REVIEW | PHOTOS: Fleetwood Mac Live in Tulsa, OK

FLEETWOOD MAC LIVE

TULSA, OK - MAY 1, 2013

AT BOK CENTER

Fleetwood Mac 'infallible' in BOK Center performance

By JENNIFER CHANCELLOR World Scene Writer 

Photo by: James Gibbard / Tulsa World

Tulsa World

Fleetwood Mac would be nothing without Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. Despite the band’s rocky history, their chemistry on stage is forged in steel.

Wednesday night at a tour stop at the BOK Center, Mick Fleetwood fortified his namesake band with solid rhythm, and John McVie held it tight on bass.

Strong out of the gate, Nicks and Buckingham harmonized to “Second Hand News,” fans on their feet, Fleetwood and McVie rumbling strong behind them.

Fans pressed to the stage, hands raised, and sang along.

Those fans who weren't on their feet then were by the first few notes of “The Chain,” Buckingham’s finger-pick guitar style texturizing each note with rich emotion. Multiple fingers added voices — harmony — to the band’s own vocals, almost like a multi-track machine.

With Buckingham head-to-toe in black, what stood out is his lightning fretwork, again and again through the nearly three-hour set. This version of Fleetwood Mac might as well have a “Lindsey Buckingham with …” in front of it.

Continue to the full review on the original site including pics

Full setlist tonight including Silver Springs

Concert review: Fleetwood Mac at the BOK -- better live now than ever?

By George Lang

The Oklahoman

NewsOK.com

There is a great argument to be made, one completely supported by Fleetwood Mac's immensely skilled and generous Wednesday performance at Tulsa's BOK Center, that Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, John McVie and Mick Fleetwood are better live performers now than when they were the biggest band in the world.

Listen to 1980's "Fleetwood Mac Live," and it sounds like a talented, enormously successful band exhausted by its circumstances and frayed at the edges. But 33 years later, in front of 20,000 fans, Buckingham and Nicks sounded completely engaged with both the audience and the music they've made together for more than four decades.

Undoubtedly, the reasons for Fleetwood Mac's current excellence have as much to do with history markers as they do with their present. Earlier this year, singer-guitarist Buckingham oversaw the remastering and release of an expanded version of the album that made them superstars, 1977's "Rumours," and they started their BOK Center show with three huge songs from that album: "Second Hand News," "The Chain" and "Dreams." Nicks sounded great -- no key changes were needed to accommodate aging vocal cords -- and her enthusiasm for taking her first lead of the evening on "Dreams" was made clear when she told the crowd, "This party starts now!"

Buckingham seemed similarly proud on the next song, "Sad Angel." The lead track on "Extended Play," the four-song EP released Tuesday on iTunes, "Sad Angel" might be a song about Buckingham's difficulty in persuading Nicks to record new material, but the uptempo song felt celebratory and meshed well with the classic songs that preceded it, and Buckingham seemed energized by the performance and the audience's response.

Nicks returned to her storied classics with 1975's "Rhiannon," then the band dipped heavily into the masterfully ramshackle 1979 album "Tusk," and Buckingham was in his zone. He ripped through "Not That Funny" and "Tusk," then ceded the spotlight to Nicks for "Sisters of the Moon" and a lovely version of "Sara."

Granted, the retired Christine McVie will always be missed -- she was a top-notch balladeer with a soulful, rounded voice, the creamy center between two singers with sharp vocal edges. It will always hurt that her repertoire is mostly missing, although Nicks now takes her vocal parts on "Don't Stop." But Nicks and Buckingham always were the stars of this drama, and their trove of great songs and residual tension continues to make a Fleetwood Mac concert an exciting proposition.

When McVie, Fleetwood and their backup singers and players left the stage to the ex-lovers for "Landslide" and "Never Going Back Again," Buckingham and Nicks bolstered one another's strengths. Their voices blended beautifully on "Without You," a lost pre-Fleetwood Mac song they re-recorded for "Extended Play," and the band all joined together for a strong version of 1982's "Gypsy."

But for several memorable minutes, Buckingham stole the show. "I'm So Afraid" is not one of the biggest songs in Fleetwood Mac's repertoire, but the closing track from the band's 1975 self-titled album is, in many ways, the quintessential Buckingham song -- paranoia, throaty wailing and thunderous guitar work. Buckingham completely killed on the ending solo, earning a standing ovation that was repeated with Nicks' solo single "Stand Back" and the main set closer, "Go Your Own Way."

