it's been a few months since the album's been released, this review just showed up:
https://www.theaquarian.com/2021/10/...ey-hank-erwin/
On The Record: Lindsey Buckingham, plus Bruce T. Carroll, Sarah McQuaid, Sue Foley, & Hank Erwin
Jeff Burger October 29, 2021 Columns, On The Record
Wait – did Lindsey Buckingham rejoin Fleetwood Mac? That may be your first thought upon hearing his excellent seventh solo album, which was originally scheduled for release in 2018 and is finally seeing the light of day.
Buckingham, of course, was unceremoniously fired in that year from the group he’d joined way back in 1975; and if his former bandmate and one-time lover Stevie Nicks has her way, he’ll apparently never be invited back. No matter. On his eponymous new album, Buckingham seems to be saying, “Who needs Fleetwood Mac? Not me.” And he may be right. The performances on Lindsey Buckingham sound quite like the tracks he created for such classic Mac LPs as Rumours, Tusk, and Mirage. The full band sound is here and so are the gorgeous vocal harmonies.
That achievement is particularly remarkable because album projects don’t get much more solo than Lindsey Buckingham, which the artist recorded in his home studio. Not only did he write all the songs aside from Michael Merchant’s “Time” (a minor hit for the Pozo-Seco singers in 1966); he apparently also played not just all the electric and acoustic guitars but with the help of overdubbing, every other instrument as well, including bass, percussion, and guitar and bass synthesizers. In addition, he provided drum programming and all the vocals – including the omnipresent harmony work. On top of that, he produced and engineered the record and mixed all but one of the songs. Just about the only thing he didn’t do was manufacture the discs and distribute them to retailers.
The past few years have not been easy ones for Buckingham, which may explain why a man who has had so much success looks so somber on the cover of this album. Besides being dumped from his group of more than four decades, he saw his marriage splinter, suffered a heart attack that almost killed him, and temporarily lost his voice because of a surgery.
You can hear evidence of those experiences in the lyrics to these songs – or at least a foreshadowing of them since they were reportedly all written prior to Buckingham’s hard times. On “I Don’t Mind,” for example, he sings that “where there’s joy there must be sorrow” and on “Santa Rosa,” he laments that “we built our home with heart and soul…now you want to leave it behind.” In “On the Wrong Side, meanwhile, he seems to allude to the discord with Fleetwood Mac, and throughout the album, he makes other observations about the passage of time and turmoil in relationships.
As any longtime fan knows, however, Buckingham has never been one to let romantic entanglements get in the way of exuberant melodies and ear-candy embellishments. Witness, for example, such early hits as “Go Your Own Way,” where he combines sunny and uplifting music with lyrics about a relationship falling apart, so it’s no surprise that Lindsey Buckingham delivers the same sort of upbeat pleasures. Informed by his consummate production, insistent rhythms, jangly guitars, and addictive melodies, the record grabs your attention with “Scream,” the opening track, and doesn’t let go until the final notes of the last cut, the atypically slow-paced “Dancing.”
Though Buckingham issued an album with Fleetwood Mac bandmate Christine McVie in 2017, this 37-minute CD is his first solo release in about a decade.
Let’s hope his next album doesn’t take nearly as long to arrive – and that it lives up to the high standard set by Lindsey Buckingham.