Sensational '70's Tune for Monday, July 27th, '09

Stevie Nicks' finest contribution to the scattershot Tusk, and one of her very best songs, "Sara" is the one song on Tusk that truly sounds like the Fleetwood Mac of Rumours. Yet even here, Lindsey Buckingham's obsessive love of Brian Wilson's more ornate productions is evident. After a first verse that Nicks sings by herself, seemingly endless overdubs of Nicks, Buckingham and Christine McVie singing complex, floating wordless harmonies slowly build under Nicks, until by the end the harmonies are louder than Nicks' lead vocals. It's like a literal musical translation of the song's lyrical conceit of "Drowning in a sea of love where everyone would love to drown." In one of the more irritating remnants of haphazard reissues in the early days of CDs, the double-album Tusk was squeezed onto a single disc by substituting the full 6:26 album version of "Sara" with the barely four-minute single mix, a mistake that has still never been rectified and which ruins the slow build of the angelic harmonies. (The full-length version is available on the 1988 Greatest Hits collection.)