Christine McVie & In the meantime Remastered
 

Hi there,

just found out that there will be a re-release of the a.m. two Christine albums in November (http://www.imwan.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=118964).

Tschoe
Tobi

Interesting. I see that ITM has a bonus track. I cant wait to hear to get them and hear them. But it also makes me sad.

I think it's the one we've heard already "Come Out To Play" or now titled, "Little Darlin'".

This is great news. We get more mixes of these wonderful albums.

Would be more interesting if the 1984 album includes bonus tracks. Either new songs or alternative versions.

We shall find out in November. Hoping they put the bonus tracks already released. (at the very least)

There has to be a recording of "Too Much Is Not Enough" that did not make the album. There also has to be a professional recording of her solo show somewhere. I wish they would not go halfway with such a release. Lets have it all.

It's now or never! Exactly.

I can’t wait!!

my baby is on his way, i just can't wait, i can't wait another day

She passed in November; I'm surprised it has taken this long for a company like Rhino Records to repackage and release a Christine McVie album with new liner notes and bonus tracks. Other than the brief grammy segment, it's sad that a fitting tribute hasn't taken place.

Maybe they wanted to release a 40th Anniversary Edition?

It would be nice if Todd Sharp’s 1986 solo albums was reissued. It‘s a nice companion piece to Christine’s album.

I had that on vinyl!

A remastered Christine McVie would be great.
But I shiver at the thought of what they did on the Songbird release, so they better not tinker with the arrangements like that.

As for In The Meantime, I wouldn't have thought it needed a remaster.

The fact that the instrumental version of Too Much Enough Is Not Enough was featured in the album documentary makes me feel confident that that it actually was recorded with vocals too. Would be nice to finally see/hear that. But I'm really looking forward to this.

Me too but seeing as it's the actual album and not a compilation gives me hope.

Also, Dan Perfect is involved.

You can hear the new mixes on Apple Music (thanks for the tip Jbrownsjr).

To be clear, if this is the album we got in 2004, we’d have loved it as much as the one we did get. But it isn’t, so when you listen, there’s a certain amount of adjustment. Anything Is Possible and Forgiveness sound very cool. Not necessarily better than the originals but equally as good. Friend may actually be better, not yet sure. Sweet Revenge definitely is better. But Bad Journey and Liar do not come off as well—at least to my ears.

Overall, I’m glad to have this and will listen to it ALONGSIDE the original. But it doesn’t supersede it.

It’s up on Spotify as well. I was surprised at how different these versions sounded to me from the originals - usually I can’t tell the difference when a remaster comes out. But that could be because I’d been listening to the original on repeat all last week so it was fresh in my mind.

I absolutely love these remasters. Something about her voice sounds sweeter, more vulnerable, and more real, like she’s singing right there in the room with you. It seems like they used entirely different vocal tracks on some songs. I can also hear more of her keyboard parts in several songs, which is something I felt was lacking on the original.

My favorite change is that the “sexy man” line was removed from Little Darlin/Come Out To Play - might have been the most cringey lyric in any of her songs ever.

These are definitely re-mixed as well as re-mastered. I know what you mean when you can't tell the difference in a re-Master. Unless, I use headphnes and compare right both versions.

I just listened to Sweet Revenge. A very different mix and vocal.

That’s one of the improved songs here, imo.

Listening to Friend now and there's a noticeable difference between this new mix and the original. I think it sounds better.

Halfway through listening now and I'm really loving this release and I'm seeing why there is a different album cover. There's enough difference in the songs that it's completely different from the original. It's almost like this is how the album might have originally been released but they decided to go with the tracks that we've already known and listened to for years. Similar to the alternate mixes we've got from the deluxe Fleetwood Mac releases.

Rather distraught listening to these tracks with Christine's vocals so crisp and close, as though she recorded them yesterday...
(Why is there no weeping emoji here.)

