Album: Mirage
Year: 1982
Coming on the heels of Stevie Nicks burgeoning solo career, the tepid Mirage was the album where the magic ran out.
After three albums where they sloughed off charges of being a soft-rock band with tough guitar and weird experiments, Mirage was something no Fleetwood Mac album of that era had ever been before: boring. That said, they did get one last great single out of it, the etherial “Hold Me.”
And really, it’s just the call-and-response chorus of “Hold Me” that I love. The piano-driven verses — sung in tandem by Christine McVie and Lindsay Buckingham, are actually pretty conventional. But that chorus — which is which is full of buried backing vocals, weird screams, and a Lindsay Buckingham guitar part that I’ve thought for over 30 years was a keyboard or a percussion instrument — is as gorgeous and weird as anything in their canon.
Also: Buckingham’s guitar in the coda, which ramps up from supportive to dominant in a matter of seconds and feels so out-of-nowhere that you listen to the entire song just to hear it again.
Official Video for “Hold Me”
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And back when bands actually used to make videos, too! Not that it made any sense.