After what nearly amounted to a Fleetwood Mac reunion album with 2017’s Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie, the first solo album from Lindsey Buckingham in a decade sounds as if it could have been the second disc of the fine 2011 solo release Seeds We Sow.
That isn’t a bad thing at all; far from it. The new self-titled album is full of songs that meld pop hooks ranging from pleasant to glorious with instrumentation—layers of acoustic guitars, in particular—that give the songs a subtle edge while maintaining, even magnifying, their sweetness.
Where Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie seemed to be striving for the sound of the late 1970s and mid-1980s glory years of Fleetwood Mac, the new solo album turns back inward. Lindsey Buckingham, like most of Seeds We Sow, is a true solo effort, with the guitarist playing all the instruments and doing all the singing. And if there’s a lack of the immediacy of his classics like “Go Your Own Way,” “Monday Morning” or “Big Love,” there’s a depth of musicality that hits just as fast, if not quite as hard.
Lindsey Buckingham album review: Fresh songs with a classic Mac sound If we ever get bored of those greatest hits, this will be a handy addition to the canon
Over four decades since the release of their biggest album, the world seems hungrier than ever for the music of Fleetwood Mac. The turbulent band’s greatest hits collection, 50 Years – Don’t Stop, has been in the UK top 20 all year, while that giant album, Rumours, is at 22 today – its 905th week on the chart. Possible explanatory factors include the death of founding member Peter Green last year, and the band’s song Dreams appearing in a viral TikTok video, but more likely it’s just that these sounds of the Seventies don’t appear to lose any appeal across the generations. Queen, Elton John and the newly recording ABBA are also in the top 20 this week, so it can’t just be your mum playing them for the 905th time.
Fresh music is thinner on the ground, however. The closest we’ve come to a new Fleetwood Mac album since 2003 was a 2017 recording that featured four main members, but not Stevie Nicks, and ended up being called Lindsey Buckingham Christine McVie. Nicks was also responsible for the ousting of Buckingham from the band before their last tour, across 2018 and 2019, in what was reportedly an “either he goes or I do” situation.
As Rumours proved, the friction between these former lovers often makes for the best music. However, there’s not much on his seventh solo album to suggest that Buckingham is still taking inspiration from that particular battle. I Don’t Mind, with lines such as: “Where there’s joy there must be sorrow/Never far apart,” is more likely about Kristen Messner, who filed for divorce from him after two decades of marriage this summer. In any case he sounds magnanimous in the song, which easily replicates his classic sound with its bright plucked acoustic melody and breathy female backing vocals.
As long as they’re not taking sides, Mac fans will find lots to love here, including the bucking guitar solo on the racing On the Wrong Side and the sweet, easygoing chorus of Santa Rosa. There’s not much evidence of ageing in the 71-year-old’s weightless voice. There are a few missteps – the restless electronic beats of Swan Song might be intended to keep up with modern times but in fact make it sound more dated, and the closing ballad, Dancing, is a dreary finale. But if there’s ever a chance that people tire of those greatest hits, this is an appealing minor addition to the canon.
Recent world events have proved deeply frustrating for musicians of all levels – even those once central to one of the best-selling groups of all time. The long dark tunnel stretches further back for Lindsey Buckingham though; after being fired from Fleetwood Mac in 2018, the visionary then faced life-saving emergency open-heart surgery in 2019 before the pandemic even hit.
He described the three life-changing punches as “a trifecta of events that were completely off the charts.” It’s no wonder then, that Buckingham finds himself picking through the rubble as well as seeking light on his seventh solo studio album ‘Lindsey Buckingham’. On his first solo studio effort post-Mac, he’s intent on staying grounded musically and emotionally.
The buoyant opener ‘Scream’ feels a fitting way to kick things off – the swift and sweet track gleefully casts those difficult and stormy days away. A sense of abandon cuts through the driving acoustic melody with innocent simplicity through the lyricism: “Lost in the language of your touch / Just like you’re wakin’ from the dream / Oh, I love you when you scream.”
One of the record’s most enchanting moments comes early on with ‘I Don’t Mind’. A figure who has been embroiled in drama and heartache throughout his career, it’s no secret that Buckingham can pen an impacting love song. The track floats with masterful melodies as the lyricism elegantly picks apart the struggles and compromise of a long-term relationship.
He’s just as effective when dealing with the more notable long-term relationship that came crashing to an acrimonious end. The rhythmic anthem of ‘On The Wrong Side’ deals with the feelings of his split with Fleetwood Mac: “I’m outta pity / I’m outta time / Another city, another crime / I’m on the wrong side”, he sings before cutting loose with a soaring emotionally charged guitar solo. There’s definitely some healing going on here.
