The band Mick Fleetwood called the most beautiful to hear: “A collaboration”
Nothing about Mick Fleetwood needed to concern himself with the melody of Fleetwood Mac songs.
He was the one laying down the fat groove in every iteration of the band, and whether he was playing down and dirty blues or a pop tune, everything seemed to hold together perfectly when he had the right beat going in the background. But the more that he grew as a musician over the years, the more he came to appreciate the kind of singers who weren’t from the traditional style of singing.
Then again, a lot of what Fleetwood Mac was about involved trying new things. Rumours might be one of the more accessible classic albums for casual fans to get into, but Fleetwood remembered everything being a bit more strange than everyone remembers. The performance on ‘Go Your Own Way’ kept him on his toes most of the time, and getting the chance to work on Tusk a few years later was going to do a number on what he thought of as traditional rock and roll drumming.
The public might not have understood what they had on their hands when they heard the band’s double album, but that must have opened up a door with Fleetwood. He knew that they had created one of the best albums of their career at that point, and while it would take a long time to get all the members on the same page again, the drummer wasn’t going to sit on his hands and wait until the rest of the band were ready to work.
Since Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham had their own solo careers, what was the harm in him voyaging out to do different things? He was just as important as any other member of the band, and while his dabblings in genres like world music weren’t going to hit the public the same way Nicks’s albums did, it was all done in service of making songs that challenged the listener every time they heard them.
No one was ready for someone like Paul Simon to make that kind of musical leap, either, but Fleetwood felt there was something that he could do when reinterpreting his tunes. African rhythms were what appealed to him first, but bringing in singers from Ghana resulted in one of the best versions of his songs that he had ever worked on.
The Visitor wasn’t going to be his version of Graceland by any means, but compared to what he had heard out of the rest of the band, hearing them reinterpret old Fleetwood Mac material made for one of the most beautiful tunes he had ever heard, saying, “We cut a new version of ‘Rattlesnake Shake’ with a children’s drum ensemble. We cut a few tracks, including a cover of Buddy Holly’s ‘Not Fade Away’ and ‘Walk A Thin Line’ from Tusk. The title track to the album was a collaboration with the Ghana Folkloric Group, who were capable of some of the most beautiful vocal harmonies I’ve ever heard.”
The rest of the band were busy doing their own things, but Fleetwood wasn’t going to be the same person that he was before when working on the band’s next album. He wanted the chance to spread out as well, and you can hear him trying to throw in a bit more surprises behind the drum kit whenever they worked on their next records.
The Visitor didn’t have to be one of the biggest albums of 1981, but it was never trying to be, either. Fleetwood simply wanted to have the chance to work on something new, and for a brief moment, he managed to make something that stood alone in his catalogue as one of the most experimental projects any member of the band ever worked on.
