Straight Back (vocals, keys, hat only)

[David]

Originally Posted by Mr Scarrott

A bit of magic can come from just two chords (even though Dreams does have more than that), but repeating the trick is difficult...

I forget where I read it but there was one review of Straight Back which said it was so woolly you could lag your central heating with it. That image has stuck with me.

Hehheheh. Yep. It’s the kind of song that, if it weren’t Stevie Nicks and Fleetwood Mac, wouldn’t interest me at all. It’s all her tumble of imagery (whether it’s apt or not) and her personal mythology that’s so thick and tortured, it can mean absolutely anything. That deliberate vagueness has never delighted me, whether it’s “Stairway to Heaven” or “Straight Back” or listening to a schizophrenic speak.

But it all just sounds right. There’s no accounting for why. Bernstein used to say that Beethoven was the composer of inevitability — that magical sense of knowing which note should follow the previous note, or which chord the previous chord, as if it were metaphysically inevitable the way his music advanced. On a much lower scale, you could say the same thing about Fleetwood.