood Mac have to sound like Flavor Flav? Mick and John are sometimes engineered to sound like human voices doing beatboxing.

Of course, the issue with the technology “improvements” is only relative. These engineering styles aren’t good or bad in an absolute sense. The question is whether they serve the songs and the personality of the band. I think Dashut, Caillat, and the band had already pioneered a personal production style in their batch of albums, and in retrospect it was a better fit for the songs than anything since. The evidence is that the original “Dreams” is much better than any of the four dozen modern remixes of the song, and the original songs on Tango are better than all those club remixes, which huff and puff like aerobics and you lose the emotional core of the song.