The Fleetwood Mac songs that only feature Lindsey Buckingham
As chaotic as the sessions for Rumours were, nothing could compare to what Fleetwood Mac would go through making their follow-up, Tusk. Rumours was filled with infighting, resentment, and a metric tonne of cocaine. Rusk had all of those same problems, with the added mania of home-built studios, millions of dollars, and a complete change in writing style from Lindsey Buckingham.
After channelling his folk roots into the soft rock sound of Rumours, Buckingham was taken with the revolutionary sounds of punk and new wave. Fleetwood Mac was never going to be able to compete with the likes of Talking Heads and Devo, but that didn’t stop Buckingham from trying. According to Buckingham himself, the recording sessions for the two albums were relatively similar, with the exception being that Tusk produced twice as many songs at the cost of roughly $1.4million.
“In the context of the whole, Rumours took longer to make than Tusk. One of the reasons why Tusk cost so much is that we happened to be at a studio that was charging a fuck of a lot of money,” Buckingham told Trouser Press in 1980. “During the making of Tusk, we were in the studio for about 10 months and we got 20 songs out of it. Rumours took the same amount of time. It [Rumours] didn’t cost so much because we were in a cheaper studio. There’s no denying what it cost, but I think it’s been taken out of context.”
Part of that context is that Fleetwood Mac built their own studio to record the album. Even with a brand new studio at his disposal, Buckingham wanted to record some demos at his home studio. Buckingham’s home demos were fully recorded by him alone with the intent that the other members of Fleetwood Mac would eventually come in and add their own contributions to the tracks. That being said, a third of Buckingham’s songs wound up featuring only him.
“See, one of the things about being in Fleetwood Mac is that Christine writes pretty much soft, pretty songs, and Stevie more or less does the same thing too,” Buckingham told Musician Magazine in 1981. “They both write rock ‘n’ roll songs from time to time, and do it very well, but the burden of the real gutsiness usually is on me. So if Christine has X amount of songs, and Stevie has X amount of songs, my slot must almost out of necessity be pretty tough kind stuff.”
“I think it would be a lot of fun to just experience making a statement in a broader range of things,” He added. “If you took all of my songs from Tusk, they would probably make a more cohesive album than the whole Tusk album, just in terms of cohesion. I wouldn’t want to get too much more fringey than something like ‘The Ledge’, you know. The funny thing is, so many people reacted to that song like, ‘My God, what is that?’ It didn’t even seem that radical to me. See, I’m trying to learn more about writing.”
In the same interview, Buckingham confirmed that the final versions of ‘The Ledge’, ‘Save Me a Place’, and ‘That’s Enough For Me’ featured no other members of Fleetwood Mac. “I’m not sure they see them as Fleetwood Mac songs,” Buckingham laughed about how the other members saw his solo recordings. “I don’t see why they can’t be. I think of them as Fleetwood Mac songs — we’ve done some of them live. We ran down ‘The Ledge’ a whole bunch of times and almost started doing that in the set; we were doing ‘That’s Enough For Me’ live. But we had a lot of problems trying to integrate the stuff from Tusk with the old set.”
