Bare Trees

Fleetwood Mac

Product Details

• Audio CD (October 25, 1990)
• Original Release Date: March 1972
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Warner Bros / Wea
• ASIN: B000002KD3
• Also Available in: Audio Cassette
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (51 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,093 in Music (See Bestsellers in Music)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

41 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Kirwan carries the day, October 14, 2004

By	S. R. - See all my reviews

Fleetwood Mac recorded Bare Trees in 1972 when Danny Kirwan was only 22. He was filing the large shoes of legend Peter Green which at the time was the consensus guitar god of the era. Folk would write "Clapton is God" on the subway walls in London, only to have others write underneath "Green is better than God". The Mac also had lost guitarist Jeremey Spencer and his rock and roll revival stage antics, thus pushing the shy guitarist Kirwan out into the spotlight. A place he would rather not be. Kirwan steps up, however, and delivers 5 top-notch songs for the Mac which all hold up to the high standards already in place in the band with Christine McVie. Newcomer Bob Welch adds a couple fine songs here most notably "Sentimental Lady". Kirwan's guitar is all over the tracks blending several styles, too boot. It's a nice look into the shy guitarists songbag at a very early age. Especially nice that his talents in songwriting seem to be beyond his young years. Everyone knows about Kirwan's later life problems and everyone knows about the things to come for the Mac, but the real story here is Kirwan's talents on a rather obscure Mac effort.

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Nothing Bare Here, April 19, 2001

By	Thomas Magnum (NJ, USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)

Bare Trees finds Bob Welch and Christine McVie taking an even greater role in the band. They contribute their strongest work to date and Danny Kirwan's work is impressive as well. Ms. McVie's "Homeward Bound" is a superb song that showed her gifts as a songwriter and singer were immense. Bob Welch's "Sentimental Lady" is his signature and is slightly different than the version he had a hit with in 1977. This version has a more pronounced backing vocal from Christine McVie, but in any version it is a gorgeous song. Mr. Kirwan provides the scorching "Danny's Chant" and the somber "Dust". Bare Trees would prove to be his swan song with the band, but he left on a high note. Bare Trees is the finest pre Buckingham-Nicks Mac album and ranks among the finest the band has ever done in any form.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Once again..., February 20, 2007

By	Mike (Philadelphia, PA, USA) - See all my reviews

Just like "Future Games", why didn't this album break Fleetwood Mac into the mainstream? The music is absolutely breathtaking. True, it may sound more commercial than the early blues material that made the band in the first place, but the fact that this album never got so big definitely helps the music's credibility.

Danny Kirwan asserts himself more than ever by contributing, a staggering 5 (count 'em) 5 songs! out of the 9 on this album. He balances his songwriting between amicable pop (the title track), blue rock ("Child Of Mine", "Danny's Chant"), and folk-ish balladry and instrumentation ("Sunny Side Of Heaven", "Dust").

Christine McVie and Bob Welch with two songs each, equal in depth to Kirwan's 5. McVie's "Homeward Bound", while not anything like the more famous Simon & Garfunkel tune, definitely invokes similar imagery, albeit more desperate in the author's want and need to just get home and relax.

Welch's "The Ghost" just rolls along at a whirlwind pace, brought on by John McVie and Bob Welch dueling for dominance in the intro, which gives way to a haunting combination of slide guitar and a Mellotron Flute drenched in reverb courtesy of Christine McVie.

The almost obligatory love songs actually offer a bit of variety on this album. McVie's "Spare Me A Little Of Your Love" holds it own against her stream of late 70's/early 80's hits, while Welch's "Sentimental Lady" (which, I must say, the version on here bests Welch's late 70's reinterpretation megahit by leaps and bounds) shows how important it really to hold on those lost moments with the one you love.

Overall, just a really good and underrated collection of songs (along with the predecessor "Future Games") that should have broken a talented bunch of musicians and songwriters into mainstream success, but instead sort of drifted into semi-obscurity underneath the late 70's and early 80's Buckingham/Nicks-era (which I have nothing against, but I prefer this era of the Mac better).