San Francisco Review Lindsey Buckingham even as a solo artist is incredible

 

Lindsey Buckingham Wows at Palace of Fine Arts

Lindsey Buckingham

Palace of Fine Arts

April 5, 2022

Photo/Review by Raymond Ahner

SFSonic

Earlier last year Lindsey Buckingham announced not only the release of his first solo album since 2011, (and his first album following his departure from Fleetwood Mac) but also a North American tour. The current leg of the tour recently kicked off at The Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, where he performed a nearly two-hour set to a packed house.

Taking the stage with his band at precisely 7:55pm, Lindsey first addressed the crowd and apologized for the absence of keyboard player Brent Tuggle, who was ill. He then kicked off the evening with “Not Too Late,” from his 2006 solo record Under the Skin. Lindsey was as masterful on his guitars as ever, as he and his three-piece band did a few more from his solo albums, including “Soul Drifter” and “Doing What I Can,” both from his 1992 record Out of the Cradle.

As the evening progressed, Lindsey played a few songs solo, including Fleetwood Mac classics “Never Going Back Again,” and “Big Love.” His backing band was not done yet though, as they returned to play a few songs from Lindsey’s long awaited seventh and latest solo album. Highlights included “Scream,” “I Don’t Mind,” and “Swan Song,” all which showed not only Lindsey’s talent, but also the talent of the band supporting him. They also tore through Fleetwood Mac standards “I’m So Afraid,” (with an epic extended solo from Lindsey and the song that everyone in the crowd wanted to hear, “Go Your Own Way,” during which Lindsey took center stage to belt out another incredible solo to close out the set.

After a brief break Lindsey and the band returned to the stage, thanking them and stating that they were “Everything you want in a hometown crowd. He then introduced his band members (Neale Heywood on guitar, Michael Urbano on drums, and Michael Kiyoka on keyboards. The band then ended the evening with “Love Is Here To Stay” and “Time.” By the time it was all said and done, Lindsey showed that even as a solo artist he is an incredible musician, and he doesn’t appear to even be close to stopping anytime soon.

Lindsey Buckingham appreciative of the fans who come out to the solo shows

Lindsey Buckingham looks past Fleetwood Mac ‘fiasco’ with upcoming solo tour.

Over the past four years, Fleetwood Mac gave him the boot, his wife filed for divorce, he lost his voice, nearly died, and watched the release of his long-awaited solo album get delayed several times. Oh, and then there was the whole pandemic thing.

“It’s certainly been an interesting few years, starting with the whole Fleetwood Mac fiasco,” Buckingham, 72, told The Chronicle, calling from his home in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Yet the songwriter, best known as the band’s lead guitarist and singer on the 40 million-selling 1977 album “Rumours,” is full of hope as he prepares to kick off an extensive spring solo tour at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco on Tuesday, April 5.

The trek is in support of his seventh solo album, “Lindsey Buckingham,” which was completed nearly five years ago and finally released in September. The first leg of the tour in the fall saw him packing theaters with loyal fans, and many of his upcoming dates are sold out too.

But Buckingham is most looking forward to getting back onstage with the members of his former group — drummer Mick Fleetwood, bassist John McVie, keyboardist-vocalist Christine McVie and singer Stevie Nicks, who reportedly issued the ultimatum forcing the band to dump Buckingham ahead of its 2018  “An Evening With Fleetwood Mac” tour.

“These are people that were my family, dysfunctional or not, for close to 45 years,” Buckingham said.

The Palo Alto native joined Fleetwood Mac with then-girlfriend Nicks in 1974, after the pair graduated from high school in Atherton. They quickly became the identifiable faces and voices for the former British blues band, with Buckingham contributing hits like “Go Your Own Way,” “Tusk” and “The Chain.”

On the band’s recent tour, his position was jointly filled by Neil Finn of Crowded House and Mike Campbell of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers, which Buckingham said made it feel like “a cover band.”

“It didn’t dignify the legacy that the five of us had built,” he said.

Christine McVie to release new solo album

Christine McVie to release new solo album of reworked Fleetwood Mac tracks

Christine McVie has shared details of her forthcoming album Songbird, containing a compilation of her biggest hits.

Christine McVie has announced that she will be releasing a new solo album featuring re-imagined versions of her biggest hits with Fleetwood Mac. The album will be titled Songbird, after one of the singer's solo compositions on Rumours.

Although no official release date for the album has yet been confirmed, McVie says it will emerge in June.

Exactly which compositions have been reworked for Songbird has not yet been disclosed. Some of McVie's hits with the group include Say You Love Me, You Make Loving Fun, Everywhere and Little Lies.

