Before and After Fleetwood Mac

As John masterfully blogs Tusk, I am really starting to realize how profoundly it and Fleetwood Mac in general has affected me. At this point, I can see pretty clearly that the discovery, acceptance, obsession, release, and re-evaluation of FM has served as a sort of delineation point between the past and current phase of my life.

It started out pretty innocently. I came into my studio and they were playing Mac. Carl is really into Fleetwood Mac right now, somebody said. And then I got some for myself. Not a lot, a few songs that I voraciously consumed. Then there was that epic trip to Philadelphia in December, an anxious look back in time which was bookended by Fleetwood Mac on the train the whole way down. This was the first time I strongly connected FM to my physical environment and my personal anxieties, and the first but not the last time I wrote about them, in my MS-Word Journal: I think New Jersey is haunting me. I went to Philadelphia on Friday afternoon, and all I am really thinking about is New Jersey: the Meadowlands, frozen, smoking, steaming on a gray Friday afternoon right before dark. On my first Amtrak train, so fancy. New Jersey was so sad and beautiful, and I listened to Fleetwood Mac nonstop—just “Dreams” and “Rhiannon” back to back, over and over again—and watched the frozen ground of the wetlands and all the industrial waste contained within that land dissolve into a more civilized Northern New Jersey landscape.

Upon return to New York, I acquired the full albums of the self-titled album, Rumors and Tusk (and the remastered versions of both), Tango in the Night, Mirage, eventually Buckingham Nicks, even some of Boston Blues. I immersed myself in Fleetwood Mac. All day at work at the magazine, all night at home, on the train, when I walked down the street. I experimented with different ways of listening—an album at a time, an album and its remastered version back to back, single tracks over and over. I researched. My primary concern in life, my most real and serious passion, became Fleetwood Mac.

Lucky for me, I had friends who were loving Fleetwood Mac right then and there, and they definitely enabled this obsession. By Christmas eve, I realized that Fleetwood Mac had indeed become more than just background music, and that I perhaps needed to exorcise it in order to save myself. I decided that this exorcism would take the form of a birthday party that involved only two elements: all of Fleetwood Mac's best work and a lot of drugs. The friends agreed that perhaps this was in order.

I knew this would be a monumental occasion, and everything needed to be just right. I waited several weeks, until all of my closest friends were back from their holiday vacations. There was some talk about procuring the rare making-of-Tusk documentary. This was followed up by phone calls by interested parties and a too-steep $150 price tag. In the meantime, I was growing increasingly distraught. My grasp upon reality was lessening. My thoughts were being replaced with cryptic lyrics, circular song structures, haunting harmonies. The world had grown dark and small and there was only room there for me and Fleetwood Mac. New Year's was a blur: my friend Peter came to visit and I spent all of New Year's Eve day hungover, listening to FM and explaining its brilliance in detail to him. I sat him down by the stereo and made him listen to Tusk with me while I was supposed to be cooking and preparing Jello shots. He said that 'Sara' reminded him of a girl he used to know, and got a little sad.

By the first week of January, I couldn't converse for more than 10 minutes without mentioning Fleetwood Mac. I would slip out of parties to listen to my iPod. Eventually the big day came, and I readied myself: this was the beginning of the end for me and the Mac. This was a dangerous, co-dependent relationship that needed to end. But like anything you love so much that it hurts you, it wasn't easy to let go.

All day, I bought candles and made phone calls to get numbers for drug dealers and actually smoked pot to calm myself down. When enough people arrived we sat together, listening all night— Rumors, Tusk, Fleetwood Mac, Buckingham Nicks, Tusk Remastered, Rumors Remastered... I think maybe Rumors again, "Gypsy" made its way in there at some point. It was perhaps one of the most profound and intense experiences of my life, and it lasted for maybe 9 hours. At 6 or 7am I went to bed with this bittersweet knowledge that it was all over.

After that day everything felt pretty raw and empty. I had thing weird longing that didn't go away for a long time. A week after the party, I permitted myself to listen to two or three songs on a train ride home (Rhiannon, Dreams, Sara) and I had a physical, almost convulsive reaction. By the time I got off the train I felt like a different person. I wasn't ready yet. By the time I went back to my job in February, I was emotionally drained.

Slowly, I've been able to re-introduce some Fleetwood Mac elements into my life again. I can't really listen to, say, "Sara" again like I used to. It's kind of painful. I don't really know how this happened to me. Before FM, I was in a generally optimistic mindset, but I knew winter was coming and it was going to be dark again for a long time. Somehow FM acted as a weird catalyst for a lot of impending badness that had been building up. It's possible that I felt like in the 6 months preceding it, I had changed into a person that I wasn't comfortable being. It's possible that a lot of the things that I had been dreaming about were actually materializing and I couldn't sort out my desires anymore. Post-FM (or, as someone called it, Fleetwood Crack), I am a changed woman. Fleetwood Mac made me see that human beings are flawed in sometimes catastrophic ways that they can't control. There are unpredictable, sometimes dark, sometimes ominous things that motivate them, and there is a certain beauty to that darkness that is rarely captured. These are all good reasons to be afraid, but maybe Fleetwood Mac's music is really about accepting fear and failure and making something good of it, then pressing on.