Interview with Salt Lake Magazine

michelej1 · #1 09-16-2008, 01:27 PM

Salt Lake Magazine, 9-15-08

http://www.saltlakemagazine.com/Blog...ingham-Speaks/

Lindsey Buckingham Speaks
By Dan Nailen

Long-time Fleetwood Mac singer/songwriter Lindsey Buckingham is one of the most electrifying guitarists around, and a mean tunesmith to boot. He's currently on tour in support of a new solo album, Gift of Screws, after which he will rejoin Fleetwood Mac for a new album and tour in 2009. He sat down for a phone press conference with reporters from across the country, including the ol' Salt Lake magazine. His tour stops at The Depot in Salt Lake City Monday at 7 p.m.; tickets are $41.50, available at all Smith's Tix outlets.

Question: 14 years passed between Out of the Cradle and Under the Skin, yet here comes Gift of Screws a mere two years after your last solo album. Has someone lit a fire under you? How would you explain this creative windfall?

Lindsey: There are a few reasons for that. Certainly after Out of the Cradle there were a number of times where there was an intention to put out a solo work. One of those was in ’97 when I basically had some material. It wasn’t finished, but it was in a maybe a half-finished state and I was working on it.

Then the band came in and said, “Well, we want to do a live show and tour around a live CD,” which was The Dance, the Fleetwood Mac live CD. So that stuff got shelved in ’97, and the touring and everything that followed took us into close to 2000. Then I picked it up again and I worked on it in my slow methodical way.

By the time I was pretty much finished with that, there was suddenly another call from the band saying, “We want to do a Fleetwood Mac studio album.” Those two are not the only times, but those are probably the most prime examples of what might be called interventions on solo work. The body of my material got folded over into the 2002 album that Fleetwood Mac did, Say You Will.

Cut to a little while later…I said to the band, “Look, I want to take about a three year period and I don’t want anyone knocking on my door. My intention is to try to get two albums out in a relatively short period of time for me, and to tour behind both of those albums. When I’m done we can talk about Fleetwood Mac again.”

It was the boundary I put around that period of time. In that time, I was able to get out Under the Skin and Gift of Screws. I am about two weeks away from beginning a tour for Gift of Screws.

There is one other reason is that in the last ten years I’ve gotten married for the first time, and I have three children. It just provides a whole other sense of stability and sense of self, that maybe I had been lacking before. I think that’s reflected in not only the work itself, but maybe in the clarity to follow through on getting it done.

Question: After all these years, do you have any clearer idea of where Lindsey Buckingham ends and Fleetwood Mac begins? How do you decide what to keep for yourself and what to present to the group?

Lindsey: There is an area in between. On the last Fleetwood Mac album, because all of that was intended to be solo work, there were some things that were probably pretty far to the left. The last time stuff was that far to the left and made it on a Fleetwood Mac album was probably Tusk.

In a way I was happy about that, but it’s not always easy. If we are in the process of making something with the group, I’m willing to give up anything that I have to offer.

I think more often than not what defines it as a Fleetwood Mac song is as much dictated by the politics of the band, and what they are receptive to. There are certainly things that seem like they are more suited for what I do on the side, but there’s certainly a lot of cross-over.

Question: Have you found that in recent years that you’ve discovered new things about your [guitar] technique, or about the instrument itself that have enhanced and broadened your music?

Lindsey: I think so. I don’t know if it’s really increased information about the instrument, so much as it is about the application. I’m not even sure that it’s so much about an increase in skill or in a level of technique, as it is about an increase in the theory about how to use what I do and what I have always done.

It’s very much tied to the art of recording. The art of playing has always been in service of the art--what we used to call good record-making or the art of production. That always comes first. Having said that, things evolve and take on a life of their own. Then it’s up to you to pick up the clues and to sort of reapply them.

A good example might be a song like "Big Love," which was an ensemble piece on a Fleetwood Mac album and somehow evolved into a single guitar piece and voice onstage. It became a real staple of my show.

One guitar doing the work of a whole track in such a powerful way made me want to make the solo album that I did two years ago, Under the Skin. The theory behind that was to have one or two guitars doing the work of a whole track.

When you put yourself in the position of trying to reposition your intention, or reposition the function of the guitar even, it forces you to broaden your technique. It forces you to think in new ways, in ways that force you to grow how you use your instrument.

I think that has applied to many aspects of the guitar. The way that I played lead has evolved over the years and gotten better and better. Certainly the way that I’ve managed to use guitars to orchestrate songs, in the service of production, has gotten more sophisticated.