According to the vocalist, as disclosed in a new interview with Gary Barlow on BBC Radio 2 show We Write the Songs, the project was produced by legendary English studio veteran Glyn Johns (The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, The Who) and features input from Grammy-winning composer and conductor Vince Mendoza.

“I’ve just finished an album which is a compilation of my biggest hits,” she explains. “But they’ve all been produced again by Glyn Johns [with] Vince Mendoza on strings, who does this fantastic version of Songbird. We’ve just now actually re-cut it with a complete string orchestra and it sounds beautiful.”

McVie says that all the re-imagined Fleetwood Mac songs on the album "sound completely different" to their originals. 

When asked if she would consider touring the album, the singer/keyboardist replies, “That I daren’t comment on yet! I’m very cagey about things like that.”

The Fleetwood Mac star last released a solo album in 2004 with In The Meantime, and issued a joint self-titled project with band-member/guitarist Lindsey Buckingham in 2017.

Discussing her reunion with the band in 2014 following a 16 year hiatus, she explains how she rekindled her relationship with her fellow band members. “I just needed to get away,” she said of her departure in 1998.

“I was quite happy for the first eight, 10 years, just living my life in the country in Kent. I had a big old rambling manor house that I lived in, and I was loving my life. 

"Then I just started to kind of miss the band again, and it was actually me who tackled Mick [Fleetwood] and said, ‘How would you feel if I were to come back?’ And he went and spoke to all the other guys because they’d all been still playing this whole time.

"You can quote Lindsay as having said, ‘Well, she better bloody well mean it. If she wants to come back, she better bloody well stay!’ Or something like that. But I did. I went back, and it was great – those final years were great.”

When host Barlow asks whether Fleetwood Mac's most recent tour was their “lap of honour", McVie disagrees.

"None of us know what’s happening with Fleetwood Mac," she notes. "With COVID and everything else, we’ve got to all of us be very careful. But you know, this is not necessarily the end of the tale, so maybe the lap of honour is yet to come."

By Elizabeth Scarlett 

Louder.com

Stevie Nicks Bella Donna 2LP Set For Record Store Day 2022

BELLA DONNA DOUBLE VINYL SET FOR RELEASE ON RECORD STORE DAY APR 23, 2022

This double vinyl version includes the remastered original album and an LP of studio outtakes, B-sides and demos, many for the first time on vinyl, from the 2016 Bella Donna Deluxe Edition.

TRACKLISTING:

LP1

Side 1

1. Bella Donna (2016 Remaster)

2. Kind of Woman (2016 Remaster)

3. Stop Draggin' My Heart Around (with Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers) [2016 Remaster]

4. Think About It (2016 Remaster)

5. After the Glitter Fades (2016 Remaster)

Side 2

1. Edge of Seventeen (2016 Remaster)

2. How Still My Love (2016 Remaster)

3. Leather and Lace (2016 Remaster) [Remastered]

4. Outside the Rain (2016 Remaster)

5. The Highwayman (2016 Remaster)

LP2

Side 1

1. Edge of Seventeen (Early Take)

2. Think About It (Alternate Version)

3. How Still My Love (Alternate Version)

4. Leather and Lace (Alternate Version)

5. Bella Donna (Demo) (Demo)

Side 2

1. Gold and Braid (Unreleased Version)

2. Sleeping Angel (Alternate Version)

3. If You Were My Love (Unreleased Version)

4. The Dealer (Unreleased Version)

5. Blue Lamp (2016 Remaster)(Heavy Metal Soundtrack)

6. Sleeping Angel (From Fast Times at Ridgemont High) [2016 Remaster]

Quantity 15,000

Record Store Day

Stevie Nicks Is Still Living Her Dreams

 The New Yorker Interview

Stevie Nicks Is Still Living Her Dreams

The rock-and-roll icon talks about style, spirits, and writing one of her best songs ever.

By Tavi Gevinson

The New Yorker

I first met Stevie Nicks in 2013, when I was about to turn seventeen. At the time, I was editing Rookie, an online magazine for teen girls, and I had recently given a tedxTeen talk critiquing a trend of superficially “strong” female characters in pop culture. I am sure the video would embarrass me now, but I stand by its concluding line: “Just be Stevie Nicks.” A few months later, I heard from Nicks’s management team. Her cousin had sent her the video of my talk, and she wanted to invite me to a Fleetwood Mac show. At the concert, in Chicago, I bawled listening to Nicks sing her otherworldly songs, and was stunned when I heard the same voice dedicating her performance of “Landslide” to me. Backstage, Nicks gave me a gold moon-shaped necklace—a token she grants to those she’s taken under her wing. We kept up a friendship, and, in 2017, I interviewed her for Rookie’s podcast. Then the show’s production company shut down midseason, and the conversation never aired.n company shut down midseason, and the conversation never aired.

