The “most exciting” album Lindsey Buckingham ever heard
Every album that Lindsey Buckingham ever worked on needed a little bit more than a couple of good tunes.
While nothing needed to be as emotionally draining as working on an album like Rumours, the hardship that went into every record was often the reason why half of his tunes sounded as pristine as they did. After all, no artist goes their entire career without a few bumps in the road, but Buckingham felt that the best records are the ones where you could hear that tension taking place in real time.
Everyone involved with Fleetwood Mac’s magnum opus would have gladly traded all of the addiction issues and heartache if they could, but that would cease to make Rumours a perfect album. Not everyone needs to suffer for their art like that, but perhaps if Buckingham and Stevie Nicks didn’t have a screaming match midway through ‘You Make Loving Fun’, their backing vocals may have sounded a lot different.
But by the time that all of their hard work paid off, Buckingham had bigger ideas for what he wanted the group to be. There had been plenty of artists who kept their winning formula after one of their greatest albums, but when they went back into the studio, the guitarist knew they couldn’t repeat themselves. No classic artist fell into a holding pattern after their masterpiece, and Tusk was never going to be Rumours Pt. 2 if he had anything to say about it.
Then again, the band’s double album is almost uncomfortable to listen to because of how strange it can get. All three songwriters in the band practically retreated to their own corners to work on material, and while that did make for some interesting moments like Nicks’s ‘Sara’, people would have been shocked looking for another version of ‘Go Your Own Way’ and getting songs like the title track and ‘What Makes You Think You’re the One’ instead.
It was definitely a change of pace, but Buckingham only wanted to follow the lead of The Beatles on The White Album, saying later, “I think The White Album is one of the most exciting and divergent albums The Beatles ever made. I’m not sure it’s valid to criticize something because on one record the approach is individualistic and on another it’s collective. The question is, ‘What is the music giving off? Is it any good?’ To criticize Tusk for that is silly. I think there are valid criticisms of Tusk, but that’s not one of them.”
And looking at how Tusk is constructed, there are more than a few comparisons to what the Fab Four were doing. Most of The Beatles were not exactly the best of friends working in the studio on that record, and by retreating into their own corners, all of them ended up making the most authentic music they could for the time, even if their fellow bandmates didn’t exactly see eye-to-eye with them.
If we were to drag this comparison out a little further, Buckingham would have definitely been the John Lennon of the group. Lennon was the maverick, always wanting to make things sound a bit strange compared to Paul McCartney’s pop ditties, so it’s not a stretch to say that Buckingham was doing the same on a song like ‘Not That Funny’, where he started doing pushups to record the backing vocals.
Even though the result worked and Tusk became a classic, there’s also a reason why both that album and The White Album came at dire points for both bands. You can certainly feel the tension, but it wasn’t exactly a shock when Nicks decided to take a break from the group for a little while once the whole tour wrapped.
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