I hardly know where to begin with this beast.
Were this an ongoing deep dive into the varied sounds of Lindsey Buckingham, I’d know exactly how to start: Despite memorable material from Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks — including the utterly gorgeous, sometimes seductive ‘Sara,’ my pick for the latter’s peak moment in Fleetwood Mac or otherwise — this thing still plays like LB’s first solo LP.
Might seem an absurd overstatement until you listen again with four decades of hindsight and background info rattling ’round your brain just as frenetically as many of the rhythms on this rewarding rollercoaster of a record. To whatever extent Christine and Stevie contributed completed compositions, a matter better determined via the ‘alternate’ version of this behemoth, the overall feel of Tusk is entirely Lindsey’s doing.
Fleetwood Mac was fully fractured personally by this post-Rumours point, yet this is no White Album— not when nearly half the set was penned by one member on an indulgent million-dollar bender careening from pure id to potent idiosyncrasy. Nor does it fall prey to drug overuse the way Brian Wilson’s teenage symphonies to God did; his genius may have been Buckingham’s paradigm, but the progeny pulled helpful lessons out of so much unfulfilled promise.
Also: their narcotic of choice was different. As plenty of writers have observed, this was white-line fever at its basest, a cocaine blizzard captured on wax.
That’s evident in mellower moods too, where most of McVie’s songs dwell — and still Lindsey provides a production palette as emotionally distant as it is intimately warm.
Yet nothing — not even his nervy delivery on ‘The Ledge’ or ‘Not That Funny’ or the pivotal ‘I Know I’m Not Wrong,’ all energetic blasts that drag this Mac kicking and screaming into new wave — comes close to capturing their collective psychoactive paranoia the way the tribal title track does.
So, uh … where does Christine fit amid all this?
To be frank, McVie is the least crucial of the three songwriters this time out, though her presence is almost always felt (more vocally than instrumentally) no matter who leads the tune. That much is quantifiable: she has only two more songs on Tusk than she did on Rumours, despite the overall track total more than doubling, and nothing on Side 2 bears her copyright. What’s more, out of her half-dozen offerings, all undeniably worthwhile, most aren’t half as compelling as counterparts from Nicks and especially Buckingham, who often sounds as if conducting his own self-exorcism.
‘Think About Me’ is an instant winner, a sonic and thematic extension of ‘You Make Loving Fun’ and probably the only cut here other than ‘Sara’ that feels as if it was made by the same band that had concocted Rumours. McVie also provides fitting bookends to this insular, ill-paced sprawl, guiding us in gently with ‘Over & Over’ (among her most stately, if subdued, pieces, with a majestic, McCartneyesque chorus), then showing us the way out of this messy mindscape via ‘Never Forget,’ another fine example of her expert use of major chords to evoke hard-won optimism.
Her other numbers, especially the lilting ‘Honey Hi’ and the deep-space murmur of ‘Brown Eyes,’ carry more than a little whiff of then-boyfriend Dennis Wilson’s aesthetic. But lacking grander ambition for her portion of Tusk might well have been the smart move, lest a more adamant vision clash with Buckingham’s contrarian madness.
He wanted a non-Rumours that would put them in league with Talking Heads, the furthest any Mac frontman had yanked the group away from its core approach. It’s largely thanks to Christine’s steadfast soulfulness — her music was never highly malleable, more of-a-piece — that there remains a through-line for this entry in the FM catalog. Yet again, she became the group’s adhesive, a calming contrast to the sound of Lindsey nearly losing his mind.