In some ways I feel like I’m probably at the height of my creative game in that I don’t feel like I can look back and feel that I was at a higher level before. Whether or not you’re reaching people is another matter, but it does feel to me like I keep evolving and growing.

Question: Can pinpoint a time in your career where you took your greatest artistic leap?

Lindsey: It’s an interesting thing. There have been sort of fits and starts. Then I wouldn’t say pull backs, but reasons to pare down your impulses.

An example might before Stevie and I joined Fleetwood Mac and we made the Buckingham Nicks album. There certainly was an element of guitar that was more present in how it was being used, and how the finger style was being used to cover ground that is in some ways closer to the things I’m doing now.

When I joined Fleetwood Mac, there was a pre-existing sound. There was a certain amount of space left because Christine took up a certain amount of space with her keyboards, as did John with his bass. I was not only in a position of changing the guitar because the tone of what I was using didn’t fit, but I was also in a position of playing much, much less because I had to find the holes.

The holes were far fewer. It was a complete lesson in adaptation. You sort of find yourself having to adapt. There’s a certain amount of knowledge you gain from that.

There is certainly a moment that defined the way I still try to think. That was in the post-Rumors environment, when we were poised to follow everyone’s expectations and make Rumors II shall we say, and to fall back on the formulas that were spontaneously created during the process of Rumors.

I made the choice to make a complete left turn, to open up whole new areas of my process, to bring them back to the band, and to take more chances and present and album that was more challenging and confounded people’s expectations. That was the Tusk album.

I always look back on that album as being the one in which I kind of drew a line in the sand in terms of what was important and what wasn’t. It’s the one that I always look back on as the beginning of me trying to maintain a road in which I’m making choices for the reasons that I think are important.

Question: A bootleg copy of “Gift of Screws” found its way onto the Internet a couple of years ago. Does something like that hurt the album when it’s released or does it build up more interest?

Lindsey: It’s funny. There is a lot of new material that has been combined with some of those [bootlegged] songs. The songs that made it out on a bootleg were mainly songs that were older and had been waiting to find a home.

When I folded over the greater part of the material for what was intended to be a solo album into 2002 Fleetwood Mac’s Say You Will, there were a few stragglers. In the interim some of those did make their way out, but I’m not sure exactly how. People get CDs and they like to share. I think you have to look at the state of the business anyway, in which the model of the record company -- or at least the large record company -- seems to be in distress.

You could certainly make the case that in a few years maybe music will be free anyway, and that all the money will be made from touring and other aspects. I don’t really know. I’m not sure anyone knows.

In an environment where it’s not completely secure and people are sharing, I don’t see it as a big detriment partly because of that environment and partly because I’m not making these albums necessarily to try to burn up the charts. I’m making them because I have a love of the process.

I have a love of sharing with the people that have the ears and want to hear it live. It’s not worth putting too much energy into whether or not it’s going to hurt some aspect of the sales.

Question: You started your first album in 1979 and here it is 30 years later and you’re coming out with your fifth solo album. Do you consider yourself a perfectionist?

Lindsey: I am a perfectionist, sure. However, you have to put it in the context of someone who is--except for a period of time when I left in the late ‘80s just because I couldn’t stand the environment anymore—a member of Fleetwood Mac. You have to put that in the context of doing albums, and yet being responsive to the needs of the whole as a group.

My involvement with Fleetwood Mac has always been one of having a certain level of musical leadership with duties that go with it. I think that has been a more challenging road in terms of trying to keep on a particular solo track.

If you call yourself a member of the band, I guess you have to think of that first, or else you probably have no business being in the band. It’s just been a different thing. There is the aspect of taking time and wanting to get it right.

There is also the aspect of not being driven to prove anything other than to work on my process, and to grow as an artist and to not put myself on any particular treadmill. I think it all kind of contributes.

Question: Could you address the rumor about Sheryl Crow. Was she seriously considered to be a member of the group?

Lindsey: I can give you a capsule version of what happened, at least from my perspective. When Fleetwood Mac was out touring behind Say You Will in 2003, Christine McVie had already taken leave of the band. She’s kind of burned all her bridges and moved back to England.

On that tour in 2003, we pretty much divided the material right down the middle. I had half of the material to work with for myself. I had a great time because it gave me that much more room to be a “guy” on stage and to present that kind of energy. Stevie probably was not as comfortable with that divide, as she was with having a female counterpart to temper that energy.

