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

INTERVIEW Lindsey Buckingham Talks About His Process of Recording

Lindsey Buckingham: Staying Grounded & Creative

BY LARRY CRANE - NOVEMBER, 2021

Tape OP

Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours came out right before I started high school. I remember most of my graduating class (not including me!) singing “Dreams” at our ceremony in a park by a local creek. Growing up in Northern California, we knew that two members of the band, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, had come from our neck of the woods, and watching the group become one of the biggest selling rock bands ever was dizzying. When they came out with Tusk a little over two years later, I bought the double LP and absorbed it like teenagers do. I knew something different was going on with these songs, but it was years before I realized what Lindsey Buckingham was doing, and why someone would find creativity in a home studio they might not otherwise. Lindsey’s new self-titled album, written, produced, mixed, and recorded in his home studio, is another classic example of his best work, and it was an honor to talk to him about his process.

Tape Op is about music recording in all kinds of scenarios. Ever since I started it, you’ve been in the back of my mind as the perfect interview. 

Well, I do have my own methods; that’s for sure! [laughter]

Exactly. I wanted to talk to you a bit about all of your various personal recording scenarios.

Sure.

It’s well-known that a lot of home recording happened around the Tusk era, but did you have home recording setups before that, in the Buckingham/Nicks era, or in the Bay Area before that?

I did. When I was a late teenager and was in the band [Fritz] up in Northern California – that Stevie [Nicks] and I were both in, I was playing bass – I had an old commercial Sony 2-track. It had that sound-on-sound feature, where you could take one recording, say on the left channel, and then bounce it over to the right channel as you were recording something over it. I could begin to get a multitrack effect, one track at a time, which is pretty much the way that Les Paul [Tape Op #50] did it. That was his method and example that probably hit home with me. Then, a little bit later, probably about when I was 20 or 21, I acquired an Ampex AG-440 4-track, which obviously still had limitations. But hey, The Beatles cut Sgt. Pepper’s… on those, so it opened up the whole idea. It gave me much more flexibility. I was already into what I would call that “painting process” as early as that point, where I was putting things down all by myself, and doing the architecture around a song.

Did that influence the way you arrange guitars? I’ve interviewed Ken Caillat [Tape Op #96] before about how you put little filigrees and figures in; sometimes they are very simple parts to build a whole.

Right. Well, so much of my function in Fleetwood Mac was to take raw material and fashion it into a sound. I had the vision to do that, and I apparently had the tools to do that. Much of that was based around having a ground-up familiarity with a self-sufficiency, if you will; doing it myself and then bringing that into a more communal arena, for sure. So yeah, absolutely.

Did you have a home setup around the time of the self-titled Fleetwood Mac album?

When we first joined Fleetwood Mac, all of Stevie’s songs and my songs were already demoed out on my AG-440. That album only took a few months to do, and part of that was Keith Olsen [Tape Op #33] being in control of the engineering, as well as overseeing that things didn’t get too – shall we say? – self-indulgent. There was a lot at stake for them, because they were almost ready to be booted by Warner [Bros.] before we joined. They’d had so many non sequitur albums. The ability to make that album so quickly was largely due to the fact that all of Stevie’s and my material had been blocked out. What you hear on the record would be very close to what the demos were like, of course without John [McVie] and Mick [Fleetwood] as the rhythm section. I didn’t get a 24-track until a bit later, until there was a little bit more money coming in. Somewhere in the middle of the Rumours process is when I probably got one.

Right. That must have been a big step. A 24-track tape deck is nothing without a console, and then you need speakers and something to mix to.

I first got a 24-track and the machine at my house, [the one] that I did most of the work on my songs that ended up on Tusk. I would start these tracks as paintings, and then discover and find something which was a little bit more to the left. Then I’d bring them in for the band to add to. What’s funny is that I did not have a proper console at that time. I had enough channels to be able to play everything [back] at once, but it wasn’t a large thing. It was more or less something you’d take on the road. I didn’t get a proper console until maybe 1985 or ‘86, when I put one into my studio in my house up in Bel Air, and that’s the console I still have.

LINDSEY BUCKINGHAM ALBUM CHARTS

Lindsey Buckingham released his self titled new album September 17th and it's a great album if you haven't checked it out. How did the album do in it's first week on the Album charts around the world? Here's what I've found.

