I’m fairly certain I didn’t know the meaning of the word “lush” the first time I heard Fleetwood Mac’s “Hold Me” (cut me some slack, I was five), but my intro to that song created a mood in my head that I would later grow to understand as the definition of the word “lush”.

Christine McVie and Lindsey Buckingham share leads on “Hold Me”, and their combined vocal effect is stunning. It’s like you’re falling into an ocean of soft white pillows. It also deserved to be a bigger hit. “Hold Me” (and its parent album, Mirage) was considered a bit of a “comeback” effort following 1979’s Tusk album, which might have been a tad too ambitious for the general public. Mirage cruised to the top of the album charts, but “Hold Me” got stuck at Number Four on the Hot 100 for a ridiculous seven weeks. It was unable to move past “Abracadabra” by the Steve Miller Band (ehhh…) , “Hurt So Good” by John Cougar (Mellencamp) and the then-ubiquitous “Eye Of The Tiger”. While it lacks the pump-your-fist anthemic quality of the latter two songs and it’s nowhere as silly as Miller’s smash, it’s a better song (at the very least, better-produced) than any of the four.

Watching the video for “Hold Me”, it’s interesting to note that there are very few scenes that feature more than one member at a time. Something tells me that the notoriously fractious band dynamic was even worse than usual at this time. I also wonder what was more plentiful; the amount of sand featured in this video or the amount of coke used during the clip’s filming.