The 1979 Fleetwood Mac album Lindsey Buckingham was actually satisfied with
It was never easy to make everyone happy whenever Fleetwood Mac went into the studio.
Even though Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks gave the group a shot in the arm when they began working on their pop songs together, there was no way for them to truly capture the same lighthearted feeling when they were making tunes about how much they couldn’t stand working with each other. But even if Buckingham had his moments of frustration, he did have those rare times when he felt that everything fell into place as it should have.
Then again, it’s hard to think of Rumours as anything less than perfect in a lot of ways. The band went the extra mile to do every single thing right, and even if they had to suffer for their art a lot more than anyone is really supposed to, that doesn’t mean that their work didn’t show. Buckingham’s perfectionism is why ‘Go Your Own Way’ sounded perfect coming out of the radio, and while he originally recorded ‘Never Going Back Again’ in the wrong key, finding the time to make the whole thing sound brighter was all that mattered for him.
But when you have those records that sound almost impossibly clean, there’s always a lingering question in everyone’s mind: now what the hell do we do? Rumours feels less like an album these days and more of a statement of how great the 1970s could sound in the modern age, so getting a record that managed to not only match it but go beyond their previous work didn’t seem to be in the cards.
That said, it’s not like Buckingham didn’t give it a fair shot when working on Tusk. He had a good idea of what he wanted to sound like now that he had genres like new wave under his belt, and while a lot of his weird moments did end up clashing with what his bandmates were doing, he wasn’t about to roll over and try to make another version of what the band wanted from him on each song.
He liked the idea of challenging his audience, and he knew that what he did on Tusk mattered a lot more than anything that the band did for the next decade together, saying, “At times I was [satisfied]. The Tusk thing was musically satisfying. But because it wasn’t selling 60 million albums, there was this dictum that said we’re not going to do that anymore. So there were moments that didn’t lead to other moments. There were a lot of stops and starts. Those 12 years, they were ambiguous at best.”
And while the numbers didn’t lie when the record officially came out, it’s not like Tusk has become a casualty in their discography by any stretch. If anything, it’s a lore more like The Beatles’ White Album in many respects. Buckingham was the maverick trying to push himself, and even though Nicks and Christine McVie were still writing the best songs that they could, all of their individual tracks sound like a couple of decent solo albums stacked on top of each other.
When the band was only known for making pop rock with this lineup, though, making a record that was this strange was a much more interesting pivot. It’s not like Buckingham’s idea didn’t work, either, especially since the reimagining of the title track with a marching band actually was pulled off surprisingly well in a live setting whenever they performed the track during their reunion shows.
But that’s the curse of what happens when someone tries to innovate like this. Buckingham could have been well ahead of his time by making a record that sounded this off-the-wall, but sometimes people who are a bit too ahead of the curve end up being wrong almost by accident when they start expressing themselves.
