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.”