Even the most casual Fleetwood Mac fans won’t have to look hard to uncover the band’s classic hallmarks, which are dotted all over the listen. ‘Swan Song’ packs the deep velvety guitar textures once heard during the ‘Tango In The Night’ era; elsewhere ‘Power Down’ showcases the effortless grandeur of the timeless finger-picking behind their biggest hits.
The album bustles with defiant spirit while leaning heavily on deeply catchy songwriting and production. And with Mick Fleetwood having reconciled with Buckingham back in March, it’s exactly the kind of triumphant return that could give his old band food for thought.
Drake and Kanye West are feuding. Meanwhile, Stevie Nicks says: “Hold my shawl.”
In the days leading up to the release of ex-bandmate Lindsey Buckingham’s new self-titled album, the fractious former Fleetwood Mac couple were once again in discord. In 2018, the latter was booted off a Fleetwood Mac tour he wanted to postpone in order to accommodate a solo tour of his own.
In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Buckingham blamed his dismissal from the band on Nicks, his long-ago partner. “I think she wanted to shape the band in her own image, a more mellow thing – and if you look at the last tour, I think that’s true,” he said.
In response, Nicks released a statement to the magazine: “To be exceedingly clear, I did not have him fired. I did not ask for him to be fired; I did not demand he be fired.” If one reads between the lines, the suggestion is that Nicks had nothing to do with Buckingham’s dismissal.
Has anyone thought of bringing in the comparatively harmonic Oasis brothers Liam and Neil Gallagher to mediate the latest Fleetwood Mac he-said/she-said? Probably not. “Now here you go again, you say you want your freedom,” as a great song once put it.
Which brings us to the eponymous seventh solo studio album by singer-guitarist Buckingham. It’s an acoustic, melodically agreeable affair with contemplative lyrics and restrained production. It’s deeply El Segundo – one is compelled to move West, hire an agent and embrace the earthquakes. The fury of something like Fleetwood Mac’s Big Love just isn’t there.
Don’t be misled by the title of the opening song: Scream is a good scream, a gratified scream. “Nighttime’s the time I love so much, lost in the language of your touch,” Buckingham sings, his voice drenched in familiar reverb. It sounds like it could have been written for a Fleetwood Mac album – and maybe it was.
The verse of I Don’t Mind is a more whispery Nirvana, but the chorus is sweet and sun-drenched. Though the third track On the Wrong Side is more up-tempo, its mood is wistful. Pretty guitar solos wind down to their destinations, like a top-down coupe on a coastal highway. Being on the wrong side of 70 seems to be what the 71-year-old is contemplating:
Time is rolling down the road
Now goes right in a hearse
We were young and never old
Who can tell me which is worse?
There’s a retro vibe at work. Blind Love is dreamy pop from the Ricky Nelson era, and a haunting cover of the sixties folk song Time (originally recorded by the Pozo-Seco Singers) conjures a Roy Orbison-Brian Wilson duet.
There are moments of cocaine-fueled tangos. And Santa Rosa could be a breakup song. Still, there’s more gentle resignation than fight to the record. The word “compromise” even comes up. One might even say the album is mellow – the same adjective Buckingham used to describe Nicks’s vision of the modern-day Fleetwood Mac.
Lindsey Buckingham Brings Ripping Guitar Solos to Late-Night With ‘On the Wrong Side’ Track appears on former Fleetwood Mac rocker’s new self-titled solo album
Lindsey Buckingham stopped by The Late Show With Stephen Colbert to perform his new song, “On the Wrong Side,” Thursday, September 16th.
“On the Wrong Side” moves with a restless rock & roll rush, and the performance ended with some dizzying guitar soloing from Buckingham. But the most thrilling moment — perhaps unsurprisingly — were the rich, full-band harmonies on the chorus, “I’m outta pity/I’m outta time/Another city, another crime/I’m on the wrong side.”
“On the Wrong Side” appears on Buckingham’s new eponymous solo album, which arrives Friday, September 17th. Lindsey Buckingham is the singer-songwriter’s first solo album since 2011’s Seeds We Sow, although it also follows his 2017 self-titled collaborative effort with former Fleetwood Mac bandmate Christine McVie. The new solo album is Buckingham’s first record since he left Fleetwood Mac in 2018.
