The one colossal downside of creating a masterpiece, as any artist who has done it knows, is that following it up with something as sublime, or even better, is a Herculean task. One option is to not even try to compete with your past work, but break new ground and venture in a completely different direction. This is precisely what Lindsay Buckingham did with Fleetwood Mac’s 12th album, Tusk.
Created in the wake of their colossally successful album Rumours, Buckingham took the reins of the fractured, burnt-out band and created a sprawling, yet utterly brilliant 20-track double album. Commercially it was a flop and regarded at the time as a grand folly. It cost over one million dollars and was the most expensive album ever made at that point. But over the decades that followed, Tusk has slowly become regarded as a classic, a peerless album driven by a powerful creative vision.