Not sure about the remixes yet. They sound very "simplified" compared to the album tracks I'm so used to. I like the enhanced isolation/focus on Christine's voice, considering in what top form she was in on these songs. They've really put the spotlight on Chris' backing vocals as well, and the keyboards on Friend are fantastic, reminiscent of YMLF.
And when the instrumentation mix does get brought forward at certain points (eg the instrumental bridge on Sweet Revenge), it really pops.

I'm listening on headphones. If this is an Atmos mix, I suppose it will sound quite different (and better) when I listen on speakers?

I might have missed this.

Has Rhino Records announced a release date for the remastered re-release of Christine McVie's 1984 self-titled album on Warner Bros. Records?

I don't think there are many unreleased B-sides from the 1984 sessions, so I'm assuming that Rhino will just add some live tracks from the '84 tour and "I Can't Help Falling in Love" from the soundtrack of "A Fine Mess".

For me, this album is superior to "In the Meantime" - so I'm looking forward to the Rhino redux.

These vocals on "You Are" (re-mastered 2023) are phenomenal. This song is so charming.

Scheduled release date for both currently is November 3.

Yes! Although the "sister and brother" is a bit cringey also.... but a bit less so once the "sexy man" line is taken out. The combo of the two together was always :distress:

Enjoyed the remasters!

Two observations: I noticed that the electric guitar riff was minimized on "Northern Star," just as it was for the "Songbird" collection. I wonder why - I like that riff.

AND, my biggest pet peeve with this whole album was not fixed! It's in "Sweet Revenge," one of my favorite tracks. In the instrumental break, in the part where the background singers sing, "Trapped!," and Christine sings "just a little...," at the end of "little" you can hear the beginning of a "j" sound, as if they sloppily truncated a take where she continued with the line "Johnny says come around if you dare." I know it's minute, but it's always bugged me that that's there. :laugh: Shouldn't be too hard to edit that out.

Agree with the poster who said it's so bittersweet to hear her voice so upfront and clear.

Trapped in the middle of a lousy cut and paste!!!:laugh::wavey:

I forgive you….

Hi! Yesterday I was looking at the Wikipedia article of In The Meantime and I was so surprised about the news of a new release...So I came here!!
I don't use Spotify (I still have a music player on my phone), so I'll wait until November to know the sound differences you say, but I'm so excited about this new work!! Christine's solo career is something I still must learn about.
Thank you, dear people! :angel:

I believe In The Meantime is out on Apple and Amazon.

@rhino_records will reissue TWO Christine McVie albums on November 3rd. “Christine McVie” will be released on CD and LP. Also, a cola-bottle clear vinyl version will be available exclusively from Barnes & Noble.
On the same day, “In The Meantime” will be released on CD and as a 2 LP set featuring a “songbird” etching on the final side.
“Christine McVie” is the second solo album by Fleetwood Mac Christine McVie, released in 1984. It was McVie's first solo recording since her 1970 self-titled release (under her maiden name). The album features two singles that reached the top 40 on the Billboard Hot 100, "Got a Hold on Me" and "Love Will Show Us How", which reached numbers 10 and 30, respectively. The album peaked at #26 in the US, spending 23 weeks on the Billboard 200. In the UK, the album reached #58 on the UK Albums Chart. Album was last pressed on LP in 1984.
“In The MeNtime”(sic) was originally released in 2004, and was produced by Christine McVie, Ken Caillat and Dan Perfect (Christine’s nephew).
The album has not been released on vinyl previously, will be a 2LP gatefold with a Songbird etching on side 4.
Pre-order both at Rhino.com

All right all right, sold! Jeez... twist my arm

Has anyone got their copies yet? I ordered both CDs but they won't come until Sunday. I have yet to see anywhere where I can listen to the 1984 album remaster online and was curious if anyone knew if there's somewhere online where it's at. I've checked Amazon, Spotify and iTunes and it's not there.

