Let's show some love for... Brown Eyes!

[louielouie2000]

So Brown Eyes has been on heavy rotation in my house the past several days. Admittedly, I've been focusing my listening the past year or two on new bands (I'm big into the Brooklyn Indie music scene). But hearing Brown Eyes pop up on my I-tunes the other night has roped me back into listening to the Mac again. This song really has to be one of my all time favorite Mac compositions. It's just... perfect. Definitely the most sensuous and seductive song in the band's entire history.

What's kind of crazy is that I found the song to be very dull for the first year or so I owned Tusk (which was about 10 years ago now). I had the strangest thing change my mind about the song though. I was blasting down the road, and my car's sound system brought out something I'd never heard before. The uber-simple 3-note electric guitar progression which was layered behind the "sha la la la sha la la la's" of the chorus. It was a complete mirrored counter melody to Christine's smokey vocal. It totally added the extra layer I felt the song was missing... and it had been there the whole time!

One of the things I think is so great about this song is it's simplicity. It's almost bare bones... yet the whole makes up FAR more than the sum of it's parts. Brown Eyes has to have one of the best pairings of John's bass and Mick's percussion too. They're ultimately what define the song. To me this song defines what made Fleetwood Mac's 1970's albums so great... simplicity, and letting the extra space in the tracks do all the talking.

Shifting gears some... I recently rediscovered the version of this song from The Chain box set (the box set was a casualty of my car jacking several years back, and I've never replaced it). While the box set version is missing my favorite part of Brown Eyes (the 3-note progression), it's so different, that I love it too! The layering of the vocals are definitely more avant-garde/new wavish... which is very neat. And is that more of Peter Green's noodling I hear intermingled throughout the song? I know Mick said that Peter was the one who contributed the fabulously juicy last few notes on the Tusk album version.

I know I've rambled a lot, but let's talk about this song... anybody else love it the way I do?