Fleetwood Mac
Tusk
(hear it)

Tusk is an awesome collaboration.

Each of Fleetwood Mac's voices, Lindsey Buckingham, Christine McVie, and Stevie Nicks, comes out swinging a drastically different basket.

Buckingham's exalted disrespect, delivered in a euphoric howl, backed by guitars which seem to be overloading the input circuitry on a 4-track cassette recorder, seems equally directed at himself and his close friends.

Nicks’s songs depart radically from her offerings on Rumours, their previous album, so much so that I can only suspect that Buckingham had a large role in the writing those precise pop songs. Almost wallowing in mysticism at times, she now delivers songs with broad structural gestures, building up from angelic words about angels or storms to stormy words about angels or storms, the lyrics expressing the sort of confused desire to make sense of the irrational that often leads us to repeat ourselves in greater and greater distress.

While Buckingham and Nicks have each somewhat left their old ways behind, Christine McVie’s Tusk songs could for the most part be found on any Fleetwood Mac album, even a pre-Buckingham/Nicks album like Mystery To Me. If anything, there is a hint of obfuscation in the lyrics, which are mostly of the “just give me a wink and I’ll be there with you” variety. In the end, her rather pretty songs almost present as interludes between the manic diatribes and extended moanings of her fellows.

The single sound which clearly declares this wild divergence of personalities is the sudden distorted, compressed snare drum which announces Buckingham’s return after Nicks’s “Sara”, which is a song about how Sara is the “poet in my heart”. “What Makes You Think You’re The One,” he asks, “who can laugh without crying?” I almost hear her responding “umm, I wasn’t laughing just now…”

This firm aesthetic misalliance makes the depth of collaboration on Tusk meaningful. The band doesn’t simply play as each other’s backing band, as is often said of the other great splintered-band album, the Beatles’s White Album. In Fleetwood Mac, they sing each other's all too serious words, which are often in direct contradiction to their own spirits as displayed in their songs. That Buckingham sings a line like “we’ll never forget tonight” for Christine McVie shows a level of intense trust, when his own song begs "save me a place".

John McVie and Mick Fleetwood, as the bass and drums consistent in each song, also display a breadth which can only be grounded in deep trust of their bandmates. It’s telling that on the White Album Paul McCartney often does his own drumming, or even plays all the instruments for himself. There, untrusting, the individual Beatles seem to apply the “Beatle” moniker as a way of justifying their solo projects. Here, the band, the “Fleetwood Mac”, puts up a united front against the onslaught of each member’s distortion of their shared reality.

Collaboration, then, is the very expression of resolve which the individual lacks. The unanswered confusions, wild misstatements, and veiled promises of the songwriters never tend toward despondency because they are answered by the act of making together.

bb, 13 January 2008