Earlier this month, Buckingham launched a North American tour in support of the record, and it’s set to wrap September 30th in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. A winter leg will kick off December 2nd in Los Angeles and end December 20th in Boulder, Colorado.
Lindsey Buckingham has taken some life situations on the chin lately, from bypass surgery to Fleetwood Mac removing him. But as his new self-titled record attests, almost nobody is better at flipping awkwardness and darkness into joyous melodies.
Lindsey Buckingham's new album comes prepackaged with obvious talking points. Crane your ear, and you can faintly hear the click-clack of MacBook keys assembling the following lede: Open-heart surgery (opens in a new tab), almost losing his voice forever(opens in a new tab), a looming divorce(opens in a new tab) (they've since thrown that into reverse(opens in a new tab)—love never fails!) and a certain über-dramatic rock institution handing him the pink slip.
But that readymade narrative leaves out the most important part, which is how it all comes out the other side of Buckingham's brain. For decades, the two-time GRAMMY winner alchemized pain and awkwardness into effervescent pop music like almost nobody else—and sold millions and millions of records as a result. How does he keep that psychological and spiritual mechanism well-oiled?
Perhaps the answer is best articulated in good ol' music: His new album, Lindsey Buckingham, which arrives September 17, is permeated with this big-picture thinking. And everything he's been through since he recorded tunes like "Scream," "I Don't Mind" and "On the Wrong Side"—honestly, the album is three years old now after a comical number of delays—gives the tunes added heft, import and longevity.
But for now, the singer/songwriter and guitarist can give it the old college try. "It's not like I'm attracted to any of the dark at all. It's just that I think it exists hand-in-hand with the light," he says over FaceTime. "There's nothing you can do about that." That was the attitude he maintained during the Jerry Springer-style lovers' fiascos that fueled Rumours, and it's how he feels today, when predicaments and headaches that "weren't on the radar" blindside him.
GRAMMY.com caught up with Buckingham during rehearsals for his current U.S. tour to discuss the long road to the new album and how he maintains a PMA (opens in a new tab) with the Sword of Damocles over his head. Near the end, he spills the tea about why he's really no longer in Fleetwood Mac.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
How's it feel to be rehearsing with your bandmates?
It's great! The camaraderie can't be beat. There's none of the politics that always were there with Fleetwood Mac. We had several attempts to get this album out over the last three years because it's been ready to go for over three years. Certain things kept getting in the way. So, we're finally here and it's good to be playing. I love it.
A fourteen-song LP pulled from the Fleetwood Mac Super Deluxe release, including a further seven songs from the Tusk tour, four from the 1977 Rumours tour and three from the 1982 Mirage tour. Released for RSD Black Friday for the first time on double vinyl.
SIDE A
1. SECOND HAND NEWS
2. THE CHAIN
3. THINK ABOUT ME
4. WHAT MAKES YOU THINK YOU’RE THE ONE
SIDE B
1. GOLD DUST WOMAN
2. BROWN EYES
3. THE GREEN MANALISHI (WITH THE TWO-PRONGED CROWN)
In response to Lindsey Buckinghams 3 most recent interviews with the New York Times, LA Times and Rollingstone, Stevie Nicks (and Fleetwood Mac's Manager Irving Azoff) respond to Lindsey's claims on why he was let go from the band.
“It’s unfortunate that Lindsey has chosen to tell a revisionist history of what transpired in 2018 with Fleetwood Mac,” Nicks wrote to “Rolling Stone.” “His version of events is factually inaccurate, and while I’ve never spoken publicly on the matter, preferring to not air dirty laundry, certainly it feels the time has come to shine a light on the truth. Following an exceedingly difficult time with Lindsey at MusiCares in New York, in 2018, I decided for myself that I was no longer willing to work with him. I could publicly reflect on the many reasons why, and perhaps I will do that someday in a memoir, but suffice it to say we could start in 1968 and work up to 2018 with a litany of very precise reasons why I will not work with him. To be exceedingly clear, I did not have him fired, I did not ask for him to be fired, I did not demand he be fired. Frankly, I fired myself. I proactively removed myself from the band and a situation I considered to be toxic to my well-being. I was done. If the band went on without me, so be it. I have championed independence my whole life, and I believe every human being should have the absolute freedom to set their boundaries of what they can and cannot work with. And after many lengthy group discussions, Fleetwood Mac, a band whose legacy is rooted in evolution and change, found a new path forward with two hugely talented new members.