When it came to contemplate working next year with Fleetwood Mac, Stevie and I think Mick had this idea that bringing someone in like Sheryl Crow would be an intriguing idea. I think Stevie put out the feelers and asked if she would be interested.

That’s about as far as it got. It was a hypothetical. When Sheryl was doing press for her album, she took it upon herself to announce to the world that she was joining Fleetwood Mac. She had made a choice to announce something which had not been even decided, which was in itself inappropriate.

I think that what happened out of that particular episode has all been good. Stevie and I have been talking a lot and have been having some really wonderful conversations about how to approach next year, and how to do it in a manner in which everybody’s mantra is about acknowledging the love that we have for each other and the road we’ve been down, and to try to keep any individual agendas to a minimum and get out there and rock and have a good time.

Question: With this new record being a more boisterous sound, do you see any particular challenges for taking that live, as opposed to the last record?

Lindsey: The challenge on the last one was to present a certain level of lightness and then still be able to fit in some of the staples and have it still rock at the end.

This record pretty much rocks from the get-go. Song for song, there is no real challenge to doing the material. We’ve only been rehearsing three weeks, and it’s great. It’s great fun to do the new stuff. The challenge is in how you make a set that doesn’t rock too much, that comes down and has a certain breathing point. We’re still trying to figures out what that arc is. It’s going to be a way more boisterous show. So I hope people are ready for that.

Question: Are we looking at the same touring band as the [Under the Skin] tour?

Lindsey: I started of with a different drummer on the last one--Taku Hirano, who had been a percussionist for Fleetwood Mac and other people. I ended up with Alfredo Reyes for the second half of the tour. When he showed up, it actually started to rock a little more and he is back for this. Other than that it’s the same lineup, yes.

Question: With so many solo and band albums, how are you going to narrow down the set list?

Lindsey: We’re having a little trouble. Obviously there are certain things you need to do because people expect that. I think the problem we’ve having right now is we’ve got a lot of rock-and-roll material that we’re having fun doing.

We haven’t quite found the formula yet for how to present that level of energy, and to still have it sort of breathe and rest and build. I was actually trying to write out a set list this morning, and I’m still a little confounded.

We need to make a stab at something and start running a set and see how it feels. We are trying to include some stuff that we’ve never done that’s from past solo albums and we’re just trying to shake it up as much as we can.

When you do that, it’s like a whole new movie. It’s like you’ve got to re-edit the movie. The tendency is to fall back on formulas that work. We’re starting from such a different place, given that the album is such a rock album by comparison. It’s actually a much harder set to put together.

There are all different ways of doing sets. You’ve got people like Springsteen who will play for four hours, which I’m not into doing necessarily. I think there’s a point where the audience starts to kind of shut down.

There are people like R.E.M. who will pull songs out of a hat every night and do a show that some nights has a great combo of songs. Other nights it probably doesn’t. But they do it anyway. If you think about it that way, whatever you do is going to work to a point. You just go out there and have fun. The audience will pick up on your energy hopefully.

Question: What are your fondest memories of taping the soundstage special here in Chicago?

Lindsey: That was an amazing experience because Joe Thomas offered it. It was a last minute thing. I was on the road with Fleetwood Mac. I had not really put together any kind of a format for presenting a body of solo work or a body of solo and Fleetwood Mac work in a solo context.

We had maybe four days of rehearsal to pull all of that together. Some of those things had already been worked out and were being done in the Fleetwood Mac show, but many of them were not. We had actually a lot of jamming to do in four days to pull that show together.

My fondest memory is that somehow we pulled it off. The other thing that I would think of was that I hadn’t really had an idea of a format musically in terms of a lineup of people.

I hadn’t really thought about it how I would present a solo show. That pared down thing, by necessity, became the template for all the shows that we did last year for Under the Skin. It continues to be the template for that.

Who knows what would have happened if we hadn’t had to work under a certain set of limitations - time and resources-wise? I might be doing something completely different now.

Question: On the title track, I’m hearing a little punk, a little rockabilly in there mixed in with these demonic laughs. Where did this song come from?

Lindsey: This is a song that’s been waiting to find a home for a little while. It’s one of those ones in a group of songs in which the greater part ended up on the 2002 album that Fleetwood Mac did. This was one of those ones that was a little too far out on the edge to go with, perhaps, Stevie’s songs. It’s a song that has Mick playing drums on it and John McVie is playing the bass. Mick and I share a love of animal energy and taking that potential in rock out and start to push the envelope.

