Following the alphabetization I learned in elementary school, Christine McVie should have come before Manfred Mann. But . . . that’s not what I did, so here she is.
In the course of my lifetime, I bought very, very few commercial tapes. While I recorded my albums and mixed collections to tape extensively, from 1979 until the advent of MiniDisc, I found the impermanence and poor quality of the tapes you could buy to be frustrating. It always sounded better if I bought the vinyl and recorded it myself onto some quality tape. And then, if anything happened to the tape, I could always record it again.
So there were very few albums that I bought on cassette, and I rarely even pawed through the bargains to see if there was anything I wanted. But rarely didn’t mean never, and I don’t know why, but sometime in the mid-’80s I picked up a handful or less of new albums on cassette, and only on cassette. Somehow, this was one of those.
Christine McVie stepped out of Fleetwood Mac for a minute around that time and released a solo record in 1984 that charted pretty well and produced a #1 single in “Got A Hold On Me,” where the (to me) more memorable “Love Will Show Us How” only hit #24. Still, she got three charting singles from that album, which is pretty good. Why I picked it up on cassette, I can’t remember, but I did – and gave it enough plays to say that I liked it, but not enough that I ever felt the need to fill in with a more permanent copy on vinyl or, in the years to come CD. And of course, at some point the tape did go bad, and I ended up getting rid of it and not replacing it.
And then late in 2020, when there was that brief period of reopening from the first wave of the pandemic, there was a trip up to Siren Records in Doylestown, hugely pent-up used record demand was unleashed, and this was among a large number of records I grabbed up that day. I love Fleetwood Mac, I love Christine McVie, I remembered being quite fond of this record – how could I not get it?
And I’m not sorry I did. It’s a nice little album that fills an occasional need for easygoing rock with Christine’s wonderful voice.
