What Makes You Think You're the One

Album: Tusk (1979)
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Songfacts®:

  • Many of Lindsey Buckingham's songs for Fleetwood Mac in the late '70s chronicle his relationship with his onetime lover and bandmate Stevie Nicks. It is widely believed that this scathing response to an ex who still believes he will be always be there for her is addressed to his Fleetwood Mac colleague.
  • Buckingham recorded Mick Fleetwood's drums through a boombox, which gives his beats a sensitive distortion that bolsters his no-nonsense vocals.

    "That was just me and Mick, and we were really looking to get some kind of crazy drum sound," Buckingham recalled to Uncut. "That was back in the day when everybody had boomboxes, and we had an old cassette player with these really crappy Mics. But you could record on it, and the system had built-in compressors, and we took the output. We put that right in front of the drums, and I think we put another one overhead, too, as opposed to mic'ing the whole thing as you usually do. And we ran that cassette player into the console and it just made this really explosive, trashy sound.

    "Mick was getting off on that drum sound so much," he added. "I was playing the piano and he was playing the drums, and we cut that song late one night, just the two of us."

Comments: 1

  • Jonathan from Milwaukee, WiSo Christine McVie doesn't play the piano on this?
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