Further to that, as for a comment on “family” — I was thrilled for Lindsey when he had children, but I wasn’t interested in making those same life choices. Those are my decisions that I get to make for myself. I’m proud of the life choices I’ve made, and it seems a shame for him to pass judgment on anyone who makes a choice to live their life on their own terms, even if it looks differently from what his life choices have been.”
Buckingham on his new solo album and why his dismissal from Fleetwood Mac was the result of the other band members cowering before Stevie Nicks: “It became a little bit like Trump and the Republicans”
Lindsey Buckingham will tell you that he isn’t about the drama. He leaves that to his former bandmates in Fleetwood Mac.
Not everyone in his family subscribes to the same feeling. His son Will issued a declarative statement shortly after he was booted out of the band in 2018: “God, they ruined your life.”
“No, not even close,” says Buckingham with a wan smile.
He’s right, in a way. Over the past three years, there have been other life ruination candidates. In short order, Buckingham nearly died, lost his voice, had an album repeatedly delayed, and suffered through a pandemic funk.
Still, he insists, he is in a good place. Right now, Buckingham is in a Burbank rehearsal space preparing for a tour supporting his new solo album, a self-titled 10-song, 37-minute pop gem sprinkled with enough California melancholy, domestic uncertainty, and sunny hooks to satisfy a divorced Santa Cruz poet. The album has been done for three years, but because of the aforementioned hiccups it remained unreleased until last month. Combined with the best songs on his 2017 duet album with ex-bandmate Christine McVie, Buckingham has churned out an hour’s worth of pop masterpieces at an age when most contemporaries are having a hard time pushing back from the all-you-can-eat nostalgia buffet. The new record is just the latest in a startling late-career renaissance that, not coincidently, began shortly after consummate bachelor Buckingham married his wife, Kristen Messner, and his three children were born.
“Lindsey Buckingham,” the singer-guitarist’s seventh solo venture, was finished nearly four years ago. Upon completing the 10-song collection, he asked his bandmates in Fleetwood Mac if they’d be willing to slightly delay an upcoming tour so he could promote his new music. He’d made a similar request back in 2006 and was granted two years to tour behind back-to-back solo efforts. For his new album, he only wanted three months.
But Fleetwood Mac’s 2018 tour dates had already been sketched out. Still, Buckingham says, the majority of the group — drummer Mick Fleetwood, keyboardist-vocalist Christine McVie and bassist John McVie — seemed flexible. Stevie Nicks, the band’s primary lead singer and singular superstar, however, would not budge.
The tension between Buckingham and Nicks, who were an infamously volatile couple during Fleetwood Mac’s 1970s peak, only grew from there. In January 2018, when the group walked onstage to receive their MusiCares Person of the Year award, “Rhiannon” — a song written by Nicks — was playing, which Buckingham complained about. Then Nicks, who accepted the prize on behalf of the band, felt that Buckingham was mocking her for her lengthy speech.
“Ironically,” Buckingham says, “nothing went down that night that was [as contentious] as the stuff we’d been through for 43 years.” But within a week, he was fired from Fleetwood Mac.
It was a seismic shift in Buckingham’s life — one he is still struggling to accept today, at age 71. As it would turn out, it was only the first in a series of upheavals. Following his departure, Buckingham sued Fleetwood Mac for lost wages, including the $12 million to $14 million he claimed he would have made in just two months on that 2018 tour.
LOS ANGELES — One day in early February 2019, Lindsey Buckingham woke up to a wallop of a surprise: He had just had a heart attack, followed by an emergency triple bypass.
The good news was that he’d had a cardiac event at arguably the best possible time and place, while under anesthesia for a minor medical procedure. (His older brother Greg, an Olympic swimmer, dropped dead from one alone in his backyard in 1990, at 45. A similar fate befell their father at 56.)
Buckingham found out the bad news when he tried to speak and realized he couldn’t raise his voice above a hoarse whisper: Someone had been “a little rough with the breathing tube,” as he put it, and damaged his vocal cords — not just any vocal cords, but those of the onetime Fleetwood Mac yelper responsible for such modern pop standards as “Go Your Own Way,” “Second Hand News” and “Never Going Back Again.” For months, he wasn’t sure if the injury was temporary or permanent. But fortunately, from his serene California living room one Saturday afternoon in August, Buckingham can now recall it all with a full-voiced laugh.
“Somebody in the hospital was going, ‘Oops! Hope he doesn’t find me!’”