As wonderful a drummer as Mick is, he will still really love the drum track on Louie, Louie, where you’re just out there going for it. You don’t even necessarily know what you’re doing.

That’s always been one of the legacies of rock-and-roll, and one of the great possibilities is spirit triumphing over skill. The song certainly has that elevated spirit. I don’t know where it came from. It was just a riff and we started doing it and just had an idea for the lyric. It came from an Emily Dickinson poem.

The meaning of it wasn’t really clear to me at first. The meaning of the chorus was a direct lift from this poem. We’re always looking for things to rip off, things that are public domain [laughs].

You can’t necessarily expect to achieve what you’re looking for or to find meaning in something just from what is given to you. You have to take those gifts and apply your own vision and love and effort.

She’s [Emily Dickinson] making this analogy about making perfume and how it’s not going to be just the sun making the flower grow. You’ve got to take the petals and press them and turn the screw basically. The Gift of Screws is you knowing what you want to get out of it, turning the screw, getting the oil from the petals and making it. That was something that I related to very much.

Beyond that I don’t know. Rob Cavallo co-produced that track and he didn’t like those screams. He thought it “sounds like you’ve got a hot foot.”

I just thought it was wild and demonic enough to be appropriate. So those things stayed. That’s probably one of Mick’s favorite drum tracks he’s ever played. He’s probably sad that that didn’t make it on the Fleetwood Mac album. I played the album for him the other day, and I think he’s wishing he could be playing that track all day.

Question: How has becoming a family man influenced your songwriting?

Lindsey: That’s kind of hard to say. It’s allowed me to let go of certain things that were still kind of lodged in there from years before. It’s allowed me to open my life back up and lead a broader life.

For years the way I got by was to focus on the music and otherwise lead a fairly monk-like existence, and there’s nothing wrong with that. That was sort of the residue from years of ambivalence about our experiences in Fleetwood Mac.

You find someone relatively late that you can share your life with and you have beautiful children. It reaffirms that things go in cycles. It also possibly reaffirmed that maybe my karma was pretty good and I had made some good choices, and that I should try to approach everything in a slightly more celebratory manner.

It provides a solid foundation to not only write slightly different kinds of songs, but also to renew your determination to keep growing, which I’ve always tried to do anyway. Sometimes your resolve runs a little thin.

I feel like I’m pretty much in the best creative point that I’ve ever been right now. That’s a nice place to be with all this other stuff going on. A more direct thing about newer songs is that some family members have actually been participants in that.

My son Will was walking around the studio going, “Great day, great day.” I said, “What is that?” He said, “I don’t know. I just made it up.” That became the chorus for the opening track on the new album.

My wife also wrote some lyrics on one of the songs and got involved in some of the structure of another one. It all starts to intertwine in a very positive way. It’s great. I feel very lucky.

Question: The new album seems to deal a lot with the passage of time and weathering life’s storms. How is your outlook different now than it was when you were starting out?

Lindsey: I didn’t think much about it when I was starting. The one thing that I could have called myself was a guitarist. I hadn’t really written very much. By the time Stevie and I moved to Los Angeles and started looking for a record deal, I hadn’t been writing for more than about a year.

None of that was something that had come to me early. I still thought of myself more as only a finger-style guitar player. I hadn’t really been playing lead for very long. It was all very new. It was all something I found myself kind of thrown into. I was intrigued as much by trying to make connections with people who could get us started, as I was with anything else.

I’ve learned an awful lot by being in the band Fleetwood Mac. It was certainly a lesson in adaptation for me, in the sense that I had to pare down my style quite often in order to fit in to what was pre-existing in the band.

I had to sort of rise to the occasion to become a producer for the band, which was its own interesting path. Being in an extremely commercially-successful bank like Fleetwood Mac exposes the double-edged sword of success. On the heels of Rumors we were poised to do something much like Rumors.

There are other choices you can make…having that kind of success gives you freedom, but you have to exercise that freedom. A lot of people don’t do that. They do follow the expectations of external forces and that can paint you into a corner stylistically.

It can sort of use you up and kind of give you a sense of losing touch with forward motion on your own terms. All of that got me to appreciate that you have to be your own person and make choices in terms of what you think’s important, even if it doesn’t pay off in the short term.

In the long term it probably will pay off, so all of that came over a period of time. Now I’m looking at what I’m doing now, and I can feel almost an entire way of approaching a career. I’m still not really a writer. I’m a stylist. I’m not really a singer per se. I’m a stylist, and you can get a long way on that. I’ve done it pretty much on my own terms.

