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Buckingham Readies One Album,
Finishing Another
September 07, 2006, 6:05 PM ET
Jonathan Cohen, N.Y.
Billboard Magazine
Fleetwood Mac guitarist Lindsey Buckingham will release his first
solo album in 14 years next month. Due Oct. 3 via Reprise, "Under
the Skin" includes two tracks featuring the Fleetwood Mac rhythm
section of Mick Fleetwood and John McVie. The other eight tracks
find Buckingham generating all the rhythm simply via his own
percussive guitar playing.
"It's something I've been interested in for a long time: trying to
distill down the essence of that certain thing I do," the artist
tells Billboard.com. "I want to still have it sound like a record,
but very much in the spirit of someone sitting and playing guitar."
Buckingham wrote most of the material for "In This Skin" while on
the road with Fleetwood Mac in support of its 2003 comeback album,
"Say You Will," and looked to his own life for lyrical inspiration.
"It gets into a more bare-bones look at what's going on with me
after all this time," says Buckingham, who at 57 now has three young
children. "I've finally gotten married and am slowly shedding the
dysfunctional thing everyone in the band seemed to have
emotionally."
The guitarist is also well into work on another new record, which
will focus more on electric guitar-driven rock. Label execs
initially asked Buckingham to include some of this material on
"Under the Skin," but "I feel it has much more integrity by keeping
it held back in the way it is. It seemed to be more truthful in
terms of what the songs were saying and what I was trying to look
at."
Eight songs are complete for the second album, due sometime next
year, although Buckingham says he may re-record some of them with a
yet-to-be-chosen producer once he finishes a fall tour in support of
"Under This Skin." The outing, which is only his second solo trek
ever, kicks off Oct. 6 in Atlanta.
Buckingham will be backed on the road by Fleetwood Mac percussionist
Taku Hirano and guitarist Neal Haywood, plus guitarist/keyboardist
Brett Tuggle. The set list is still coming together, but Buckingham
speculates the show will be broken into three sections: "one with me
out there by myself, another with the band but you hold a line in
terms of the kind of material and the last section, where you'd rock
it."
As for the status of Fleetwood Mac, Buckingham says he and the other
band members are all up for future touring but unsure if any
recording is in the cards.
"It's important that we end up in a place where we are good, as a
group of people," he observes, "A place where all the politics are
left behind for what's really real. Despite what has gone on, this
is a group of people I'll know as well as anyone I'll ever know
except my family. I've been through more with them than I've ever
been through with my own family [laughs]. I'd love to see that
continue. It's a matter of everybody somehow moving toward the
center a little bit, and that means me too."
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