Buckingham, 71, may be playing a bit on what he knows is his prickly, self-serious reputation — as parodied, however absurdly, by Bill Hader on “Saturday Night Live” — but throughout a series of conversations he was remarkably open and quick with the occasional self-deprecating joke. As he prepares to release “Lindsey Buckingham,” his first solo album in a decade, on Sept. 17, his edges seem to have smoothed a bit in the wake of a series of perspective-shifting events: the bypass and then the pandemic, of course, but also the July 2020 death of the Fleetwood Mac founder Peter Green, and Buckingham’s recent separation from Kristen Messner, his wife of 21 years and the mother of his three children.
Then there was the business, three years ago, when he got kicked out of Fleetwood Mac, a beloved group known as much for its timeless song-craft as its intra-band pyrotechnics and power struggles, and then sued his former bandmates.
Many of Buckingham’s solo releases have been pressure valves for when Fleetwood Mac was feeling a little too tense or controlled. After steering the group more left of center with the edgy and eclectic “Tusk” in 1979, the drummer and (in Buckingham’s words) “vibe master” Mick Fleetwood said they would have to reorient in a more commercial direction. Buckingham told him, “OK, well, I guess I’ve got to make some solo albums.”
Lindsey Buckingham has shared his new song “On the Wrong Side,” the latest single from the former Fleetwood Mac singer’s upcoming self-titled album and first solo LP since 2011.
“On the Wrong Side” is both musically and lyrically inspired by Buckingham’s former band, with the lyrics dealing with his long journey with Fleetwood Mac as well as the road of life.
Buckingham, who likened his new single to Mac’s hit “Go Your Own Way,” added in a statement that “On the Wrong Side” is “not a happy song, subject-matter wise, but it was an ebullient song musically. This was sort of the same idea.”
Oddly, this isn’t Buckingham’s first song titled “On the Wrong Side.” A completely different song with dissimilar lyrics written and performed by Buckingham featured on the soundtrack for the 1994 film With Honors; it’s unclear why Buckingham opted to reuse the song title for the new track (maybe he forgot?). Hear that version of “On the Wrong Side” below:
Lindsey Buckingham, the singer’s first solo album since 2011’s Seeds We Sow, arrives September 17th; he previously shared “I Don’t Know” from the LP, which he wrote and recorded in his Los Angeles home studio.
“I wanted to make a pop album, but I also wanted to make stops along the way with songs that resemble art more than pop,” Buckingham previously said of the album. “As you age, hopefully, you keep getting a little more grounded in the craft of what you’re doing. For me, getting older has probably helped to reinforce the innocence and the idealism that hopefully was always there.”
Buckingham will also embark on a nationwide solo trek that kicks off September 1st in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
US TOUR DATES:
SEPTEMBER 2021
9/1/2021 The Pabst Theater – Milwaukee, WI
9/3/2021 Mystic Lake – Mystic Showroom – Prior Lake, MN
9/4/2021 Four Winds Casino Resort / Silver Creek Event Center – New Buffalo, MI
9/7/2021 Carnegie of Homestead Music Hall – Munhall, PA
9/8/2021 Riviera Theatre – North Tonawanda, NY
9/9/2021 The Academy of Music – Northampton, MA
9/11/2021 The Chevalier Theater – Medford, MA
9/12/2021 The Music Hall – Portsmouth, NH
9/14/2021 Warner Theatre – Washington, DC
9/16/2021 The Town Hall – New York, NY
9/18/2021 Tropicana Casino & Resort – Atlantic City, NJ
9/19/2021 Santander Performing Arts Center – Reading, PA
9/21/2021 Knight Theatre – Charlotte, NC
9/22/2021 Woodruff Arts Center – Symphony Hall – Atlanta, GA
9/24/2021 Bijou Theatre – Knoxville, TN
9/26/2021 Ponte Vedra Concert Hall – Ponte Vedra Beach, FL
9/27/2021 Ruth Eckerd Hall – Clearwater, FL
9/29/2021 King Center for the Performing Arts – Melbourne, FL
9/30/2021 Parker Playhouse – Fort Lauderdale, FL
DECEMBER 2021
12/2/2021 The Theatre at Ace Hotel – Los Angeles, CA
12/3/2021 Magnolia Performing Arts Center – El Cajon, CA
12/5/2021 Fox Tucson Theatre – Tucson, AZ
12/8/2021 The Paramount Theatre For the Performing arts – Austin, TX
12/9/2021 Majestic Theatre – Dallas, TX
12/11/2021 Smart Financial Centre – Sugar Land, TX
12/13/2021 Von Braun Center – Mars Music Hall – Huntsville, AL
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