It’s allowed me to get to a point where I feel like I’m just in a really quintessential place creatively. That’s great. It’s a wonderful place to be right now. It’s a much more enabled place to be than it was when I first started out. That isn’t something that everyone has the luxury of having. So I feel very happy to be there.

Question: In 2006, you collaborated with Little Big Town and did an episode of CMT’s Crossroads. How has seeing the influence of your music on the bands of today helped shape what you do?

Lindsey: That was really extraordinary. I thought that was such a good fit. I’m a little bit country and a lot more something else. They’re a little bit something and a lot more country.

There were a lot of reference points that were similar in terms women and men who have been in personal relationships, personalities--a lot of stuff that we did share. I don’t necessarily assume that they were influenced by me. It was just one of those things where we were able to come together and have it work really, really well.

I really don’t have much of a sense of how I or the band has influenced people in general. A generation’s come along and you don’t know who’s listening to what. You find yourself a little more isolated from that.

You just hope that what you’ve done has some exemplary quality to it, and that’s all you can ask for. If that’s the case, then you know you’re passing the right thing down to somebody else. I hope there’s been a little of that.

Question: Can you explain a little bit more about this process of craftsmanship in creating something musically that has worked for you?

Lindsey: I think that part of that comes from having a certain process of working. If you work in a band situation where you’re in the studio and everyone’s there all at once, I think that element tends to fall away slightly because everyone is adding something of their own simultaneously. The choices you make tend to be a little more political and a little more conscious.

I would make the analogy of shooting a scene from a movie where you’ve got a bunch of people and everyone’s talking about how to do the scene. It’s verbalized and it is political to a certain degree. The end result comes about and there’s a certain agreement on what it is. There may be an interest in tweaking this or adding this or making it a little more elaborate, but its initial embodiment tends to dictate a larger percentage of what it ends up being.

When I work on solo work, even if I’m working with a drummer like Mick, I tend to play a lot more instruments myself. When you’re working alone, you take a track and you’re by yourself. Instead of the movie-making, it tends to be a little more like painting. It tends to be more meditative and more subconscious.

If you’re sitting in front of a canvas and you’re slopping paint on the canvas, you may have an idea of what you wanted. There’s far more possibility that you’re going to find things that are more surprising--that are more esoteric, certainly--if your radar is up.

There’s probably a tendency to get detail-oriented in that process. There’s just a finer sense of the possibility of finding interest--in putting smaller pieces of a puzzle together and having them all fit when you’re working in that way.

When you work with three or four people in a room playing all at once, the end result tends to be more broad strokes. It’s particular to the process that I choose to use more often than not, and that does happen more on solo work for sure.

Question: Can you give some insight into your techniques of playing guitar on the album?

Lindsey: I don’t think it’s really any different than it’s been for a while. There are two very prevalent things about the guitar work on this particular group of songs. One is finger style, which is on a couple of those songs--two or three of them. That’s something that I’ve always done.

I keep trying to push the envelope on how to use that, but that just comes from the way I learned how to play. I never really took lessons. I started to play when I was very young. When my older brother brought home Heartbreak Hotel by Elvis, that was like the big moment for me.

I got a chord book and just kind of taught myself how to play and was listening to Scotty Moore, who used a pick. He used his fingers, too. Later on I got into folk music and some bluegrass banjo styles and--something you can hear pretty well--a little bit of classical.

When I joined Fleetwood Mac, they tried to get me to use a pick. My style was playing with fingers. The other thing that has been refined over the years is the way I play lead on the records especially.

It’s the same thing though…just with the fingers. It’s hard to really analyze it. I just play in a way that somewhat peculiar to me and certainly this album. You can go back to Under the Skin and you can find a lot of the finger style all over the album. You don’t find any lead guitar. That was more of a mellow album.

This is probably the most rock and roll album I’ve ever made. Consequently you get the intensity of that little style stepped up as well. It probably sounds like I’m getting ready to break a string here and there.

michelej1 · #2 09-16-2008, 01:34 PM

He worked the "cycles" back in and he hasn't been able to use that one in a while, so I bet that was spiritually uplifting for him.

I laugh about Wally pushing things up a notch and Lindsey saying he ended up with him. What he doesn't say is that Taku had to leave. I remember being at a show where he was begging Taku to stay and telling him they were not going to let Taku go, saying they were going to kidnap him or something.

Michele

strandinthewind · #3 09-16-2008, 01:40 PM

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