'The Ledge' is a jarring, frantic explosion of punkish rockabilly from a solo singer-songwriter who sounds as if he is, indeed, on that titular ledge and about to take us with him for the journey that follows. That Tusk wasn't going to, in fact, be Rumours Part II was evident by its second track, the first of Buckingham's compositions. He announced it so viscerally, so demandingly, that I think he scared us!' That visceral approach defines Tusk. In Jim Irvin's excellent liner notes, Steve Nicks describes that mission bluntly: 'Lindsey was just so adamant about doing something that was the opposite of the previous records. Responsible for nearly half of the album's songs, producer-arranger-sonic architect Buckingham tends to dominate Tusk with his mission in mind. In the indispensable track-by-track liner notes here, Buckingham concedes that Christine's song had 'a certain familiarity to it.' A ballad tinged with country-rock guitar and ethereal, lightly-applied harmonies, 'Over and Over' proved an attractive appetizer to the main course that followed. This rueful rumination on a romance (with multiple meanings to its title) wouldn't have been out-of-place on Rumours. McVie's shimmering 'Over and Over' provided an unlikely start to the album. Nicks relished her role as resident mystic, turning out extended musical narratives shrouded in mystery yet always alluring. McVie solidified her role as purveyor of smart adult pop. Buckingham emerged as the restless studio wizard and pop deconstructionist brimming with ideas incorporating the urgency of the day's new wave sounds while taking in influences from rock and roll's past. Tusk is chockablock with unorthodox song structures, varied production textures, and not one song as immediately accessible as 'Go Your Own Way' or 'You Make Loving Fun.' The 20-song album was assembled from six songs penned by Christine McVie, five by Stevie Nicks, and nine by Buckingham - three highly individual songwriters with distinctive voices. But the story is far from linear, the sounds anything but expected. It shares with its predecessor Rumours the sense of being a 'relationship' album, with many of the lyrics still seeming to reflect on the songwriters' various romantic entanglements. It's reported in this set that the band's resident visionary, Buckingham, used over 175 reels of two-inch tape recording his magnum opus - and then almost 400 mix reels! (The album is credited as 'Produced by Fleetwood Mac (Special Thanks to Lindsey Buckingham' with Richard Dashut and Ken Caillat.) Tusk is the band's answer to The Beach Boys' SMiLE, assembled from wildly disparate parts - except that Tusk was released as planned! One could endlessly debate the album's schizophrenic sequencing, as well in fact, much like SMiLE once was, it's a perfect album to arrange and rearrange in one's head (or one's computer).

The result is an exhaustive and illuminating exploration into the strange world of Tusk. A long-awaited 5.1 mix, on DVD, also is included. 29 previously unreleased studio outtakes premiere here across two CDs, as well as a 22-song/2-CD live set. Records and Rhino, most notably a 5-CD/1-DVD/2-LP Deluxe Edition. Now, over ten years after its last expanded reissue, Tusk is back in a variety of formats from Warner Bros. Nobody expected the band that had already morphed from blues-rock to the epitome of California pop-rock (and everything in between) to defiantly go the 'art-rock' route, yet that's precisely what Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, Lindsey Buckingham, Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks did with Tusk. One of the most willfully unconventional albums ever made, the follow-up to Rumoursnonetheless went multi-platinum. Can an album that sold four million copies be fairly called a cult classic? If the answer is yes, that album would certainly be Fleetwood Mac's Tusk.

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