Trivia / Tusk (1979)

• Creator's Favorite Episode: Mick Fleetwood named Tusk his personal favorite Fleetwood Mac album.
• Cut Song: One of the notable outtakes is a cover of "Farmer's Daughter", originally by The Beach Boys from their 1963 album Surfin' U.S.A.. They would release a live version the very next year for the album Live.
• Follow-Up Failure: Selling over four million copies worldwide wouldn't seem too bad on paper, but against the over forty million sold by Rumours, it came off as a massive drop-off, with considerable repercussions on the music industry for the next decade.
• Trend Killer: The relative commercial failure of this album struck a major blow to the popularity of double albums in popular music that would span the next thirty years. The format had long existed on shaky ground due to its high production costs, but Tusk underselling compared to the blockbuster sales of Rumours made labels and artists alike far more reluctant to release double albums except out of necessity. When the rise of CDs made longer albums fashionable again, the LP versions would either pare down the material or pack the grooves closer to avoid using more than one disc, and double-CD releases are still rare outside of live albums, compilations, and reissues of double-LP albums that don't fit on one CD. Double-LP albums would only become popular again with the Vinyl Revival, which made it easier to profit off of a Multi-Disc Work on vinyl (which was often necessary due to many newer albums still featuring CD-centric runtimes).
• Troubled Production:
  • The album's size and change in musical direction started with Lindsey Buckingham going to Mick Fleetwood, then stuck acting as the band's manager, with a bunch of songs. While the conversation went pleasantly and ended with the two agreeing the band would record them, the two later admitted they'd read other things into it: Fleetwood thought that Buckingham was threatening to leave the band if he didn't get his way, while Buckingham thought Fleetwood was giving him permission to record each and every song for the band's next album. This had a lot to do with how things turned out over the next ... two years.
  • The first attempt to record the new songs took the band to Sausalito, California. After three months in a studio there all they had to show for it was drum tracks.
  • Fleetwood tried, and failed, to get the label, which had been hoping for (basically) Rumours II, to pay for the band to build their own studio. Instead, the label agreed to pay for improvements and customizations to the Village Recorder in L.A. ... work that wound up taking longer and costing more money than building a studio would have.
  • Unbeknownst to anyone else in the band, Fleetwood and Stevie Nicks were having an affair. Then he left her for her best friend, adversely affecting her mood and leaving her in no condition to work with Buckingham.
    • Buckingham was largely in charge, and he found yet another way to piss off Nicks off, by cutting "Sara" down to six and a half minutes from the original 14. He was influenced by the New Wave sound of the time, and it shows. For the title track they got the USC marching band to play along.
  • The album cost a million dollars to make, the most expensive album ever recorded at that time, and although it generated three hit singles ("Sara" among them) and sold four million copies it was widely regarded as a failure because that was nowhere near the business Rumours had done.

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