Let The Night Unfurl

Lindsey Buckingham & Christine McVie “In My World”

The new album attributed to Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie is a Fleetwood Mac record in all but name. The rhythm section is John McVie and Mick Fleetwood, the music was intended to be a Fleetwood Mac record until Stevie Nicks opted out of the project. But there are post-’75 Fleetwood Mac records that don’t include Lindsey and others that don’t include Christine. Mac logic can be strange and volatile, but the constant seems to be that people must appease Stevie at all costs. I get it. But if this was a Fleetwood Mac record and you added a few good-to-decent Stevie tunes, it’d be the best thing the band had done since Tango in the Night.

“In My World,” a Buckingham composition, has the atmosphere of a classic Fleetwood Mac tune – melancholy, quasi-mystical, vaguely Californian. The hooks are immediate even if the feeling is subdued, with the strongest emotions caught somewhere between Buckingham’s finger-picked guitar notes and Fleetwood’s distinctive pocket groove. The chorus is a major earworm, but whereas you’d expect Christine to cover the harmony part, it’s instead the echo of a multi-tracked Lindsey knocked out of phase. Thematically, this checks out – he is singing about “his world,” so of course it’s insular and self-reflective.

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