In The Meantime: Christine McVie Was "As Revealing As Ever", Says Dan Perfect

JEANETTE LEECH
03 November 2023

“This was therapy,” Christine McVie said, in 2022, of recording her 2004 album, In The Meantime. “I was coming out of a relationship and just got it all off my chest.” McVie’s third and final solo album was underheard and underappreciated on release. Now, with In The Meantime freshly reissued both on vinyl and in a gorgeous new Dolby Atmos mix, the time is ripe for its reappraisal – as Dan Perfect, McVie’s nephew and the album’s co-producer/co-writer, tells Dig! in this exclusive interview.

RETURNING TO ENGLAND: “I’D JUST HAD ENOUGH”
A mainstay of Fleetwood Mac throughout many of the band’s ever-changing line-ups, Christine McVie had not been a prolific solo artist. She had released one self-titled album in 1970 (Christine Perfect, issued under her maiden name) and another in 1984 (Christine McVie). Her incredible career in Fleetwood Mac, alongside the demands of touring with the band, had left her without much time and energy for writing and recording music under her own name.

McVie left the group in 1998. “I was tired of living out of a suitcase, tired of travel, plus I had a fear of flying,” she said in 2017. “I’d been doing it longer than Stevie [Nicks] and Lindsey [Buckingham], and I’d just had enough. Plus, my father was really sick and I wanted to come back to England and rediscover my roots, and I was quite adamant that this was what I wanted to do.”

Dan Perfect remembers how his aunt begin considering a return to recording. “Chris, in the late 90s, she pretty much thought she’d retired,” he tells Dig! “She came back to England, bought a country house, and got the dogs. The reality of it was that she was bored out of her brains. And it took her quite a bit of time for her to really realise that.”

THE GENESIS: “CHRIS HAS ALWAYS WRITTEN FROM THE HEART”
“It was her manager, Martin Wyatt, who started to put the idea in front of her of doing a solo album,” Perfect remembers. “There were logistic problems because she didn’t want to travel anymore – instead, she wanted to bring people over. And she didn’t really want to go to a recording studio. I don’t know that she quite knew what she might do, but with a bit of encouragement the ball started rolling.”

Following a few false starts, the In The Meantime songs began to come to McVie. “Chris was inspired, and the subject of the album, really, in retrospect, was a somewhat unhappy love affair and the narrative trajectory through first infatuation, through passion, disappointment and acceptance,” Perfect says today. “She came up with a couple of songs that she was inspired by. Chris has always written from the heart, and her oeuvre is the love song. And when Chris got into something, she really got into something.”

McVie herself confirmed, in interviews promoting the album, that In The Meantime was about a specific person, but “nobody knows this bloke, he’s not famous”, she said in 2004. “They’re love songs. I suppose the thread is about one man, different periods during that relationship, and the feelings that happened.”

THE RECORDING: “CHRIS WAS A GREAT COLLABORATOR”
As McVie didn’t want to go into a recording studio, there needed to be alternative ways to get her new songs out of her. Fortunately, technology was advancing at a rapid place in the early part of the new millennium, and Perfect was skilled in using computers for recording in a way that made his aunt feel comfortable.
“I certainly had the practical tools to help her out, and record what she’d done,” he says. “I put a bit of backing together for her to listen to it. And it just so happened she loved what I did. I played 12-string guitar on one of the tracks, and immediately we just started to get on with it.”

Perfect was of a younger generation, with enormous respect for McVie, and their musical partnership soon grew and equalised. “I was initially quite intimidated at presenting any ideas to Chris,” he says. “As you would be in that scenario. But actually, that very quickly went, because Chris was a great collaborator, and she liked the team. She liked playing with other musicians, she loved the spark, and she was very much a group player. She was not a big authorial, I-do-it-all-myself person.”

Perfect also remembers McVie being open to contemporary music, and that – during recording – “we were listening to Garbage’s first album. And there’s no doubt that some of that is in there, which Chris fans would be very unaccustomed to hear. But there’s definitely that rawer edge, slightly angrier tone in some of the songs that she really liked.”

