Pop Music Critic
Chicago Sun-Times
http://www.suntimes.com/
tconner@suntimes.com
September 16, 2011 4:38PM
“There was a time when I was the Terrence Malick of rock in terms how the projects were spread out,” Buckingham told the Sun-Times during a recent interview.
It’s not that he’s suddenly more prolific. He’s simply been able to keep Fleetwood Mac’s grubby paws off these batches of songs. Several Mac albums started as Buckingham solo projects, including 1987’s “Tango in the Night” and the 21st-century comeback studio set, 2003’s “Say You Will,” which is virtually the Buckingham solo album it started out to be plus a few harmonies and Stevie Nicks songs.
The new album, “Seeds We Sow” (Buckingham) [★★★ ], finds Buckingham not only solo but independent — self-releasing the record after ending a three-decade relationship with Warner Bros. We spoke with Buckingham about the new album, new personal challenges and new plans for Fleetwood Mac:
Q: We last spoke amid the Fleetwood Mac’s Unleashed Tour in 2009. You described the experience then as “hang time” for the band and “a proving ground.” What came out of the experience, what was proven?
Lindsey Buckingham: To me, it kind of revealed itself to be a freeing experience. You know, I’ve got this large machine with Fleetwood Mac, and then this small machine with the solo work. As any filmmaker who’s done an indie vs. a big-budget project will tell you, it’s the small projects where you’re able to take the risks and grow and follow your heart to the greatest degree. Fleetwood Mac went out on that tour without an album to support; we were basically doing a body of work. I think any band that’s been around for a while, eventually you get to a point where your audience is less interested in hearing anything new from you. When you come to terms with that, it’s kind of cool! I can go out now with the solo stuff and grow and reaffirm the transcendent aspects of playing, and then I can bring that back to Fleetwood Mac to enhance what we already have.
Q: Mac is planning a tour next year, again without a new record to support?
LB: That’s what I’ve heard through the grapevine. I’ve read Mick [Fleetwood, Mac’s founding drummer] saying that in interviews. I’d be surprised if something didn’t happen.
Q: It’s always funny to me, hearing you talk about how you communicate — or don’t — with the other band members. We always think rock bands are closer than they usually are. But you’re hearing Mick’s thoughts via the media.
LB: Well, yeah, I spent some time with Stevie recently making her album. I speak with Mick once in a while. We don’t feel a need to hang as a community at this point. That’s probably best.
Q: It’s been nice to see three solo albums in a row, none of which have been hijacked to become a Mac album. How’d you manage to keep the band away from these songs?
LB: After “Under the Skin” and “Gift of Screws,” I had to tell them: “Don’t bother me for three years!” My material on the last Fleetwood Mac album, “Say You Will,” was meant to be a solo album, and if you take that material on its own it would hold up well as a solo album. The hijacking phenomenon has happened several times. So I started by telling them to leave me alone — and they did! I did two albums back-to-back and toured both, and I wasn’t planning to make this third album. It just came out of me, a very spontaneous thing.
Q: The press sheet for the new album makes a big deal out of your DIY approach — writing, recording, producing, mixing it all yourself. But that’s not unusual for you, right?
LB: I always make the analogy to painting. Working with a band is more like movie making; it’s more political to get from point A to point B in the creative process. When I work alone, it’s me slopping colors on the canvas. I don’t have to have a notion for a whole song. It can be a far more meditative process. The point of departure on this project is releasing it myself.
Q: You’re a full-fledged indie-rocker now.
LB: Yes, and it feels good. Warner Bros., even in the best of times for the record industry, never stepped up to the plate for my solo work. They always said, “OK, fine, but let’s get back to what’s important,” i.e., the band.
Q: So you’re on your own, but Mac is still on Warner?
LB: Well, that’s a whole other complex question. Technically, no, the band is not on Warner. There are legal snags I don’t even want to go into. If Fleetwood Mac does do another album, I’d love to see us do something like what the Eagles did with Walmart.
Q: You’ve mentioned a lot recently that part of what has made you more prolific is how content you are in your family and personal life. I thought an artist had to be discontented to produce his best work.
LB: I thought that, too. Isn’t that funny? Certainly part of the appeal of Fleetwood Mac has been people buying into the struggle of our private lives and realizing we’re writing about what’s actually going on between us — the musical soap opera that’s been a subtext of everything, the history of us having successful careers but being utter failures in our personal lives, I would say. … I was lucky to meet someone and have all this happen at a late point in my life, after I was done with all that garbage. It’s allowed me to completely dispel the notion that family and children are death to an artist. It depends on the individual. There are, though, a lot of artistic things that can be approached and written about within the balanced framework of a stable family life.
Q: Your son is almost a teenager now. Has he started his own musical journey, and has any of it had an impact on you musically?
LB: He’s 13 and hormonal. He turned on a dime 10 months ago into a different person. You hear about that, but nothing prepares you for it. He’s an intent listener. He’ll burn CD compilations of things he likes. I’ll listen; some of it makes sense to me, some of it doesn’t. It’s all pretty thoughtful, though. He also has a healthy … not a disregard but a healthy ambivalence for what I do. He looks at me on stage and basically thinks, “There’s Dad showing off again.”
Q: Has he turned you on to anyone in particular?
LB: I don’t know the names of some of the people he’s been listening to. He takes it in one song at a time.
Q: Does that bother you, as a traditional album artist?
