Kathy McCabe,
National Music Writer, News Corp Australia Network
It really should be a Fleetwood Mac album. The debut duo album from Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie sounds like a Fleetwood Mac album but is missing one essential voice: Stevie Nicks.
Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie return with a new duet album
The unmistakeable groove of the Mac’s rhythm section of drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie is present and the distinctive voices of Buckingham and McVie blend as they always have in unique harmony.
The Buckingham and McVie record began as a tentative experiment to test the bonds — creative and personal — between the Mac’s guitarist and keyboardist as she rejoined the pop rock survivors after a 16-year absence.
McVie quit the Mac in 1998. Her father was ill, she had developed a fear of flying and could no longer live with the threat of Los Angeles’ earthquakes so returned to live in rural England.
Consequently she was musically out of shape when she reached out to Fleetwood to canvas a return to music and the band.
Before the reunited classic line-up headed out on the On With the Show tour in 2014, Buckingham and McVie convened at the Village Studios in LA where the Mac had made Tusk back in 1979.
“It didn’t really start off to be an album,” McVie says.
“Lindsey wanted to reconnect properly after my absence of so many years, so just prior to that long Fleetwood Mac tour we went into the studio for a week or so.
30 minutes with…
Peter Robinson
Thurs 1st June 2017
The Guardian
The guitarist talks about how Christine McVie – with whom he has recorded a duet album – rejoined the band
Lindsey Buckingham: ‘Christine told me she had some rough ideas … I, of course, took great liberties with them in my studio.’ Photograph: ACE/Rex/Shutterstock
Hello Lindsey. Where are you? I’m in London and it’s quite hot. I’m in Los Angeles and you’d think it would be hotter, but it’s actually quite cool.
What have you done so far today? I’ve got three kids who are all in the last couple of weeks of school so my wife and I got up, had coffee and breakfast, and got the kids off to school. I went out and took my morning walk up a hill and down to get the blood going, then had a shower, and immediately got on the phone to do interviews.
Now here we are. Here we are. A little bit later, I’m off to rehearsals. We’ve got a couple of Fleetwood Mac festival shows, but they’re interspersed with Christine and I doing a few dates – we’re starting off by doing 20 or so shows.
Let’s talk a bit about your new album with Christine [1] before I subtly manoeuvre the conversation on to demanding information about the new Fleetwood Mac album. A lot of it was done remotely, is that right? Well, only initially. It was done in stages – before Christine decided to rejoin Fleetwood Mac, Mick Fleetwood, John McVie and I had gone into the studio, just the three of us, to cut some of my songs. We put that material on the shelf. A year after that, Christine phoned up Mick and was nosing around about wanting to rejoin the band.
“Nosing around”? Yes! I don’t think she assumed we’d necessarily be OK with it — we had been doing quite well as a four-piece. I think she was trying to nose around to see if there was any openness to it before she got too assertive or specific about it. [2] I had to have a conversation with Christine and say: “Well, we’d love you to come back, but you can’t leave again.” She told me she’d been reconnecting with her creative muse and had some rough ideas she sent to me – I, of course, took great liberties with them in my studio. And she was interested in these songs I’d been working on, and Mick and John thought it would be good to bring her over early and cut tracks on some of these things. It was unbelievable. We only expected to do it for a couple of weeks but we stayed for a month. Nobody was saying it was a duet album – we didn’t care what it was!
So riddle-me-ree: given that this album has involvement from so many members of the band, how many songs could have been Fleetwood Mac songs? That’s sort of a question you can’t answer …
Have a go. Well, defining something being a Fleetwood Mac song is calling it a Fleetwood Mac song, you know? Nothing becomes Fleetwood Mac until that’s what you call it. The thing that defines this duet album as being a duet album is that it has elements of what I’ve learned over the last 15 years and brought to my own work, which is away from the palette of Fleetwood Mac. But there’s also a heart that exists by the symmetry of being only the two of us.
It’s a Monday after noon on the Sony Pictures Lot when I drive on to meet Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie as the two iconic singer/songwriters rehearse for their upcoming tour in celebration of Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie, their first album as the duo of Buckingham and McVie.
When I tell the guard who I am there to see, he replies, “Really? I love them both.” In hindsight, it is no surprise. Maybe more than any other band, Fleetwood Mac defined the marriage of pop and rock, crafting some of the most beloved and iconic songs of the rock era. Between the two of them, Buckingham and McVie wrote or played a part in “Go Your Own Way,” “Never Going Back Again,” “Over My Head” and the sublime “Songbird,” among countless more rock era standards.
Given the beauty, majesty and universality they have conveyed so many times before it’s not surprising that in rediscovering their musical connection after almost two decades apart the pair of Buckingham and McVie have crafted arguably the perfect album for 2017. While most of music understandably tries to make sense of and protest the current administration and the continued global atrocities happening on a daily basis, Buckingham and McVie have delivered an album of hope and optimism, one that brings a much-needed sweetness back to the world of music for a sublime 45 minutes of near perfect pop.
I was fortunate to speak with the two greats about the superb new album.
Steve Baltin: This is day six of rehearsals?
Lindsey Buckingham: Yes, we came in and basically did a lot of prep, which we thought was only gonna take a couple of days and someone had given us a lot of stuff that was not usable and we had to start over. Took most of the first week, so there wasn’t a lot of getting up and playing the first week.
Christine McVie: Once we did start playing, it happened quite quickly. These guys are good.
People often think of Fleetwood Mac as a band propelled to artistic eminence by interpersonal turmoil. Who could forget that Rumours, the band’s defining album, was the product of a period of libertine excess and relational meltdowns? Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks were on the rocks, Christine McVie and John McVie were divorcing and Mick Fleetwood’s civilian marriage was disintegrating, too. Long before bloggers began parsing insinuating lyrics from Taylor Swift and others who’ve passed through her orbit, there was perverse sport in scrutinizing the wistful, wounded or prickly lines in Fleetwood Mac songs, not to mention group members’ on-the-record comments and on-stage interactions, for evidence of unresolved conflict.
No such history hangs over the pairing of Buckingham and Christine McVie, he a famously exacting guitarist and producer, she a blues-schooled keyboardist, and each of them singers and songwriters responsible for significant chunks of their band’s discography. Over the decades they’ve ventured into a handful of direct collaborations, but they haven’t truly explored the potential of their partnership until now. Their album features most of the band’s classic lineup (notably, minus Nicks), but gets its identity from ideas generated within the closed circuit of the duo; all of the songs are credited to Buckingham, McVie or both. Continue reading First Listen: Lindsey Buckingham & Christine McVie | NPR→
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