At last: a new Fleetwood Mac album!
New, that is, for this ongoing deep dive into the discography of the late great Christine McVie, following 10 posts dedicated to things she did to keep busy after the Tusk tour of ’79-’80.
That’s when we last found the most famous Mac-ateers all in the same room, sounding like cocaine as much as looking it and rapidly getting on each other’s nerves (again). A healthy break was needed — and maybe should have lasted longer?
I mean for mental reasons, not marketplace focus; ‘Hold Me’ and ‘Gypsy,’ the most shimmering illusions on Mirage, would have been smash singles (and videos) at any time in the ‘80s. But listen to Stevie Nicks’s ‘Straight Back’ on this one and tell me she wouldn’t have been just as happy soaring forward on solo wings without making time for a u-turn.
Yet no sooner was she crowned an inaugural MTV queen, they all decamped to le Chateau d’Hérouville to start work on one of the last albums recorded there before that legendary locale closed for the better part of four decades.
Lindsey Buckingham remained principally in charge of quality control, his home-studio style having evolved (somewhat at Mick Fleetwood’s insistence, definitely with Richard Dashut’s assistance) into a hit-making gloss that melded all the variants on ‘Tusk’ into a freshly identifiable brand.
He gets 5 of 12 tunes, and they’re all solid; ‘Book of Love’ and ‘Eyes of the World’ especially merit rediscovery, and I dig the warped ELO-isms of ‘Empire State.’ But none strike me half as memorably as Stevie’s trio of tunes.
Not to mention Christine’s impeccable quartet.
True to herself at every juncture, McVie continues to be the group’s most vivid chronicler of wounded hearts overjoyed by (re)new(ed) romance. She’s months away from 40 at this point, her gloriously husky voice (stronger than ever) expressing that fact in every line, yet her lyrics are still filled with the giddy yearning of a teenager crushing hard.
The crazy-in-love dreaminess of ‘Only Over You,’ about her tortured love for Dennis Wilson, is among her very best — and the only one she alone wrote. Bet she carried that all-because-of-you bit in her head for months. I can’t help but picture the two of them strolling Malibu beach while she coos the chorus couplet at him. He drowned in those waves a year later.
‘Wish You Were Here,’ lush with ahhhh harmonies worthy of the Beach Boys, is another classic McVie closer introduced by grand piano. Hard not to hear it too as a pleading paean to Dennis, who was gone long before his body was.
‘Love in Store’ is one of those sunny gems for which Christine had such an uncanny knack, this time propelled by a sprightly Motown drive from Fleetwood Mac’s reliable rhythmic namesakes.
As for ‘Hold Me,’ well … it’s perfection. Not only the best thing on Mirage but easily among the choicest cuts this lineup ever recorded — a Top 5 all-time McVie track.