DEBUT POSITION	COUNTRY
#6	SCOTLAND
#8	UK (Top 40 Vinyl Albums Chart)
#25	UK
#37	GERMANY
#39	GERMANY (albums download chart)
#60	SWITZERLAND
#65	IRELAND
#99 debut #57 Week 2	BELGIUM (Flanders)
#173 debut #180 Week 2	BELGIUM (Wallonië)

UNITED STATES	VARIOUS ALBUM CHART	CHART EXPLANATION
#6	Tastemaker Albums Chart	Albums ranked based on "an influential panel of indie stores and small regional chains
#13	Top Album Sales Chart	A pure album sales chart.
#12	Top Current Album Sales Chart	The same chart as Top Album Sales, with catalog titles removed
#37	Top Rock Albums Chart	Most popular rock albums of the week, compiled by Nielsen Music. Based on multi-metric consumption (blending traditional album sales, track equivalent albums, and streaming equivalent albums)

PEAK POSITION ON iTUNES ALBUMS CHARTS

#7   - CANADA (itunes)

#9   - USA (itunes)

#10 - UK 9 (itunes)

#23 - AUSTRALIA (itunes)

#33 - GERMANY (itunes)

REVIEWS "LINDSEY BUCKINGHAM" May well make Fleetwood Mac think again.

Fleetwood Mac’s former guitarist goes his own way, but treads old ground

The Sydney Morning Herald

by Barry Divola

⭐⭐1/2

Sometimes the soap opera threatens to obscure the music. Case in point: Fleetwood Mac. The drugs, the affairs, the infighting, the walkouts and the reconciliations have become part of the band narrative, most recently in 2018 when, after increasing tensions in the group, Lindsey Buckingham was fired and replaced with Neil Finn and Mike Campbell for live shows. He’s taken his ball, gone home and made his first solo album in a decade.

Buckingham was always the weirdly shaped peg in the Mac machine while they helped create the ’70s US West Coast FM-rock universe. When he was given free rein on the band’s 1979 opus Tusk, the world discovered he was more enamoured with the left-field experimentation of Brian Wilson or Todd Rundgren: mercurial musicians and maverick producers with highly individual visions of how songs should sound.

This self-titled disc softly treads the same ground he has been covering for a while now – close-miked guitar played in his distinctive finger-picked style, lead vocals in his high, breathy register, layers of gossamer harmonies and beats that twitch and fidget. Case in point is first single I Don’t Mind, a sparkly wisp of a thing that rhymes willow with pillow and broken arrow with straight and narrow, while you’re left wondering how it might sound with Mick Fleetwood providing a big beat and Stevie Nicks cutting through with her white-winged dove vocals.

Remember, this is a man whose best-known solo hit, 1981’s Trouble, was a Vaseline-lensed soft-rock song he introduced with a repeated “two, a-three, a-four” count-in as if he was imitating Cookie Monster. Buckingham shoots for The Everly Brothers on the echo-laden Blind Love and constructs an aural Venn diagram where Paul Simon and Roy Orbison intersect on Time, but there’s a compressed and boxy aura around the production, while Swan Song threatens motion sickness with the strobe-like effect of fluttering Spanish guitars rubbing up against a beat with a case of the jitters.

The solo in On the Wrong Side proves he can still pull off the licks with ease, even if the song’s thin sound doesn’t match his virtuosity. Is it wrong to wish Buckingham would let it hang out again and build on the legacy of Go Your Own Way, a song that rocked and shimmered so majestically? Maybe that’s a place he no longer wishes to revisit, but these songs suggest yet another Mac reconciliation could be in order.

Lindsey Buckingham’s latest solo venture is a statement of intent

By Elizabeth Aubrey

Independent UK

September 16, 2016

Lindsey Buckingham – Lindsey Buckingham
⭐⭐⭐/5

It’s been a tumultuous few years for Lindsey Buckingham. After being fired from Fleetwood Mac in 2018, he had to undergo life-saving, open-heart surgery in 2019 and then the pandemic hit. Buckingham called it “a trifecta of events that were completely off the charts” – which is, perhaps, putting it mildly. Despite his troubles, Buckingham’s seventh studio album is far from a dour, downbeat affair. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.

Take early album track, “On The Wrong Side”. While it seems to address his acrimonious break-up with the band –“I’m outta pity,”he repeatedly croons – it’s an upbeat, stripped-back pop song which culminates in one of Buckingham’s signature, stomping electric guitar solos – and shows Fleetwood Mac just what they’re missing.

Drum machine led “Swan Song” is the album’s most inventive and surprising song, proving that the creator of “Tusk” has still got his knack for innovation and creating a daring pop hook.

While the weakest tracks here tend to veer into self-pity – the reflective, gentle and Searchers-like “Time” is a good example when Buckingham sings, “Some folks treat me mean”, these moments are usually short-lived. Buckingham is better when looking ahead, with purpose, as on the harmonious “Power Down”.

The self-title here feels like a statement of intent and with a strong solo offering like this, it may well make Fleetwood Mac think again.

Lindsey Buckingham’s latest album is a pop sensibility of precision

The ex-Fleetwood Mac star opines about his tumultuous relationship with former bandmates, but the music is poised and vibrant.

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney 

The Financial Times

⭐⭐⭐/5

Fleetwood Mac haven’t released new music since 2013. They have become a behemoth of the nostalgia circuit, trading lucratively on past glories. But although the songs have dried up, the quarrels continue. 

