Tusk is Fleetwood Mac’s best album. But it’s not their most popular. That, of course, would be their 1977 classic Rumours, which I regard as a sort of introductory album to the band. Tusk is the definitive Fleetwood Mac album after you have listened to the obligatory Rumours, and you are ready to get a master’s degree in the world of Fleetwood Mac.
Rumours is still one of the best selling albums of all time and gave Fleetwood Mac superstardom. After that kind of success, Fleetwood Mac knew they had carte blanche to do anything they wanted for their follow-up album. A seventy-three-minute double LP album named Tusk was their gift to the world.
For perspective, most 1970s albums were only about thirty-five minutes long, because that is all a single LP could hold. The rise of compact discs in the 1980s would allow the average album length to balloon to about forty-five to fifty minutes.
Fleetwood Mac took a lot of chances with this album. The eponymous hit single Tusk does not appear until over an hour into the album - sixty-eight minutes to be exact. It is the second to last track.
For me, several listens were required for the album to fully sink in and get the feel of it. But once it clicks, it is the kind of album that is endlessly listenable and never gets boring.
Continuing with my recent fascination of the late 1970s/early 1980s aesthetic, Tusk perfectly encapsulates the light, breezy days of a Southern California Sunday afternoon. Cruising Pacific Coast Highway wearing Halston cologne while driving your Rolls-Royce Cornische convertible during the height of your mid-life crisis. All the while wondering what exactly happened to the world of your childhood, and how the hell you can possibly survive another forty years.
Oh, wait. I’m describing the movie ‘10’ with Dudley Moore! But either way, you’re driving the PCH on a boring Sunday afternoon, feeling the Sunday Scaries before they had a name but yet knowing that is what you are feeling; and without quite putting your finger on it.
A must-watch video including 1978-79 recording studio footage, interviews discussing their creative process, and live footage from their November 1979 performance in St. Louis. All in LaserDisc quality! (For those who don’t know, or don’t remember, LaserDisc was the first home digital video medium in the 1980s. Its resolution was 480i, and a decade ahead of its time. DVD was the same technology, but on a smaller disc and released a decade later.)
Melancholy pervades most of the album - particularly the darker, moodier songs written by Stevie Nicks and the late Christine McVie. For me, the overall feeling of the album is a searching for what comes next after the feeling becomes undeniable that an easier way of life is transitioning into an undeterminable future no one could yet grasp. Upbeat pseudo-optimism appears, however, in short bursts throughout to break the binding spell of the cozy melancholic feel, particularly on the Lindsey Buckingham written tracks. The final track “Never Forget” finally blends these two moods into one, and it ends the album on what could be an uplifting note (possibly false?), but what after what is just a few seconds one of the most intoxicating melodies on the entire album, it quickly fades away, never to be heard, forever.
Tusk is the musical sound of this transition from the 1970s to the 1980s. By 1985, it would be a brand new, shinier, glossier world at our fingertips - a world of success and winning at life would be our new birth right. Intoxicating at the time, it would prove to be no more real than an Old West movie set - where nothing but sand, cacti, and the dust of time were behind those swinging saloon doors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tusk_(album)
A fascinating series of printed inserts were included in the earliest pressings. All were found on discogs.com
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