Wow -- that's weird! I was just listening to Bare Trees yesterday, after not hearing it for awhile. Something in the air/zeitgeist that made Bare Trees pop up? How great to be able to talk about it here on IORR.
here's no good recording of the album on YouTube (the one that's there is speeded up), I made a playlist using individual songs someone remastered very well:
Fleetwood Mac - Bare Trees YouTube Playlistvideo: [
www.youtube.com]
I adore Danny Kirwan's guitar "voice" and writing so much, so melodic and sort of epic, groovy, transcendent, just suffuses into my soul like an aloe mist. I love all his contributions on Bare Trees.
Track by track
- dig "Little Child of Mine" because it's mysterious and rollicking
- "The Ghost" is ok if I'm in a Bob Welch mood
- "Homeward Bound" is enjoyable to me because it's Christine McVie--like others posting in this thread, I prefer Christine McVie's voice, her tone, and overall vibe to Stevie Nicks (although Stevie Nicks added interesting and not unappealing dimension to the group, particularly the first 2 albums featuring her and Lindsay Buckingham)--and also has some nice guitar work--both acoustic and electric, and any Fleetwood Mac song with strong piano (again: Christine McVie) is a favorite
- "Sunny Side of Heaven" I could hear 15 million times and be happy about it--it's one of those songs when I heard it as a little kid it just gave me hope--I knew that nothing in the "straight world" that struck me as hypocritical or unkind or stupid could touch, much less destroy, the far deeper beauty and truth of music like this
- "Bare Trees" has such a great groove and roll song. I really love the beats and rhythms to it. The bass and vocals in unison (with one guitar?) ("I was alone in the cold of a winter's day...") is a neat touch and then the other tasty, tasteful--and joyful--guitar licks and fills. I think if Danny Kirwan weren't singing lead Christine McVie could a good job on this one.
- "Sentimental Lady" - nothing to say at the moment. They're ok and part of the album.
- "Danny's Chant" - very acid rock.
- "Spare Me a Little" - from that snare roll intro and moving into, again, that so chill, laidback yet resolute, vibe that was always more authentically California-feeling than what came forth when they actually started recording with California musicians. I don't care for the chorus. But the verses just soar, with Christine's chantilly creme voice and the mix of the pure and distorted guitar interludes. And I never noticed until this minute when singing the 6 opening notes ("Why not li-ie he-re") that those first 6 notes are the same intervals as the guitar hook in "My Girl"! The song isn't a songwriting masterpiece and sort of disintegrates into a jam, but that's ok to me, because it's a good spirited jam, almost predating Allman Bros Dickey Betts/Ramblin' Man-esque sound, in a way.
- "Dust" - almost beyond words. It could so easily have remained an instrumental, but instead Danny Kirwan sings the first 2 stanzas of a poem by Rupert Brookes, "Dust," which fit so well. the first 2 stanzas lay the foundation for the poem, but interestingly, the poem isn't so much about when we die, or are in or near death, but the poet describing when he dies and when the poet's love dies, their spirits--which Brookes describes as one mote of a dust and an atom...
Still sentient, still unsatisfied,
We'll ride the air, and shine and flit,
Around the places where we died,
And dance as dust before the sun,
And light of foot, and unconfined,
Hurry from road to road, and run
About the errands of the wind.
Not dead, not undesirous yet...
One mote of all the dust that's I
Shall meet one atom that was you
--describes how they and dance and swirl and ascend into orbit above a garden of people who just sort of gape and have no idea what the hell this energy is, before it disappears--
"And they will know---poor fools, they'll know!---
/One moment, what it is to love."
The quintessential Romantic ode to those who are alive and awake to love, set against a backdrop of the banal and mundane and those who are not "Lovers." But Danny Kirwan quotes only the opening lines here about death itself...amidst a wash of lush contented melancholia.
- "Thoughts on a Grey Day" - I have always loved this woman and can speak her lines in her voice. So sweet. And her and her husband's patter/bickering at the end - adorable.
All that said,
Future Games may even be more of a favorite album
-swiss
Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 2017-02-09 12:49 by swiss.