The one Fleetwood Mac album Stevie Nicks never understood: “Trying to make it weirder”
It’s easy for anyone to have the one album that defeats them. Whether it’s the tracklisting being too long or the story being too convoluted to figure out, there comes a point where even seasoned musical veterans have to cry ‘uncle’ and tap out of a record that has far greater ambitions than they were willing to go. It’s rare that one of them is an album that an artist is directly involved with, but Stevie Nicks thought that Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk was too cerebral for her actually to wrap her head around.
Because, in theory, this should have been a slam dunk for everyone involved. The group had come off releasing one of the greatest albums in the world with Rumours, and it was only a matter of time before they started working on the next project that was sure to be just as good and filled with even more juicy gossip about their personal lives.
That’s not what Lindsey Buckingham had in mind, though. He figured that the next step was for them to go even further with what they could do, and since he was listening to punk and new wave acts at the time, a lot of the record felt like a guy who’s played rock and roll all his life suddenly trying his hand at writing something nervy.
It’s never a bad thing for someone to take a risk like that, but not everyone in the group was necessarily at that same stage in life. Nicks was more than happy to just write songs that appealed to her, and while her songs like Tusk ended up being the greatest on the project, she still didn’t think that she understood what kind of tone Buckingham was going for.
When speaking about the album later, Nicks thought that Buckingham was reaching too far for what the rest of the group wanted, saying, “I think Tusk is a spectacular record. We were all down with getting heavy, but Lindsey was really trying to make it weirder and heavier than any of us were able to comprehend. But we went along. We followed him up that mountain!”
Then again, anyone who has listened to the record for more than three songs will probably say the exact same thing. For as many great pieces are on the record, there are just as many that sound like the group is starting to crack under the pressure. No matter how much the effect might have worked, having Buckingham do pushups in the studio to get the right sound for backing vocals doesn’t exactly come from a sane mind.
In fact, this might actually be the reason why Nicks decided to step back from the group after a while. If she was peaking as a songwriter and all she got was a handful of songs amid Buckingham’s wild experiments, it was time for her to fly solo once the 1980s started with her record Bella Donna.
Still, Tusk is definitely a curious fascination for anyone who’s looking to hear what the eccentric side of Fleetwood Mac is supposed to sound like. Not every song is intended to make that much sense, but if you break it down, it might be one of the most human records that the group ever made.
Tusk is the kind of album that punishes anyone who approaches Fleetwood Mac expecting comfort. After Rumours, the band could have chased another immaculate set of soft rock anthems and collected their rewards, but Buckingham chose the harder route, dragging the group into a jagged, post punk shaped headspace where polish was treated like the enemy.
For Nicks, that shift was not a lack of talent or commitment; it was a question of language. She could hear the ambition, she could feel the momentum, but she was not always sure what the record was trying to say.
And yet that confusion is part of why Tusk still matters. It captures a band refusing to become their own tribute act, even if the refusal comes with stray corners, nervous detours, and ideas that sound like they were born mid-argument. Nicks might not have fully understood Buckingham’s map, but she followed him anyway, and the result is an album that feels less like a product and more like a document. It is messy, brilliant, occasionally baffling, and unmistakably alive, which is sometimes the most flattering thing you can say about a record.
