The other day, Apple Music gave me a notification about a new EP: Promises by Lissie. I started listening, predisposed to like it—I must have listened to her 2016 song “Wild West” 100 times. And I did like it. For me, the standout track was “Everywhere.” I liked Lissie’s version a lot, but after playing it a few times, what I really wanted was to listen to the Fleetwood Mac original again.
It turns out “Elsewhere” is off their final album, 1987’s Tango In The Night. Who knew? Not this millennial. Nonetheless, I know the track so well. I must have heard it a thousand times on the radio. Or maybe I once owned their Greatest Hits? Either way, I became interested in knowing more about this album and immediately read the little blurb included in Apple Music. Here are the last two sentences of the first paragraph:
As a great pop band, Fleetwood Mac has never been ahead of the times—if anything, they’re always just behind them enough to serve as a kind of summary or reflection. Where Rumours feels like mid-’70s pop-rock, Tango feels like the late 1980s: the synthesizers and drum machines (“Everywhere”), the gauzy surfaces (“Seven Wonders”), the sense of everything being suspended in pink perfumed mist (“Little Lies”).
How great is that!? Especially the phrase, “…the sense of everything being suspended in pink perfumed mist”! I love it!
But who wrote it? Apple Music never lets the authors sign these blurbs, and there’s no trace of these phrases on the internet, beyond a few search results from Apple Music / Shazam. Some anonymous music writer wrote this précis just for the streaming service. Like an unsigned letter in a bottle. For what, fifty bucks? It all makes me a little melancholy.
