Tusk

Buckingham said he meant Tusk to defy the expectation of a Rumours 2 and Rumours 3, and Fleetwood decided early that it would be a double album. The band recorded in Studio D, a custom room built at The Village Recorder by Geordie Hormel. Buckingham recorded several songs, including The Ledge, Save Me a Place and That's Enough for Me, at his home studio on a 24-track machine, playing every instrument himself. Caillat remembered him telling the engineers to turn every knob 180 degrees and see what happened. The journalist Bob Stanley wrote that Buckingham was desperate to make the band relevant to a post-punk world.

Costs were put at about $1.4 million, the most expensive rock album made to that date. Buckingham said the sessions ran about ten months and yielded 20 songs, about the same as Rumours. The sleeve photograph by Peter Beard shows Caillat's dog Scooter snapping at a trouser leg, and the sleeve was designed by Larry Vigon.

Release and reception

The album reached number four on the Billboard 200 and number one in the UK, with the title track reaching number eight in the US and Nicks's Sara number seven. It sold four million copies, which the label regarded as a failure after Rumours. Fleetwood blamed the RKO radio chain, which played the album in full before release and let listeners tape it. The list price of a double album was $16.00.

Stephen Holden of Rolling Stone wrote that it was less a collection of finished songs than a mosaic of pop-rock fragments by individual performers. Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic called it a peerless piece of pop art, and Amanda Petrusich of Pitchfork found it self-indulgent and terrifically strange. Fleetwood named it his second favourite of their studio albums, behind Then Play On. Camper Van Beethoven remade the whole album in 2003.