Fleetwood Mac - Mirage
In the Fall of 1994, my older brother, who had a turntable, double cassette deck, and CD player in one of those impressive stacks had done me the favor of taking Vitalogy, which at that point had the advance release on vinyl for two weeks before the CD was released, and recorded it on a blank cassette for me. In those two weeks, I felt like I had won something, an incredible album that felt like it was just mine for two weeks, and I wore the hell out of this thing and told friends how good it was. Come December 6th and soon after, I was disappointed to find that all I heard in that album wasn’t shared by friends who thought the album was too uneven and whined the refrain I grappled with friends through the end of that decade: “why can’t they just make another Ten!?”
I didn’t know it then, but I could have just pointed them to the lesson learned through Fleetwood Mac. Not so dissimilar to what happened to Ten, Rumours was an album that transcended the band, a highly impactful statement tied up in several conflicts that poured out into the music. It was a once in a lifetime confluence of the individual anguish of these band members exploding into the music but creating a force that had a universality to it that created an all-time classic. Their follow up, Tusk, didn’t try to replicate that moment but instead insisted that they shouldn’t even try to. It was an experimental gem that I think time has been kind to, even if it wasn’t the next Rumours. Mirage then comes along, almost like an about face, as if they should have given it their best shot to replicate Rumours, and questioning that decision, they went back and gave this their best go.
Don’t get me wrong, Gypsy, Straight Back, Hold Me, Eyes of the World, and Wish You Were Here are all excellent tracks in their own right. Book of Love is also pretty good and Empire State is the song that comes closest to replanting their flag in that Tusk hill. But even with all of that, in the larger sense, this album still feels like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of Rumours, and as Lindsay Buckingham would have predicted while recording Tusk, it makes much of this album pretty forgettable. They were that band on Rumours, but that album, and Tusk that followed, changed them in ways perhaps they weren’t quite ready to embrace. It serves as notice to that future band, who never did quite try to reclaim the space they’d already been and moved past - landmarks have their time and place.
The Essential Track: Gypsy
Up Next: The Who - It’s Hard
