After two records about cheating on each other, it was inevitable that Stevie Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham, Christine and John McVie, and Mick Fleetwood would begin to cheat on Fleetwood Mac. They were traveling in separate limos by the end of the bad-tempered Tusk tour, where Buckingham had kicked Nicks onstage, and they’d circled Europe on Hitler’s old train. “Looks like the end of the line,” the New York Post warned in March 1981, as solo careers started to proliferate. Fleetwood released The Visitor in June. Where Tusk had taken a year to record, Nicks’ debut album, Bella Donna, was nailed in a few days, released in July, and certified Platinum by October—just as Buckingham’s Law and Order limped to No. 32. Her blousy mystique was the antithesis of his uptight theme, and to dent his fragile ego further, it had been validated by serious men: collaborators Tom Petty, Don Henley, and producer Jimmy Iovine, who she was now dating. According to Buckingham’s then-girlfriend, Carol Ann Harris, he liked to refer to “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” as “Stop Draggin’ My Career Around.”
Having accepted that the band weren’t interested in “shaking people’s preconceptions of pop,” as he sniffed to any reporter who would listen, Buckingham resolved that Fleetwood Mac’s next album should be a proper group effort. Mostly minus Nicks, they mingled their ghosts with those of the haunted Château d’Hérouville, just outside Paris, a destination chosen to accommodate Monaco resident Fleetwood’s tax affairs. Harris observed communal meals eaten in silence. The drug intake exceeded even that of Tusk, according to co-producer Ken Caillat. It’s hard to find any comment about why they chose to name their thirteenth record (and fifth under this lineup) Mirage, though the resonance is obvious in hindsight: It’s the illusion of the band, rather than the full-blooded beast. Buckingham tossed off his songs in under two months. “What can I say this time/Which card shall I play?” Nicks sings on “Straight Back,” sounding like a woman in search of an idea. She pulls out her well-worn tarot deck—wolf, dream, wind, sun—and whips up an unconvincing sandstorm about how “the dream was never over, the dream has just begun,” while Fleetwood Mac increasingly resembled an inescapable nightmare.
Fleetwood Mac’s internecine relationships and betrayals outdid any soap opera, though by 1982, they had plotted almost every conceivable love triangle and finally found partners outside the group. Mirage nixed any suggestion that drama and vicious recriminations were the band’s sole animating force, and flourished in the emotional void they occupied: heartbroken, strung out, and alone at the top. “Every hour filled with an emptiness I can’t hide,” Christine McVie sings on “Wish You Were Here,” referencing her split from the Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson. Love and happiness become an illusion, an unattainable idyll only accessible to the gods: “Knowledge not meant for mortal fools,” Buckingham sings on “Book of Love,” though that doesn’t stop him and his cohort from clinging to the belief that someone, something out there can save them. “Never take your love away, begging you, baby,” McVie pleads on “Love in Store,” turning a trope into a frantic plea.
Yet Mirage has a sunny desperation. Rumours’ harmonies return, the rhythms shuffle, xylophones tinkle, and acoustic guitars add innocent flourishes to every refrain. There’s a similarly nostalgic optimism to Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly, also released in ’82: Where Vietnam and Korea cast an ominous pall over Fagen’s paradise, Fleetwood Mac’s collective mania makes Mirage feel like fiddling while Rome burns. Buckingham in particular is hell-bent on leaping back several decades to escape all this mess: “Standing in the shadows, the man I used to be/I want to go back,” he growls on the peppy “Can’t Go Back.”
Some of Buckingham’s perception-shaking DNA remained intact: “Empire State” is the opposite of “Oh Diane,” a daring pop song indicating that Tusk was the result of calculated genius, not just megalomania and madness. Buckingham praises the Big Apple and denigrates his native LA with a wild, removed lust that looks right through the object of his affection; when he sings about “flying high on the Empire State,” the lurching keys and harmonies make him sound like he’s being spun on his axis. (Fleetwood’s drums also sound fantastic, recalling Dennis Davis’ work on Low—also recorded at the Chateau.)
Nicks also mainlines nostalgia, though hers is motivated more by loss than bitterness. “That’s Alright” harkens back to the country music of her childhood, and the precise mix is as rich as a watercolor where every color blurs and accentuates the next one. There’s a grace to her lyrics that’s absent on Tusk, conceding to a partner who just can’t work it out: “I can’t define love like it should be,” she sighs. “That’s alright, it’s alright.” And you can only imagine how mad Buckingham was when she swept in and stole the show with “Gypsy,” its chrome glint distilling her loss of self and the death of a childhood friend, and the optimism the couple felt as young bohemians in San Francisco. Buckingham is always attempting to harness his overheated energy to open up some kind of tear in the fabric of time and space, to step through and rediscover innocence. Nicks, though, conveys the sad wisdom of someone who knows you can never go home again.
As ever, it’s McVie who maintains the most poise on Mirage, even as she languishes over Dennis Wilson. She’s just as lachrymose as on Tusk, but her songs rediscover the body she lost there. There’s adult acceptance in her voice on the Carole King-indebted “Wish You Were Here,” though the lyrics convey an adolescent morbid streak: “I can’t help feeling lonely/There’s no way, no way that I could stop.” “Hold Me” is one of the few moments on the record where McVie, Nicks, and Buckingham sing together. It’s the polar opposite of Tusk’s title track, where the three singers hissed their spurned collective demands. (“Don’t say that you love me! Just tell me that you want me!”) Instead, even as McVie is singing about Wilson, it plays as a plea for understanding and reconciliation between the estranged five-piece: “I don’t want no damage/But how am I going to manage with you?”
They barely did. They fought on the video shoots for “Gypsy” and “Hold Me,” and the Mirage tour was short. Unsurprisingly, given the perfunctory nature of the sessions, there are few whole songs from the cutting room floor on this reissue: Nicks’ “If You Were My Love” is solid, and a more aggressive version of “Empire State” shows what might have transpired had Buckingham been allowed to make Tusk II. Warner Bros. were relieved that he didn’t: Mirage took the band back to No. 1 for the first time since Rumours, and spent five weeks there. The public preferred Fleetwood Mac as soft-rockin' comfort food. In a state of exhaustion and addiction, the five-piece papered over the cracks with an apple pie lattice, and saw other people for five years.
