Analyzing album covers: The Dance

[michelej1]

Originally Posted by sodascouts

No problem. I wonder what was analogous between the history of the paintng and the history of the band. It's not evident from the brief write ups I have read on Matisse and the painting, and I haven't dug any further. Anyone know?

I don't think it has a specific story like Double Suicide. I don't think it was inspired by any particular human beings or events. I think perhaps FM, or Lindsey, thinks that they do with music what Matisse was trying to do with dance, trying to show how it is really primitive and the same now as it was years ago and is universal, instinctive, not learned or something only accomplished by professionals or artists. I mean, it probably appealed to Lindsey in the same sense that he calls himself a reformed primitive.

Matisse said he was inspired by seeing fishermen in 1905 doing a circle dance on a beach. You go different places and see different people and they are all doing the same thing, at heart. And it's been the same for decades and centuries.

Also, Matisse was going through a phase where he was just using cut-outs, forms of people or bodies, and creating a whole by putting those simple cut-outs against more intricate, colorful backgrounds. The elements of the painting didn't arise together. They were put together. So, you start off with something very simple, individual pieces, and you layer them into a more complicated whole and I think that's what Fleetwood Mac does. And is.

Michele