Smile At You... philosophical question

[Hawkeye]

Originally Posted by David

I agree that the word is used as a catch-all. I spent enough years amassing all this stuff to have concluded that.

But I bring it up here because I disagreed with the widespread view that Lindsey Buckingham or Fleetwood Mac was ruining (or improving) something that they previously had no part in. I'm only suggesting that the "demo" was a group production, too--a collection of sound & performance decisions, & not a raw artifact torn from Stevie's whatever, as the term "demo" implies.

I hate it on Say You Will, by the way! But it had to change somehow. The idea that the 2003 Fleetwood Mac was going to closely reproduce something they had done decades earlier is ludicrous. Maybe I'd have preferred a straight-ahead 4/4 beat on it, midtempo & guitar-driven. It's not a "dreamy" song, so why the filigree & the wispy, vaporous atmosphere, as if it were Sara?

Part of the job of a sound-shaper in pop music--& part of the immense talents that the Mac production team used to have--is to match the song's "internal" atmosphere with an "external" soundscape. It's an exercise in complementing. Think of how perfectly Fleetwood Mac did that with Rhiannon, with Go Your Own Way, with Think About Me, with Hold Me. Those guys used to excel at this sort of thing.

i didn't get what you were saying before but now I FULLY understand and it makes perfect sense. I don't why I couldn't see it earlier. Of course Stevie couldn't have been involved fully in that amazing Mirage version. The instrumentaion is just perfect. She's not playing that awseome piano or those great guitar licks or that awseome bass line. Lindsey and Fleetwood Mac are equallya s responsible for those old Smile at Yous that until today I've given Stevie full credit for.

I still blame Lindsey for what it became in 2003 (still like it but it just pales) but I now also include him in the praise of the old versionss.