Review: A Guitar Hero Goes His Own Way – The Magic of Lindsey Buckingham

If there was a new video game out there called Underrated Guitar Hero… or Unsung Guitar Hero, Lindsey Buckingham would surely be on the cover.  

I have always known him to be nothing short of amazing, but last night’s concert at Royce Hall on the UCLA campus proved it once again.  The man is a living legend, and that is not something I say lightly or very often.

I would love to see him on stage trading licks with bass legend Stanley Clarke.  Okay, yes I have always said Stanley is a living legend and he is… He is the best living musician out there.  There is something very similar about their styles and approach and the way they attack their instruments.  Watching their fingers fly across those strings, seeing an instrument literally transformed into something else… That would be amazing…

Continue to the Full Review by Marc's Muse



Lindsey Buckingham - Royce Hall UCLA - Los Angeles

10/13/11
By Danielle Bacher
Photos by Danielle Bacher

Some men gain weight as they get older, and many lose their hair. Lindsey Buckingham, however, has beaten the odds. Reed-thin with a shock of gravity-defying gray hair that reminds one of Jack Nance in Eraserhead, he retains a youthful air and still-keening voice. This is fortunate, as his set included both decades-old Fleetwood Mac hits and more recent solo work. The mixture didn't always cohere, leaving an off-kilter feeling, but the highs were extremely high, and the adoring fans were going to enjoy the music no matter what. 

Buckingham led off the evening alone, just himself and his acoustic guitar. He opened with "Shut Us Down" from 2006's unjustly overlooked Under the Skin. A number at once gentle and snappy, it allowed him to show off his world-class fingerstyle skills, bending and popping each string for maximum effect. He kicked things up with the second track, 1984's "Go Insane." Stripped of its dated production (and  Miami Vice visuals), it kept its jangly accents and haunting edge.

​The steadfast picker followed with his biggest solo hit, "Trouble." Perhaps the quintessential Buckingham tune, it combines a lilting melody and catchy chorus with an air of coked-out dread that is, well, troubling. "I should be saying goodnight/ I really shouldn't stay anymore/ Been so long since I held you/ Forgotten what love was for," he coos to a lover who clearly has spooked him somehow. The pretty-but-fucked-up vibe continued through a breathy, languorous version of  Fleetwood Mac's "Never Going Back Again" (aka, "The Song Every College Guy Tries to Learn on Acoustic Guitar"). It's not hard to hear why the Mac were a phenomenon in the late-1970s. Even if they only had Buckingham writing songs, they would have had more hits than most bands could ever dream of.

Continue to the full review at LA Weekly

Lindsey Buckingham: HIS FINGERTIPS AREN'T LIKE YOURS! has a secret he doesn't really talk about

Lindsey Buckingham, playing Aliante, talks about love, calluses and music
Doug Elfman
Las Vegas Review Journal

If you know the lore of Fleetwood Mac, you know all about Lindsey Buckingham's messy relationship with Stevie Nicks. It helped them write their classic album "Rumours," yada yada.

But that was so very long ago -- 30-plus years and counting. It's time to let it go.

Besides, Buckingham, 62, lives with his wife of several decades, Kristen Messner. They have three kids.

Buckingham -- performing solo tonight at Aliante Station -- romantically says he waited "a long time" for her.

See the full article at RJ

Review: Lindsey Buckingham Seeds We Sow ★ ★ ★★★ ★ ★/10

Lindsey Buckingham
Seeds We Sow  ★ ★ ★★★ ★ ★/10
By John Bergstrom
Pop Matters

Most of Lindsey Buckingham’s career has been a study in contradiction. He was the eccentric, anti-social studio rat who was fascinated by Talking Heads and the Clash. Yet he was the featured guitarist in one of the most mainstream, popular bands in the world. When Buckingham tried to inject his restlessness into Fleetwood Mac on Tusk , the result was a million-selling album that was deemed a commercial failure and brought on the wrath of his bandmates and record company alike.

Buckingham relented, saving his more experimental work for an intermittent solo career, which he financed with his day job as musical director for the Mac. But it was always a struggle. Thanks in no small part to Warner Brothers Records’ politicking, Buckingham’s solo albums became Fleetwood Mac albums, first Tango in the Night, and then, after a 15-year reprieve, Say You Will.

Finally, as the 21st Century dawned, Buckingham began to come to terms with both sides of his musical existence. As he formed his own family and relationships within Fleetwood Mac became more normal and drug-free, he was able to channel his restless energy into the band, then take the momentum back into the studio for a resurgent run of solo work. Under the Skin (2006) and Gift of Screws (2008) are widely regarded as some of the best work of Buckingham’s career, and for good reason. They showcase a musician and songwriter who is fully immersed in, and coming to terms with, his considerable gifts. And the two albums provide an ideal combination of the skilled melodicism and almost unhinged strangeness that have marked the different aspects of Buckingham’s career.

