I spoke with [original Rumours engineer and renowned surround-sound producer] Ken Caillat about all this a few years ago, and he told me he had completed surround mixes of both Tusk [1979] and the Fleetwood Mac "white" album [i.e., the self-titled one from 1975]. He also said he had played them for you and the band and that the reaction was very positive. [Caillat wrote in an email to Mettler on December 10, 2003: "The band went crazy when they heard them."] Do you recall that at all?
Yes! I wonder what happened to them.
They never came out.
I don't know why they never came out, but maybe it was considered too much of a specialty thing or... [pauses] I can never guess what's going on in the minds of record company executives.
Me neither. Have surround-sound remixes ever crossed your mind in terms of your solo projects?
Well, I haven't really thought about it. There's a certain amount of economics that drive those specialty things, and usually my solo work doesn't fall into that strata. [laughs] But now that you mention it, it's probably not a bad idea. I'll bring it up to somebody, and see if they look at me funny.
No, it's all good - go for it. You're endorsed by the sound-quality community out here.
That's good to know.
How do you feel about people listening to digital music files?
I don't have a particularly bad feeling about that. You hear people saying that the sound isn't as good, but I can't necessarily judge that, because when I was growing up, most of my musical nurturing came from my brother's 45s, which were very lo-fi and listened to on a crummy RCA 45 player. You know, 45s were basically a single-song format. Not that there weren't albums at that time, but the album as an artform hadn't really come into its own. But I can't look back and say, "that was a bad way to listen to music." It certainly was a less-sophisticated way, on an audio level, but if you had taken a 45 and put it on something that sounded better, who's to say? I'm not someone who feels the idea of a single-song download means that we're losing something.
