Tag Archives: Lindsey Buckingham (album)

“Applaud my genius, Bemoan my failings” | The RC Interview with Lindsey Buckingham

Record Collector Magazine
April 2022
Terry Staunton

Musicians with careers as long and as successful as Lindsey Buckingham’s tend to have a wealth of stories to tell, but few have involved quite so many plot twists. From relatively unassuming beginnings as a recording artist via a sun-kissed album made with his then-girlfriend Stevie Nicks, he was catapulted into the white heat of superstardom with Fleetwood Mac, as a creative linchpin of the makeover that brought them global acclaim. A solid, parallel solo career garnered more plaudits, if not the same sales, but there have been myriad pitfalls and problems along the way Oddly, despite the stratospheric success, he remains, in a sense, a cult artist, “I was determined to avoid becoming a caricature,” he tells Terry Staunton.

Lindsey Buckingham opens with an apology. While happy to be grilled about any and all aspects of his professional and private life, he’s concerned some events may be trickier to recall than others: “I want to say sorry in advance, in case I draw a blank on some of your questions. There may be memory lapses, especially during those years we weren’t behaving ourselves.”

The misbehavior he alludes to is a frequently referenced component in the story of Fleetwood Mac, a band whose appetite for frowned-upon substances has, in some quarters, defined them as much as any of their million-selling albums. The same can be said about the unraveling of in-house romantic entanglements that inform the contents of their most iconic work, the “musical soap opera”, Rumours. Released in early 1977, three months before Star Wars opened in US cinemas, more than one subsequent magazine article about its songs and the star-crossed lovers who made them has headlined May Divorce Be With You.

Quick-fix shorthand aside, however, Buckingham’s is a musical CV distinguished by daring, by taking risks, by refusing to zig and relishing a zag. He may have been the co-architect of the perceived pinnacle of soft rock (with worldwide sales north of 40 million), but he was also the driving force behind the often wilfully radio-unfriendly Tusk.

When the boundaries of the Fleetwood Mac blueprint were no long a workable (or welcome) fit for his spirit of musical adventure, he embarked on a parallel solo career that, while retaining many of the melodic hallmarks of the band, allowed him to scratch a relentless itch for pushing envelopes. His 2021 self-titled collection is a continuation of the sonic explorations of its six predecessors, of a hunger to remix the paints on what he refers to in this interview as his “artistic palette”.

It’s an album we should have heard when it was completed in 2018, were it not for a sequence of events no one saw coming on the last day of its recording. A request to extend his sabbatical from the group in which he’d served for a total of 43 years was met with an unceremonious sacking, and while still licking his wounds from that bolt-out-of-the-blue news, Buckinghamham was rushed to hospital to undergo triple-bypass surgery.

While recuperating and redrafting plans to take the new record to market, his private life also went into a tailspin with headlines that the man whose name was synonymous with hign-profile breakups in the rock biz, was getting a divorce from Kristen Messner, his photographer and interior designer wife of 21 years. The ending of that particular chapter has yet to be written, and the now 72-year-old Buckingham is candidly philosophical about what the future might hold.

Today he has a European tour (including his first-ever solo shows in the UK) to promote, while looking back at the highs and lows of a life in music that started with playing acid rock bass at school in the San Francisco suburb of Atherton. Continue reading “Applaud my genius, Bemoan my failings” | The RC Interview with Lindsey Buckingham

Lindsey Buckingham looks past Fleetwood Mac ‘fiasco’ with upcoming solo tour | San Francisco Chronicle

Aidin Vaziri
San Francisco Chronicle
April 1st, 2022

Lindsey Buckingham doesn’t have much reason to be optimistic.

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.

After being ousted from Fleetwood Mac, musician Lindsey Buckingham released a self-titled album in 2021.

“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 since it released the 40 million-selling album “Rumours” in 1977, 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. Continue reading Lindsey Buckingham looks past Fleetwood Mac ‘fiasco’ with upcoming solo tour | San Francisco Chronicle

Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham on Stevie Nicks: ‘She’s never been over me’ | The Times

The Times (UK)
Will Hodgkinson
September 17 2021

Last week the singer revealed he had been fired from the group by Nicks. The reason? She’s probably still in love with him, he tells Will Hodgkinson

Lindsey Buckingham: “It’s hard for me to know what Stevie’s mentality is towards me — but I know what mine is to her”CHANTAL ANDERSON/NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX/EYEVINE
Lindsey Buckingham: “It’s hard for me to know what Stevie’s mentality is towards me — but I know what mine is to her” CHANTAL ANDERSON/NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX/EYEVINE

The soap opera continues. Last week Lindsey Buckingham announced that he was fired in 2018 from Fleetwood Mac because Stevie Nicks made an ultimatum: it was either him or her. They chose her. It was, says the guitarist who joined the band in 1975 with Nicks, then his girlfriend, the result of long-simmering tensions. They reached boiling point after Nicks refused to delay a tour so Buckingham could promote his solo album, and because of a perceived slight during her speech at the MusiCares charity event in New York, when she felt he was smirking behind her back. Nicks responded by stating: “I did not have him fired, I did not ask for him to be fired, I did not demand he be fired. Frankly, I fired myself.”

Rather than fuel the he-said-she-said back and forth, I’m interested to know where all this antipathy came from in the first place. Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 masterpiece, Rumours, was dominated by songs about the pair’s romantic tussles. She wrote Dreams about him, he wrote Go Your Own Way, Second Hand News and Never Going Back Again about her, and since then they have dealt with cocaine addiction, alcohol abuse, solo careers, Nicks going through rehab, Buckingham getting married to the interior designer Kristen Messner, and countless worldwide tours. If they could survive all of that, why should it fall apart in 2018 over a tour delay and a snigger? Continue reading Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham on Stevie Nicks: ‘She’s never been over me’ | The Times

Lindsey Buckingham Drops Jubilating New Single ‘Scream’ | Rolling Stone

By
Sept 1, 2021
Rolling Stone

“It just seemed like a good place to start the album,” Buckingham says. “It’s very upbeat and very optimistic and very positive”

Lindsey Buckingham has dropped “Scream,” the opening track to his upcoming self-titled solo LP.

The single opens with instrumentation that builds as Buckingham’s voice enters in a cathartic rush. “I love you when you scream,” he sings on the chorus.

“Everything on the record is me, for better or worse,” Buckingham said. “Many of the songs on this album are about the work and discipline it takes in maintaining a long-term relationship. Some of them are more about the discipline and some of them are more about the perks. ‘Scream’ is about the perks. It felt very celebratory and it was also very, very simple and short. To the point. It didn’t evolve into some huge thing. It made its case and got the hell out.”

“It just seemed like a good place to start the album, somehow,” he added. “It’s very upbeat and very optimistic and very positive. It’s a celebration of an aspect of life.”

“Scream” follows the singles “I Don’t Mind” and “On the Wrong Side.” Lindsey Buckingham arrives on September 17th via Reprise. Buckingham will kick off his tour in support of the record on Wednesday, hitting the Pabst Theater in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The U.S. trek wraps up in Boulder, Colorado on December 20th.