"I can't listen to this song ["Beautiful Child"] without crying so I don't listen to it often. But there isn't a more beautiful or appropriate song to play us out of the seventies. There's a sense of loss and saying goodbye, but it's a sparse and restrained culmination of the studio techniques honed throughout the decade, many of which broke ground on
Rumours, the seminal seventies record. 'Beautiful Child' takes all they learned about vocal overdubs and harmonies, and applies those techniques in the most light-handed way that is just so heartbreakingly beautiful. Despite the lushness, the vocal harmonies still manage to convey a deep loneliness, and it sounds to me like every vocal performance in the mix was performed in isolation. Every player and singer on the song sounds like they were standing a mile apart, like the drums were played across the freeway, the piano recorded with the lights off."
—Joanna Newsom on her favorite songs from the '70s
"On 'Get Yr Life Back', sensual memories of a lover are inextricably tangled with the products of the present-day wellness industry: 'And you smell like dark chocolate cocoa butter'. While plastic signs advertise 'Get your life back yoga', experience becomes user-generated content: 'Take out the voiceover/The Fleetwood Mac song/The clomping is too loud'.
This clomping is famously the sound of lamb chops, tissue boxes and a marching band, and the Fleetwood Mac song is that favourite of millennials (and music critic Simon Reynolds), 'Tusk', right? 'Yeah.' Does she like the song herself? 'I do. I just hear Fleetwood Mac everywhere right now. I mean, I love and relate to Fleetwood Mac. As a teenager I was into them but then really didn't pay any attention to [
Tusk], then nine or ten years ago Bill [Nace] and I both discovered the album and would listen to it every day. It's weird how at the time it was such a hated record and now people love it. And now I've been consulting on this TV show based on a book called
Daisy Jones & The Six, which is a fake oral history of a big band from the 70s that's supposed to be like Fleetwood Mac. So I've been reading about them. What a weird band they were. Really weird.'"
—from The Wire's "The World Of Kim Gordon" special