LB: It gives me pause and it doesn’t at the same time. When I was a young boy, all we listened to was singles, 45s. People made albums, but it wasn’t an art form. Albums then were two singles and a lot of throw-away. Then the Beatles defined it as an art form, and some of us are still doing that. I had this discussion with [my son] the other day a few months back, in fact. I was struggling over the sequence of the album. He said, “Dad, why are you spending so much time on the running order?” I said, “Well, it’s like a movie. You can have a lot of great scenes, but if you don’t edit it together in the right order, the relationship to each other, the story you’re trying to tell — it won’t be a good movie.” He just looks at me and goes, “Yeah, whatever.”
Lindsey Buckingham still working but puts fatherhood first
By James McNair
The National
http://www.thenational.ae/
Sep 1, 2011
In 1974, when the drummer Mick Fleetwood asked Lindsey Buckingham to join his band, the California-born guitarist insisted that he and his girlfriend Stevie Nicks should come as a package.
"It wasn't a slam-dunk, 'Oh my goodness, this is our big break thing'," Buckingham tells me on the line from his home in Los Angeles. "Stevie and I could have made another Buckingham Nicks album - and who knows what would have happened if we did?" History records that the couple did not, of course, and when the gifted and glamorous duo joined Fleetwood Mac, they helped transform the group from esteemed British blues outfit to drive-time radio colossus.
Formerly led by the troubled guitar magus Peter Green, the band became an Anglo-American entity whose eponymous 1974 debut reached number one in the US. The new recruits' song-writing talent sat nicely alongside that of the keyboardist, Christine McVie, whose bass-playing husband John was also a long-term member.
Amazingly, the success of Fleetwood Mac was surpassed by that of the group's 1977 follow-up album, Rumours. Essentially a document of two relationship break-ups - Buckingham and Nicks were separating; ditto the McVies - the album has since gone on to sell more than 40 million copies. The band was indulging in all kinds of excess, and songs such as Go Your Own Way and Dreams aired their dirty laundry in public. Not for nothing, then, has Rumours been dubbed "rock's greatest soap opera".
"We can laugh about it now," says the soft-spoken Buckingham, "but at the time it was incredibly painful. The instinct was to run away, but we had to make the right choices for the band. Rumours brought out the voyeur in everybody, I think, but we learnt to be philosophical about that and use it to our advantage. I'm just glad it wasn't today's media covering the story - there was no phone hacking or people rooting through your trash back then."
Now 61, Buckingham is about to release his sixth solo album, Seeds We Sow. He recorded it in his home studio, where a poster of the Beach Boys' Smile album hangs for inspiration ("I also have a little teak warrior figure standing between the speakers to remind me that I have to fight on"). The new record packs echoing lattices of nylon-string guitar, songs such as Illumination and That's the Way confirming Buckingham's pop sensibility is still highly attuned. The album also benefits from the guitarist and singer's left-field production technique, something that, in Fleetwood Mac, was only ever let loose on the brilliant, defiantly uncommercial Tusk, an album the band's record company later dubbed "Lindsey's folly" despite its selling four million copies.
Buckingham says his new album is about "karma" and how the decisions we make influence our lives. So is he happy with his own choices? "Yes, I think so. With the music, my small, independent projects allow me to take risks, and that has a positive effect when I go back to Fleetwood Mac. More personally speaking, I think it was good not having children too young." He and wife Kristen Messner had their first child, William, when Buckingham was 48, and have since had two daughters, Leelee and Stella. "I've seen a lot of parents not really be there for their kids, so I'm glad that gift came when I was ready."
Chatting more about the new album, Buckingham explains that When She Comes Down was written for his wife. "When we first met, it took Kristen a while to open up and feel safe with me," he says. "I just had to wait and have faith." Happily married the couple may be, but for Fleetwood Mac fans, Buckingham will forever be romantically linked with Stevie Nicks, the girl he first met when they were pupils at Menlo-Atherton High School in Atherton, California.
In May of this year, Nicks released her seventh solo album, In Your Dreams, and, much to the delight of Mac fans, Buckingham sang and played guitar on the song Soldier's Angel.
"It was great," he says of the dynamic between them. "We spent more time together than we had in while, and we even talked about trying to get the [long deleted] Buckingham Nicks album out again and perhaps doing some kind of tour around it."
There are plans for new Fleetwood Mac projects, too, and Buckingham says that once he and Nicks have finished with their respective solo album commitments, their thoughts may well turn to another Mac studio album and tour. At 64 and 65 respectively, the band's titular rhythm section Mick Fleetwood and John McVie are still game, but Christine McVie - who retired from touring in 1998 and only fleetingly appears on 2003's Say You Will album - is unlikely to return to the fold.
"You could call Chris and ask her," laughs Buckingham, "but she quite deliberately burnt her bridges some years back. As far as I can tell, she's living the quiet pastoral life back in England, but I would imagine that must get a little one-dimensional for her from time to time."
For all his gentle ribbing, Buckingham, too, has clearly taken his foot off the accelerator ("Have I mellowed? Oh, I hope so!"). As for Buckingham, he's happier than ever. "I just want to be a consistent and present parent and not let anything get in the way of that. I don't have any big burning ambition, or anything I feel is just out of my grasp.
"One of the most frustrating things about Fleetwood Mac," he adds, "is that you don't get everybody wanting the same things for the same reasons at the same time, but it would be nice to reach a place that dignifies where we started. I find it rather touching and sweet that Stevie and myself might be able to share something beyond the formal designations of recent years. I think there are still a few chapters of our story to be written."
Seeds We Sow is out on September 5 on Cooking Vinyl
No comments:
Post a Comment