Rolling Stone
March
26, 1987
By David Wild
Fleetwood Mac will release its first new album in five
years and possibly its last LP ever next month.
"I guess you could say the needs of the many
outweighed the needs of the few," Lindsey Buckingham said of his decision
to put aside work on his third solo album to make the new Fleetwood Mac LP,
which was still untitled at press time. Originally, Buckingham planned "to
just waltz in and do my tracks," but after work on the record got under way
with another producer, Buckingham and longtime associate Richard Dashut took
over production duties. "I decided, if we're going to do this, then
let's really do this. This could very well be the last Fleetwood Mac album, so
let's make it a killer."
The group's first LP since 1982's Mirage, the
new album features twelve songs: five written by Buckingham, four by Christine
McVie, two by Stevie Nicks and one written by Nicks's friend and former backup
singer Sandy Stewart. The first single from the album is Buckingham's
"Big Love," a song he described as a "lustful mid-to-uptempo
number featuring love grunts." He has already begun working on story boards
for a video of the single and was planning to work with Jim Blashfield, who
directed the video of Paul Simon's song "The Boy in the Bubble."
"Welcome to the Room Sara," one of Nicks's
songs, is described by Buckingham as "a song with an islandy feel that
Stevie's written about her experiences in that cryptic way that only she can
do."
Buckingham who found the Mirage album
"safe" and "unispired" said he's thrilled with every
song on the new album, which took sixteen months to make. "I don't know
if this is Fleetwood Mac's swan song," he said, "but if it is, then
there's no doubt that it would be a more appropriate one than Mirage.
Everyone is very happy to be done with it, but they're also very happy with
the end result. Warner Bros. is flipping over it. Of course, they paid a lot of
money to flip over it."
"This album has some of the coherency of Rumours,"
he added. "It feels like a story, it works as a whole. And it has some of
the charms of Tusk, with some of the rough edges polished up just a bit.
On a production level, it's beyond anything we've done."
Early last year, Buckingham and Dashut took over
production duties from Jason Corsaro, who'd previously worked with Robert
Palmer and Power Station. "It wasn't that Jason wouldn't have worked
out," Buckingham explained. "It was just me and Richard realizing that
if we were in, we had to be in all the way." Work then proceeded at Rumbo
Studios, in the San Fernando Valley, for three months, until Buckingham's home
studio was completed. Much of the overdubbing and all the mixing of the record
took place there. The album was recorded on analog equipment and mastered on
two-track digital. Buckingham said the CD version will be released
simultaneously with the album and tape.
Though the band members hadn't played together for four
years, Buckingham said that everyone got along. "It was a process of
discovery all through the album, and our process was a little more meticulous
this time around," Buckingham said. "That chemistry that made us what
we were in the first place hasn't gone away. There was very little of a party
atmosphere going on. I think that era is pretty much gone. Five years ago, the
norm was to work from four in the afternoon to four in the morning or even
later. This time around we'd start about two in the afternoon and finish by
ten at night. It was a lot healthier."
When asked about the health of Stevie Nicks who made
news this winter by entering the Betty Ford Center, Buckingham would only say
that the singer had "cleaned up her act." As for the tension of having
two former couples within the same band, Buckingham said, "Those tensions
have always been there and always will be. The thing is that most people when
they break up don't have to still spend the next ten years together."
At this point, Buckingham isn't sure what the prospects
are for more records from Fleetwood Mac. "It's too far in the future to
know," he said, "I can't say how I or anyone else will feel. From a
personal standpoint, though, I'd like to think this record brought all sorts
of loose ends together. I think the album's been a healing process."
According to Buckingham, there's "some chance"
that Fleetwood Mac will tour to support the new album, though he's anxious to
finish his solo album, which he hopes to release this fall.
Buckingham said he is not worried about Fleetwood Mac's commercial
viability after a five-year break. "I don't worry about things like that.
We're human beings, we're trying to live our lives being creative. We're
not victims of the record-business machinery. That's what the Tusk album was about: selling 16 million copies of Rumours, and seeing what
that created in terms of pressure to make a Rumours Two. Suddenly the
phenomenon was the sales and not the work. And that's dangerous ground as far
as I'm concerned."
(article
sent to me by Dark Angel, with thanks)