Tusk Songwriting Credits by Fleetwood Mac

Tusk is the twelfth studio album by Fleetwood Mac, a double LP released in October 1979 on Warner Bros. Records and produced by Buckingham, Caillat, and Dashut. It was an uncommercial, experimental follow-up to Rumours that cost approximately $1 million to record and represented Buckingham's deliberate effort to avoid repeating the sonic formula that had made the previous album the best-selling record of 1977. The album was recorded partially at Village Recorder in Los Angeles and partially at Buckingham's home studio, where he recorded several tracks using a deliberately rough, cassette-tape-quality aesthetic influenced by the lo-fi post-punk and new wave movements he was absorbing while Rumours-era FM radio continued playing the previous album. The songwriting split is the most uneven in the classic lineup's history: Buckingham wrote 8 tracks (including the title track, recorded with the USC Trojan Marching Band at Dodger Stadium), Nicks contributed 6, and McVie contributed only 4, a distribution that reflects both the creative tensions within the band and Buckingham's increasing dominance of the album's sonic direction. The title track, released as a single, reached number eight on the Billboard Hot 100, a disappointment by Rumours standards, and the album sold approximately four million copies in the US, a substantial commercial performance that was nonetheless framed by the press as a failure relative to expectations. Tusk is now regarded as Fleetwood Mac's most artistically ambitious studio record and the album that most clearly demonstrates Buckingham's aesthetic independence from the commercial pop-rock framework of the band's mainstream identity.