What makes Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Tusk’ so beautifully sloppy?
Every great album is usually triggered by some sort of tension within the group. Not every band needs to go through personal pain to create classics, but if they can pour all of that emotion into the songs rather than fight among each other, they normally bring some magic into the grooves of the vinyl. And while Fleetwood Mac was already one of the biggest acts of the late 1970s, it should come as no surprise to anyone that Tusk was a mess before it even got started.
Because even at the best of times, Fleetwood Mac was already going through a lot of turmoil amongst each other. The road to making Rumours had seen every band member fall out romantically amongst each other, and no matter how much ‘Go Your Own Way’ or ‘Dreams’ worked as staples of AM radio, there was bound to be a lot of pain knowing that the gory details of one’s relationship were on full display for anyone to see.
So now that they were at the top, Tusk was the only real place they could go afterwards. After all, there had been an absolutely rapturous reception to the last album, so why not have even more of that thing that the audience loved with even more emotional baggage to go along with it?
But that’s not to say that Tusk is an absolute trainwreck from back to front. Somewhere in here is one of the best Fleetwood Mac projects ever, and if there had been just some minor tweaking in the studio, this might have been the kind of long-awaited follow-up everyone wanted rather than something that divided the room amongst soft-rock fans.
Why is Tusk such a mess?
From day one, the chemistry in songwriting in Fleetwood Mac came down to just three people. Although Mick Fleetwood and John McVie named the group, Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, and Christine McVie were the entire reason why their tunes were on the hit parade. But somewhere along the line, Buckingham figured that he could get the job done without his bandmates on Tusk.
That’s not to say that this is a Buckingham solo album in disguise. Some of his delves into new wave territory are pretty captivating for what they are, but they seemed to be competing with the classic Fleetwood Mac sound half the time, especially when Stevie Nicks comes through with anthems like ‘Sara’ and ‘Storms’.
If anything, the whole record just feels like three different albums competing for the audience’s attention, which probably makes it the closest thing they have to The Beatles’ White Album in their discography. If things got shuffled around just a little bit, though, maybe they would realise that they didn’t need something so extravagant to get their point across.
What could make Tusk a better album?
While it’s easy to just blame the massive changes on Buckingham, the prominent change that Tusk would have needed to make is as clear as day: Make this single a project. The whole point was about getting everyone’s creative ambitions out, but since Nicks would be working on her first solo albums a few years after this came out, it was clear that the rest of the group could straddle that line just as well. But when pairing things down, what would you keep?
Since Buckingham’s wild experiments coat a lot of this record, hearing him get back in touch on some of his rockabilly-inclined songs like ‘What Makes You Think You’re The One’ would work a lot better than ‘Not That Funny’, which would be much better suited to a solo album produced by David Byrne. And given that McVie never wrote a bad song in her life, most of her material is worthy of staying like ‘Over and Over’ and ‘Think About Me’, with songs like ‘Honey Hi’ maybe reserved for B-sides.
Nicks, on the other hand, may have benefited from keeping songs like ‘Storms’ and ‘Sara’ while maybe adding in a tune from Bella Donna like ‘After the Glitter Fades’, which could have been a brilliant piece of meta-commentary on where the group were going. And if they cap things off with ‘Sisters of the Moon’, it would put a final bow on the track listing and leave the audience with the same punch ‘Gold Dust Woman’ had.