Fleetwood Mac returned for two encores, playing "World Turning," "Don't Stop," "Silver Springs" and "Say Goodbye" before finally saying goodbye after a two-and-half hour show. They were in fine voice and spirits, and the feeling they brought to both old and new material was kind of miraculous for a band that has been through it all.

FAN PHOTOS

Audio Interview: Lindsey Buckingham Talks Fleetwood Mac Tour, Stevie Nicks, "Sad Angel", Christine McVie

Lindsey Buckingham

93.7 The Arrow Houston's Classic Rock Station

May 1, 2013

FLEETWOOD MAC MOTHER’S DAY CONTEST - B.C. Canada Residence Only

You could win a "Landslide" of a prize for Mother's Day! from The Vancouver Sun

Grand Prize includes a pair of front row tickets to the Vancouver show.

ELIGIBILITY:

To be eligible for this Contest, an individual must:
(a) be a legal resident of the province of British Columbia;
(b) be of the age of majority or older in his/her province or territory of residence at the time of entry; and
(c) not have been selected as a winner of a Postmedia (as defined below) contest within the past ninety (90) calendar days

Contest ends at 11:59 p.m. PT on May 9, 2013

Enter Here

Fleetwood Mac "Extended Play" "Sad Angel," shimmers with the glossy textures of 1987's "Tango in the Night."

First impression: Fleetwood Mac's four-song 'Extended Play'

By Mikael Wood
LA Times

The four songs on the new Fleetwood Mac EP -- which the legendary pop-rock outfit put up for sale on iTunes on Tuesday morning with little advance warning -- arrive steeped in echoes of the past, in at least one case quite literally: 

"Without You," a strummy acoustic number overlaid with harmony vocals by Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, reportedly dates back to sessions for the two singers' 1973 album as a long-haired vocal duo deeply opposed to shirts.

But the other tunes on "Extended Play," newly composed by Buckingham and co-produced by him and L.A. studio pro Mitchell Froom, feel no less rooted in earlier iterations of this on-again/off-again institution.

"Miss Fantasy" has some of the folky back-porch guitar action of "Never Going Back Again," while the stripped-down "It Takes Time" could be Buckingham's version of Christine McVie's big piano ballad, "Songbird." And opener "Sad Angel," which you can hear below, shimmers with the glossy textures of 1987's "Tango in the Night." (Incidentally, if you want to get a sense of Fleetwood Mac's enduring influence on synthed-up young rock acts like Phoenix, go straight to "Tango" -- it looms larger these days than the vaunted "Rumours" does.)

Nothing about this self-reference surprises, of course, especially given that Fleetwood Mac is in the midst of a giant arena tour that will bring the band to the Hollywood Bowl on May 25 and Anaheim's Honda Center on May 28. Old hits are what the members are playing onstage -- "Don't Stop," "Dreams," "Go Your Own Way," "Silver Springs" -- so old hits are what the members are hearing in their heads.

And yet "Extended Play" -- Fleetwood Mac's first studio output since "Say You Will" in 2003 -- doesn't sound stale or overworked; indeed, the songs have an impressive crispness (after only a handful of spins, anyway) that makes their familiarity seem less like evidence of a tapped creative supply than like proof that this is simply the kind of music Fleetwood Mac writes.

"I remember you," Buckingham sings over and over again near the end of "Miss Fantasy," and he might be addressing his own melody. But it's a good one. You'll remember it too.

Get the EP on iTunes $3.96

First Single "Sad Angel"

REVIEW: Fleetwood Mac "Extended Play" - "a joyous 18 minutes, strongly melodic, filled with dreamy hooks

New music review: 
Extended Play, Fleetwood Mac
By Bernard Perusse

The Montreal Gazette

It wasn't quite the blindside of David Bowie's sudden emergence in January with new music. Lindsey Buckingham had started the jungle telegraph with an announcement at Fleetwood Mac's April 6 concert in Philadelphia that the group would release an EP of new material "in a few days." 

But the actual appearance of the music yesterday on iTunes still came as a surprise in an era when release dates are etched in stone and the hype machine gets going ages before the music surfaces. 

Four tracks from the Mac - one of them a rediscovered oldie - is not the feat Bowie accomplished with 17 unheard songs. But it shares the same decade-long gestation period: this is the group's first fresh recording since the 2003 album Say You Will. 

And it's a joyous 18 minutes. 

Fans will read all sorts of meanings into the lyrics, which are hard not to connect with Buckingham's often-troubled relationship with Stevie Nicks. It is, after all, the backdrop for rock n' roll's longest-running soap opera. 

