"Walk A Thin Line"-Fleetwood Mac

Those that know me know that I like Fleetwood Mac even more than I like McDonald's, and sadly, I like McDonald's a lot.

My parents owned both Rumours and the 1975 self-titled album (the one with "Rhiannon" and "Landslide") and I completely devoured them. This was at a time (seven or eight years old) when I was basically only willing to listen to Paul Simon, The Beatles, and The Everly Brothers, so adding another band to my roster of gentle and melodically-inclined white people was a Big Deal. Since then I have loved them passionately and felt that I had to protect them from accusations of second-rateness, lame-itude, and generally only having a few good hits but being overall kind of milquetoast (I just learned this word and this is the perfect occasion to use it).

I didn't grow up with the album Tusk though, so when my friend Ian sent it to me, I was worried about getting my hopes up too much. I was afraid that if I didn't like it, I might be proved to be NOT A REAL FLEETWOOD MAC FAN which would be equivalent to not being a real Tarheel or not really needing glasses but just wearing them to look cool.

Luckily, the album is just fantastic. After more than fifteen years of loving those other two albums, I think I might (gasp) like this one the best. It cost something like a million dollars to make and includes the University of Southern California's marching band playing on the title track. What's amazing is that it still sounds like a Fleetwood Mac album (you can hear the voices of the songwriters coming straight through) but then there are also all of these interesting and even weird musical and stylistic choices that add so much to it.

Here's a story that I promise is related: Some friends and I once came up with a game/theory (game theory?) called "Indie Rock or Bonnie Raitt?" The idea is that all music can ultimately be put in either the "indie rock" or "Bonnie Raitt" category. I love Bonnie Raitt just as much as I love indie rock, so this is not a discussion about quality, it's a discussion about type. Obviously this can cause all kinds of heated arguments (that's kind of the point, I guess) because some bands or artists are really on the line between the two.

The point is that for my whole life I've been sure that Fleetwood Mac is Bonnie Raitt. But after listening to Tusk, I'm convinced that they're indie rock. Wikipedia tells me that Lindsey Buckingham tried with this album to "allow punk rock and New Wave influence into his work." I definitely hear it.

"Walk A Thin Line" is just an incredible song. It's slow but in this tightly-controlled, percussive, powerful way, landing heavily on each beat and chord with a quality that falls somewhere between the regal and the sexual. I'm also convinced that the "oh-wa-oh-wa-oh-wa-oh-wahhh" backing vocal line is the forerunner to the "oh-la-oh-la" backing vocals in The New Pornographers' song "Challengers."

Some people call R.E.M.'s Murmur the first indie rock album, but I say it happened four years earlier with Tusk. That's kind of a wild claim, I realize, but I am WILD about Fleetwood Mac.