THE RELEASE: “BECAUSE I DIDN’T TOUR IT, IT DIDN’T SELL SO MANY COPIES”
“We were very enthused about it,” Perfect says of the finished In The Meantime. “In a normal world, we would have toured it. But Chris just didn’t want to do that. I think we just accepted that. We were pleased with the album. We put it out but it didn’t really get a lot of hearing.”

“At the time, I didn’t go on the road, I wasn’t keen,” McVie said in 2022, looking back at the album’s release. “So because I didn’t tour it, it didn’t sell so many copies. I always thought the songs were good, though.”

Originally released on CD and through the iTunes Store, on 7 September 2004, In The Meantime was a low seller – certainly compared to the millions McVie had sold as part of Fleetwood Mac – and Perfect reflects on how this affected his aunt.

“I think she felt a bit embarrassed that we put it out and it didn’t sell very well. I think that she was a few times in print a bit apologetic about it, and unnecessarily so,” he says. “It was her natural underplaying. But, frankly, other than Stevie Nicks, none of the solo projects have stood up to the success of Fleetwood Mac.”
“It’s about the darkest thing I’ve ever written,” McVie said, of In The Meantime in 2017. “I don’t think it sold anything but the point was to prove I could still write, still play, still sing.”

THE REISSUE: “IT’S AN INTIMATE PORTRAIT OF CHRIS”
Because In The Meantime wasn’t widely heard at the time, its reissue, both on vinyl and in the new Dolby Atmos mix – the latter’s surround-sound technology helping listeners to pick up detail and amplify small sounds – is a renewed opportunity to hear some of the best Christine McVie songs. It’s also possible to now take a longer view, considering the album in the context of McVie’s career both with Fleetwood Mac and as an artist in her own right.

The personal nature of In The Meantime almost calls back to McVie’s first album, 1970’s Christine Perfect, which she made after leaving Chicken Shack but before joining Fleetwood Mac. Again, just like she would do with In The Meantime, McVie underplayed that album’s significance. She said in 1980 that “when I made that record, I wasn’t really sure about my talent, or about what direction I wanted to go in musically”. Yet Christine Perfect is a landmark of British blues and a portrait of defiant womanhood. The strength of that record is in its juxtaposition of McVie’s voice and the bluesy material, with an elusive, vulnerable quality. This combination was all her own.

The same can be said of In The Meantime. Again, McVie opens up her psyche and experiences, even though, sonically, it is a very different album to her debut. “I do think it loops back to her younger self,” Perfect says. “I think it’s an intimate portrait of Chris. I think it’s as revealing as she ever was in her songs. I think here you have a really good, up-close view of Chris.”

THE LEGACY: “I FEEL THAT IT HONOURS CHRIS”
“I took apart the whole thing and reconstructed it in Atmos,” Perfect says of the new In The Meantime reissue. “Chris was very enthusiastic about the Atmos contribution, though she may not have been able to tell you entirely what it meant! But she could tell the difference, she had really great ears.”

Sadly, Christine McVie died in November 2022, aged 79. The process for the In The Meantime reissue had started before she passed away, but Perfect had to complete it without his aunt’s guidance. “It was a way to deal, in some degree, with her death,” he says. “I felt I had a real duty to honour her voice and really showcase her tone and her delivery, and make the tracks all in the service of that. I feel that it honours Chris as well as I can, and as well as the music can, and I hope she would have been delighted with it.”

https://www.thisisdig.com/feature/ch...ect-interview/

Listening to The Challenge from the new reissue/remaster and I'm not hearing any noticeable difference between it and the one from the original CD. I'll give the whole album a listen later when I have time.

I'm still waiting for confirmation from RHINO that my order of ITM has actually shipped. I'm impatient because I ordered it back July. Anyone else receive even a confirmation from RHINO? I know it's early days, but I would think on the day of its official release that there'd be a confirmation email for pre-orders.