The latest outbreak of arguing in their long and disputatious history has been triggered by the arrival of the new solo album from Lindsey Buckingham, who was fired from the Mac’s ranks in 2018. He is still bristling at being expelled from the band that he helped turn into superstars in the 1970s. His feelings of hurt are chiefly directed at his former creative foil and ex-romantic partner, Stevie Nicks.

“Has the queen lost her sight?” he sings in “Swan Song”, one of Lindsey Buckingham’s 10 tracks. The apparent jibe at Nicks’s poor eyesight since childhood is compounded by verses evoking bitterness at being cast into limbo while the band toured in 2018 and 2019, which was rumoured beforehand to be a farewell. “Is it right to keep me waiting in the shadow of our swan song?” he choruses. His breathy voice belies a needling tone of self-pity. 

Buckingham blames Nicks for kicking him out of Fleetwood Mac. In recent interviews, the 71-year-old has compared her to Donald Trump and speculated that she was jealous about his starting a family in his late 40s while she remained childless. Nicks riposted with a statement denying that she had him fired and repudiating the bitter suggestion of ill-feeling at his becoming a father. 

There is a toxic quality to Buckingham’s resentment — especially in light of allegations that he behaved abusively towards Nicks when they were a couple, as claimed in Stephen Davis’s 2017 biography of Nicks, Gold Dust Woman. But whatever the shortcomings of its maker, and despite a troubled gestation, Lindsey Buckingham is not itself a poisonous experience. 

Recorded in 2018, the album’s release was delayed by the fallout from Buckingham’s Fleetwood Mac ousting and then a heart attack in 2019. Lyrics about the ups and downs in a relationship have acquired an unfortunate significance after he and his wife Kristen Messner separated earlier this year. Yet Buckingham’s gifts as a songwriter and performer cut through the surrounding noise.

The music was recorded at his home studio in Los Angeles, with Buckingham playing all the instruments. It has been crafted with customary attention to detail and ear for melody, a pop sensibility of precision, concision and escapism. The result is a set of four-minute songs that try to find the sweet spot between simplicity and complexity, and often succeed in doing so. 

Opening track “Scream” is a nocturnal erotic reverie set to a thrumming guitar rhythm, pounding drums and chanted choruses, a pocket-sized version of arena rock, at once curtailed and expansive. “On the Wrong Side” is based on a contrast between a tightly metronomic beat and exuberant synths and guitar solos. Layers of vocalisations and instrumentation are arranged with an acute sense of space and action. 

Buckingham’s smoothly hoarse voice glides through these often fast-paced songs at a cruise-control tempo. Although the recordings were made before he sustained vocal damage during open-heart surgery in 2019, they betray the effects of time on his singing. Exertion is rationed. Lyrics are a mixture of cliché (“The future’s looking bright”) and cynicism (“Business and murder, they go hand in hand”). With the mawkish exception of “Dancing”, the music is poised and vibrant. It keeps afloat amid the wreckage of Buckingham’s Fleetwood Mac career. 

LINDSEY BUCKINGHAM Takes Us Behind The Music

Lindsey Buckingham breaks down 10 of his best guitar riffs

The man who's always gone his own way takes us behind the music.

By Maureen Lee Lenker 

Entertainment Weekly

Lindsey Buckingham has had a tumultuous few years, from his firing from Fleetwood Mac to undergoing emergency open heart surgery to his wife's recent filing for divorce. But the veteran rocker's new solo album, out Friday, probes quieter moments, engaging with the relationship questions that have always made his work soar. And it sings with Buckingham's distinctive California pop-rock, fingerpicking style.

In honor of the album's release, Buckingham, widely considered one of the greatest guitarists of all time, goes back again to give us the stories behind his most memorable songs and epic guitar riffs.

Buckingham originally wrote this hard-rock song, atypical of Fleetwood Mac's style at the time, for his album with then-girlfriend and creative partner, Stevie Nicks. "We'd been in LA only for like a year and a half," he explains. "Things happened pretty fast. The album came out, and it didn't really connect and we were working material for a second album."

All of Buckingham and Nicks' songs that ended up on their first collaboration with Fleetwood Mac were demoed before they ever joined the band. "It made the process of cutting that first album much easier than it would've otherwise been, working with people we'd never worked with before," he notes.

Buckingham based "Afraid" off musical themes he'd heard in church music, singing in a boys' choir at the age of 10 or 11. "It was an exploration into two things. One, into the use of a guitar as a very orchestral thing with a triad of melody going on. And then, the unleashing of the solo at the end, which grew into epic proportions over the years on stage.... It also addressed the yin-yang of having confidence and having faith that you have something to offer in a somewhat tenuous environment that is the entertainment industry, And yet, there's always a fear underneath that."

REVIEW Lindsey Buckingham is an upbeat, frequently delightful album 8/10

Lindsey Buckingham tips his hat to ’60s pop on solo album

By Sam Richards

RIFF Magazine

8/10

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.