Hi David, I'm Brian (the guy who posted the piano video). Someone told me there was a thread on here about the piano, so I read the comments. I had forgotten that I had an account on here because it's been several years since I've posted, but I was able to sign in, so here we are.
I glanced through the comments on the post you linked to and am trying to piece together the best that I can of that. Here's what I can tell you: when I was a kid (as in, literally from when I was 11-14 years old or so), I recorded and self-released a few (in retrospect, hilariously crappy) albums that represented the exact kind of musicianship you would expect from a little kid. I even created a Fleetwood Mac fan site in 1997 -- with handcrafted HTML, which was just as rudimentary as you would expect for a Tripod-hosted site in the early days of the internet -- and a lot of the "songs" I wrote as a little kid were inspired by Fleetwood Mac.
One of the songs for one of those albums I made as a kid, which came out when I was 14, used the melody for "The Ledge" as the basis for the song, which had different lyrics, etc. When I published the song through ASCAP (the performing rights society), as would be customary for a song that is not a cover but uses elements of another artist's work, the song was published at that time as a co-write, which included Lindsey as the creator of the melody. This is the same kind of thing that has happened in recent years when successful artists have been later named as co-writers on songs that they weren't involved in writing, because it was determined that a famous song written prior to the new work must have inspired/infringed on the original work. Hell, even one of the most famous songs of all time, "Stairway to Heaven," almost resulted in a co-writing credit for the band Spirit a few years ago.
Anyway, the fact that this song showed as if it was a jointly written song with Lindsey is what I assume started confusion, which is represented in some of those comments from that thread you shared. Remember, I was literally 14 years old at that time, and this was more than 22 years ago. Obviously, I had no relationship with Lindsey Buckingham or any member of Fleetwood Mac. Hell, I was just a freshman in high school. I was recording songs on a 4-track Tascam Portastudio in my parentsÂ’ basement. Ambitious? Yeah, I guess. Good? No.
I assume that some hilarious bastardization of that fact is what sparked claims that I wrote a bunch of songs with Lindsey, but that was not me writing or claiming that. I read that it says that this was for “Gift of Screws,” but that’s obviously someone being a troll on some site. I would have been something like 7 years old when he started recording that album. Obviously, that’s not only not true, but also nonsensical. I didn’t even meet Lindsey for the first time until I was 25.
I am now 36 years old, married, and a father, but alas, I still have not written a song with Lindsey Buckingham, nor do I ever expect to. I have gotten the chance to meet Lindsey on several occasions and have had (non alcoholic, by Lindsey’s choice) drinks on multiple occasions with him and often at least one member of his touring band (either Brett or Neale). These are pretty well documented experiences, but they do not make me a special person, just a lucky guy who was in the right place in the right time. I think there are a handful of us fans who have been in the right place at the right time enough to be a known entity to Lindsey. He knows me on a first name basis but we are not “friends.”
With Christine, I did genuinely have the opportunity to get to know her on a personal level. But when her piano up for sale, what did I have to do? Bid, just like everybody else. With that said, Chris is the only member of Fleetwood Mac whose personal cell number and email address I had. I readily and fairly frequently communicated with Chris and she seemed to genuinely enjoy the opportunity to connect. We even traded Christmas presents, etc., but do I believe I was somebody super special to Chris? No, of course not. But she was such a warm person that if you crossed paths with her on any kind of a regular basis and she felt that you were a genuine person, she took a liking to you. I was very lucky, nothing more than that. The same with Lindsey in recent years.
I donÂ’t know if this does anything to settle whatever beliefs or concerns you or anybody else might have about me, but it is what it is. Best wishes to you.
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