...but no one would listen, he walked a thin line.

Tusk probably wasn't what the millions and millions of people who bought Rumours were hoping for, and it seems fair to say that about 4/5th of the band might've felt the same way. Now that its reputation has been restored, the story within Fleetwood Mac is that they were a hundred percent on board with Lindsey Buckingham's weird experiments all along. But that isn't true. When Tusk didn't come close to making the numbers Rumours did (and how could it have?), the rest of the group was quick to put the blame on Buckingham's folly, then urged him for the follow-up Mirage to please go back to writing nice, conventional (or at least conventional-ish) pop songs which he resigned himself to. But during the lead-up to Tusk, while the rest of the Mac were relatively risk-averse and the two lady songwriters plowed their respective fields of established songwriting, coke fiend Liddy Buck heard something different, something new. We don't know for sure what post-punk and new wave records he listened to, if any, but Buckingham was the only one not to be complacent in their multi-million SoCal soft rock paradise. There's something else, something maniacal, that wanted out. 

So, what if the band and the label had panicked a little more and a little earlier? What if their request to Lindsey to go back to writing 'normal' songs came in the middle of the recording for what would become Tusk? What if, to appease Buckingham, the label promised him that none of his work so far would be lost and that they would bring these recordings out as his first solo album, no questions asked? And what, yeah, what if Buckingham had actually agreed to this? 

Then we might've ended up with something like Not That Funny. You could make a point that Tusk needed Buckingham's crazy little vignettes to balance the stately, typically elegant balladry from Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks, but there was still an enormous  whiplash going from Buckingham's songs to everyone else's. They might be better served, I thought, by being put together to form Liddy Buck's own little madcap adventure. Enter Not That Funny. 

Not That Funny isn't simply the Tusk tracks all thrown together, none of the tracks as such were on the Tusk album. For almost all tracks I preferred the rougher demo versions sourced from the Tusk box set. If we imagine Buckingham going all DIY /punk /new wave on our asses, it would make sense to keep some of the edges that the band would then sand off as much as possible. So I tried to keep the big, sometimes cheesy-sounding synths, the akward drums or in the case of "That's Enough For Me" his trademark fingerpicking in as raw a state as possible. So, tracks 1 - 9 are alternate versions, track ten and eleven are the remixed single versions. 

A word on the two 'new' songs: "Out On The Road" with its near wordless vocalising is an early version of "That's Enough For Me", but really different enough to stand as its own track. And "Let The Fall Wind Blow" is a very early version of "That's All For Everyone", but in reality it is an almost completely different song with entirely different lyrics and major musical differences. It's also an interesting look into Buckingham's psyche. In this early form "Fall Wind" is still very much in the Rumours vein, a song about being left and feeling terrible and vulnerable. That last part especially comes out very clearly ("don't let 'em know...don't let it show"), whereas the new lyrics for "That's All For Everyone" have no trace of this, or really anything particularly personal. Maybe Buckingam's experiments would have fallen on more graceful and voluntary ears if he kept that kind of emotional content. His songs always seemed to keep you at a distance, which is of course quite the opposite of what Stevie Nicks' songs were about. And we know how that dichotomy turned out. 

Lindsey Buckingham's solo work probably deserved better than the attention it received. Maybe Not That Funny wll do its very small part to get people to tune into his very peculiar way of seeing things, again. And even if it doesn't reach such lofty goals, it is above else an interesting listen. And now, ladies and gentlemen, Liddy Buck...