In the years since, Nicks’s appeal among younger generations has only grown. On TikTok, her songs provide a soundtrack to viral videos and fans pay tribute to her witchy aesthetic. Artists such as Harry Styles, Miley Cyrus, and Lana Del Rey have asked her to lend her voice to their songs, and she’s become “fairy godmother” to a wide circle of younger artists. For listeners, too, she has always acted as a kind of spiritual guide. In her music, loss is simultaneously earth-shattering and ordinary. Heartbreak is survivable, and possibly a key to self-knowledge. Many of her songs take place at night, in dreams or visions, “somewhere out in the back of your mind.” Her narrator frequently asks questions of herself and of some higher power, as if in constant conversation with her own intuition. When I said “Just be Stevie Nicks,” I was thinking of how her work had taught me to see such sensitivity as a source of strength. Nicks’s music is what you listen to when you need help listening to yourself.

Over two evenings last month, Nicks and I caught up over the phone. She was at her home in Santa Monica, where she has spent the pandemic keeping nocturnal hours and working on a TV series based on the Welsh myth of Rhiannon. When she apologized for asking to speak at 10:30 p.m. E.T., I assured her that I was on a similar schedule. “Good,” she said. “Then we are definitely friends of the night.” This interview has been adapted from our unpublished early conversation and our recent ones.

Q&A Lindsey Buckingham Most Fulfilling and Dysfunctional of His Career

Lindsey Buckingham on the Most Fulfilling and Dysfunctional of His Career

By Devon Ivie - Vulture

It’s long been theorized that it takes two other guitarists to cover one Lindsey Buckingham, which was proved back in 2018 when the fingerpicking deity was unceremoniously fired from Fleetwood Mac and had to be replaced with a duo of rock elders for the band’s ensuing tour. (You thought playing “Never Going Back Again” night after night would be easy?) Unsurprisingly, there was the requisite gossipy domino effect of headlines for the next few years. But after bringing a lawsuit against the rest of the band, the subsequent settlement, his emergency triple bypass surgery, various reconciliations, and a maybe/maybe not divorce from his wife — phew — Buckingham now finds himself in a fulfilled state of mind, enjoying the September release of his newest solo album, Lindsey Buckingham. During a break in his touring schedule, Buckingham spoke from his California home about the highest highs and lowest lows of his career. Oh yeah, and about Stevie Nicks.

Most underappreciated Fleetwood Mac song

TUSK

It wasn’t so much about the song than it was the whole album Tusk and the fact that everyone was expecting Rumours II. We gave them something totally different. When Tusk came out with the song and the album, people either got why we did it and appreciated the departure we’d made, or it alienated them. You might make the case for saying that Rumours as an album was overrated, and it wasn’t. It was just the success detached from the music, and it became about the success at some point. You lose maybe a certain faction of people when you move that far to the left.

I always joke that I would’ve loved to have been a fly on the wall when Warner Bros. first sat down in their boardroom and put the whole album on and played it collectively. And they were probably going, What the hell is this? Because they didn’t really know what they were getting. I think that that was probably part of the reaction from part of the audience too — it was alienating in a certain way, which ultimately turned out to be constructive. I think Tusk has stood the test of time and it’s one that resonates with fellow artists more in a lot of ways. It also has become understood in terms of why it was done and is appreciated for that. But in the moment, it definitely divided up the room.

Guitar solo that makes your fingers hurt the most

BIG LOVE

The stage version of “Big Love.” [Laughs.] It was the first single from Tango in the Night, but it was an ensemble piece at the time. That was one of the things that began to evolve after I left the band — I realized I wanted to try to address that finger style in a more complete way. “Big Love” evolved from what it had been as an ensemble to a single guitar-and-voice piece onstage and became the template idea for quite a few other songs to follow, in terms of making the statement both onstage and on recordings. Like, basically having one guitar do the work of a whole track, and wanting to include that as one approach in the making of an album. I don’t think it ever got more rigorous than “Big Love” with the actual demands of the part required. It’s a finger-hurter, for sure.

I don’t really do any finger exercises, by the way. I have no discipline whatsoever other than to remain calm and centered and just trust that my impulses are going to be correct. All around me in Fleetwood Mac, you could hear through the walls of the dressing rooms, people going, La, la, la, la, la, la, stuff like that. I was never interested in vocal exercises. I would hear Mick Fleetwood trying to play the guitar to keep himself calm so that he wouldn’t be too nervous. I was blessed with never having been nervous going onstage. I think by virtue of that, I never felt like I needed to prepare on a nightly basis in any way, whether it was vocally or exercises for the guitar. I just go out there, plug it in, and hopefully become psychically plugged in as well.

Most fulfilling album