LINDSEY BUCKINGHAM
Fleetwood Mac’s visionary guitarist reaps the solo seeds he’s sown
By Russell Hall
The story of Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 album Rumours is well-worn: Fueled by the angst of the various romantic collisions among the members—singer and guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, singer Stevie Nicks, singer and keyboardist Christine McVie, bass player John McVie and drummer Mick Fleetwood—the album became one of the best-selling in rock history. But one less-told story is of the way its success set Buckingham’s uniquely dual-natured career in motion. When he pointedly pushed the group in adventurous new musical directions on the 1979 follow-up, Tusk, sales were relatively disappointing. “It forced my hand,” he recalls. “The band insisted we revert back to a more conventional way of making music. Since any sort of experimentation was disallowed, the only way I could do that was to make solo albums.”
And so Buckingham established a two-sided musical life—at once steering the classic-rock behemoth and unleashing a more restless creative spirit in his solo work. “The success of Rumours helped define the big machine of Fleetwood Mac and the small machine of my solo work,” he observes. “I’ve tried to find a balance between the two, a way to have them nurture one another.”
For most of the last decade Buckingham has focused on solo work while embarking on the occasional Mac tour (most recently in 2009). For his new Seeds We Sow, he embraced a true do-it-yourself approach, recording in his home studio and playing nearly every instrument himself. The result reflects the peace Buckingham has found with his wife of 10 years and the couple’s three children. “The whole experience of what I’ve done for all these years has had an element of strangeness,” he admits. “That was true onstage and off, until I was lucky enough to meet my wife. My personal life has never been more solid and grounded.” Buckingham spoke to us from his home in Los Angeles.
Did the Mac tour affect the album?
What was most noteworthy about the Fleetwood Mac tour was that we didn’t have an album to push. It was the first time we had been out there solely to do the body of work we had. That was freeing, and the solo projects I had done prior to that tour allowed me to bring something new to that endeavor. The experience was great, in terms of revisiting a group of songs without feeling as if you’re just resting on your laurels. I came off that tour with a grounded sense of myself. Perhaps that did translate into the approach I took on Seeds We Sow.
How did you start work?
I wasn’t even planning on making an album. There had been talk about additional Fleetwood Mac dates, and I was open to that. But that never happened and suddenly some time opened up. I went into the studio with no preconceptions about what I was going to do or the kind of album it would be. In the end, the album took me in the direction it wanted to go.
Tell us about your home studio.
It’s very basic. I have Pro Tools but I don’t use it a lot. I still do a lot of work using an old reel-to-reel 48-track digital machine. I use a Neotek console that I’ve had since the late ’80s. I was very proactive about this album. I play more on everything than ever before. I’ve always likened the solo work to painting. This was really a pure painting process, where you have a one-on-one with the canvas. It’s a sort of meditative thing you go through. Eventually a point comes, more so than what happens with Fleetwood Mac, where the work starts to lead me places I never expected to go. That makes it exciting.
What’s your writing process?
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