"It's still evolving, and that's the beauty of it too. I've known Stevie since high school. We were a couple for many, many years, and we've been a musical couple forever," Buckingham said to Rolling Stone. "After all this time you would think there was nothing left to discover, nothing left to work out, no new chapters to be written. But that is not the case - there are new chapters to be written." 

"I had a really good time working with him for four days at his house. I got to hang out with his family and his kids, his grown up kids, and really connect with him again. We're pretty proud of what we have done, and we're looking at it through the eyes of wisdom now, instead of through the eyes of jealousy and resentment and anger," Nicks told the same publication. 

""Hello, hello sad angel, have you come to fight the war?" Buckingham and Nicks sing in harmony during the killer chorus of opening track Sad Angel, an uptempo, catchy pop-rocker written by Buckingham. In many ways, in fact, the entire EP sounds like a Buckingham solo release: strongly melodic, filled with dreamy hooks and neurotically self-aware. 

Without You, which, tellingly, comes from the pre-Mac Buckingham-Nicks era, is the sole track penned by Nicks. It finds the two in a grizzled update of the Everly Brothers sound: over a gorgeous, crisp acoustic jangle, Nicks's rough nasality blends with Buckingham's high tenor in a celebration of where the two have brought each other. The perspective might be 40 years old, but it seems oddly poignant now. 

It Takes Time, a stark, but sweet piano ballad, finds Buckingham's protagonist struggling to connect with his own feelings, while Miss Fantasy is quite the stunner: a sunshiny, bittersweet look back, with a chorus that evokes the Beach Boys. As Nicks comes in on harmony, the track soars higher than we could have hoped for. 

No word yet on when, or even whether, a physical release will follow. 

Fleetwood Mac release new four-track EP on iTunes without warning - Immediately goes Top 10

The songs are the band's first new material since 2003, but there is no news on whether an album will follow
Sean Michaels
The Guardian.co.uk

Fleetwood Mac have unveiled their first new music in a decade. Without fanfare or a marketing campaign,

the band released their four-song EP direct to iTunes on 30 April.

The release, simply titled Extended Play, comprises a quartet of tunes: three originals by Lindsey Buckingham and one by Stevie Nicks, written in 1973 when the pair were still the duo Buckingham Nicks. This is hardly a set of sexagenarians' basement tapes: Without You – not be confused with the Danny Kirwan-written Mac song of the same name – and Sad Angel are as shiny as Rumours, and even the lonely piano ballad, It Takes Time, has a dramatic synths/strings coda.

Buckingham revealed plans for the EP at a gig in Philadelphia earlier this month – the band have been performing some of the new songs on their current tour. "It's the best stuff we've done in a long time," he said, promising that the record would be out "in a few days". It took a few weeks, instead, but within hours of appearing on iTunes, Extended Play had appeared in the digital shop's top 10 chart, though it has since dropped.

"We all felt that it would be great to go into the studio and record new material before embarking on this tour and the result has been remarkable," Buckingham said in a statement. Nicks has previously indicated that Fleetwood Mac would only record another full-length if she felt certain fans would buy it. "Big, long albums don't seem to be what everybody wants these days," she told Billboard in February. "[Let's] see if the world does want more music from us … If we get that feeling, that they do want another 10 songs, we can reassess."

One of Buckingham's new songs is an explicit response to Nicks's musical reticence. "At the moment [Sad Angel] was being written, I was really thinking about the fact that [Stevie] and I were not agreeing on the idea of an album," he recently told MSN. "The chorus is, 'Hello, sad angel, have you come to fight the war?' It goes on to talk about 'the crowd's calling out for more' … [Sad Angel and Miss Fantasy] are songs about Stevie and me."

Prior to Extended Play, Fleetwood Mac's most recent new recording was the 2003 album Say You Will. That record reached No 6 on the UK album charts, and achieved gold sales, but fell well short of the band's commercial peak from 1975 to 1987. The band have sold more than 100m albums worldwide.

Fleetwood Mac are currently in the midst of a North American tour, with plans to visit the UK and Europe this fall.

Fleetwood Mac "Extended Play"
Current Top iTunes Albums Charts

# 3 - Canada
# 3 - Ireland
# 5 - USA
# 6 - Netherlands
# 6 - Sweden
#10 - UK
#10 - Finland
#11 - Australia
#11 - Norway
#21 - New Zealand
#25 - Germany
#30 - Belgium
#41 - South Africa
#44 - Spain
#48 - Poland
#54 - Switzerland
#90 - Denmark
#91 - France

Get the EP on iTunes