Fleetwood Mac – The Ledge
1979
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The story
This one is a fan edit. A YouTube uploader called wet_confetti took Fleetwood Mac's The Ledge and set it to footage gathered from the Prelinger Archives, the stash of old ephemeral films Rick Prelinger started collecting in 1982: corporate-sponsored films, classroom films, amateur and home movies. Thousands of them sit on the Internet Archive, free for anybody to download and reuse. Somebody did.
The song is pure Lindsey Buckingham. He brought it to the band in June 1978, they cut takes together, and then he took it home, stripped out everyone else's parts and played it all himself, with his guitar tuned down an octave and his vocals recorded while kneeling in his bathroom. Engineer Hernán Rojas later said Mick Fleetwood's snare from the first session survived anyway. It landed as the second track on Tusk, the band's twelfth album.
Mojo compared it to a deranged circus. Rolling Stone called it the most punk-influenced thing on the record. Buckingham shrugged that nothing on it seemed especially radical to him, and said he liked it because it goes by so fast it sounds almost rushed. Two minutes and eight seconds. The band rehearsed it for the Tusk Tour and never played it live.