You can consider Seeds We Sow the third in a trilogy. In terms of overall feel, it is very much of a piece with Under the Skin and Gift of Screws. Maybe too much so, for some listeners. Buckingham is now free of Warner Brothers, which means Seeds We Sow is even more of a do-it-yourself effort than the previous releases. But the close, reverb-drenched atmospheres, needling acoustic guitar arpeggios, and minimal production are familiar.

CONTINUE TO THE FULL REVIEW

AN EVENING WITH STEVIE NICKS A Special Benefit For The Grammy Museum

AN EVENING WITH STEVIE NICKS
A SPECIAL BENEFIT FOR THE GRAMMY MUSEUM AND THE GRAMMY FOUNDATION
PRESENTED BY AMERICAN EXPRESS
Wednesday, October 19, 2011; 8:00pm
Grammy Museum

The GRAMMY Museum, in conjunction with The GRAMMY Foundation, is honored to welcome the multi- GRAMMY Award -winning Stevie Nicks to the Clive Davis Theater. As a member of the legendary Fleetwood Mac as well as her extraordinary solo career, Nicks is one of the world's most influential and inspiring artists of the last three decades. Before an audience of 200, Nicks will converse with GRAMMY Museum Executive Director Bob Santelli about her history-making career and her current CD, In Your Dreams, her first studio album in a decade. After the discussion, Nicks will take audience questions and perform a few songs.

Doors open at 7:30 pm. American Express presale tickets are $50 and can be purchased at Museum Box Office starting Thursday October 13, 2011 at noon. Public onsale is Saturday, October 15, at noon. American Express is the exclusive payment method for presale tickets. American Express ticket purchasers will also receive a special gift. All proceeds benefit the GRAMMY Museum and The GRAMMY Foundation. For more information, please call 213.765.6803.

This Event is Already Sold Out

Stevie Nicks - "Moonlight" [Official Music Video]

BellaAndEdward.com is proud to be exclusively premiering the much-anticipated music video for Stevie Nicks’s Twilight-inspired song “Moonlight (A Vampire’s Dream)” from her current album “In Your Dreams.”

If you click through and watch the video on Youtube which you can do by clicking on the Youtube logo on the bottom right of the video screen, I encourage all of you to please leave a comment on Stevie's Youtube page and "Like" the video... It'll help the video blowup on Youtube and gain wider attention... Thanks!

Review: Lindsey Buckingham goes his own way at Celebrity Theatre

Lindsey Buckingham goes his own way at Celebrity Theatre
by Ed Masley

Photo by: Maria Vassett

Lindsey Buckingham could be playing a much larger room than the Celebrity Theatre (and pocketing more money) with the "Big Machine," as he's been calling Fleetwood Mac.

But he's clearly enjoying his time at the wheel of the Little Machine, his solo tours affording him the opportunity to take more risks, get more intimate and showcase his solo material, including selections from a great new album, "Seeds We Sow."

And touring solo also lets him stroll on stage alone with his guitar, as he did Wednesday night, Oct. 12, at the Celebrity, and set the tone with a powerful set of stripped-down, one-man, unplugged versions of his songs that put the focus on his awe-inspiring finger-picking prowess. The percussive country-blues approach of "Shut Us Down" was followed by a melancholy reinvention of his early solo hit "I Go Insane," on which his guitar style was closer to classical music. It got pretty unhinged for an unplugged performance by the time he brought it to a climax, howling "She's a lot like you."

"Trouble" also benefited greatly from the mournful unplugged treatment, and he earned his first standing ovation for the night's first Fleetwood Mac song, "Never Going Back Again," bringing his guitar down to a whisper and slowing it down for dramatic effect on the verses.

Continue to the full Review at AZCentral

Photo Gallery (27 photos) Here

Lindsey Buckingham at Celebrity Theatre, 10/12/11
By Jason P. Woodbury
PhoenixNewTimes

"The small machine."

That's how Lindsey Buckingham described his solo work, comparing it to the "big machine" that is Fleetwood Mac. Buckingham was about halfway through a kind of extended monologue about the differences between his massive, stadium-touring collaboration with Stevie Nicks, Mick Fleetwood, and John McVie (Christine McVie no longer performs with the band), and his Celebrity Theatre-filling solo project, describing Fleetwood as a "big budget Hollywood film" and his solo work as an "independent," when the crowd got weird. Someone shouted, "That's why I love you" in response to something he said about Hollywood; a guy just screamed "Lindsey;" and someone shouted "Hi, Stevie!"

In the intimate confines of Celebrity (with the stage on its more dignified "non-rotating" setting), Buckingham seemed to relish a chance to get VH1 Storytellers-style intimate, revealing the nitty gritty of each song. But the crowd wasn't all that interested in that. They wanted bombast. They wanted rock 'n' roll. But most of all -- they wanted songs from the "Big Machine."

I don't mean to imply that people weren't interested in classic Buckingham solo material like "Go Insane" or "Trouble" -- both got big cheers, and the crowd reacted well to material from Buckingham's latest, Seeds We Sow.

But Buckingham was visually perturbed by the interruptions. "Hi, Stevie?" he sneered. "No, no, we all love Stevie very much, don't we?"