Geeking Out with Lindsey Buckingham

[redtulip]

Geeking Out with Lindsey Buckingham (by Alex Bleeker)

http://www.relix.com/features/2013/0...alex-bleeker?1

Good Q&A with Lindsey at the link. I didn't copy and paste the whole thing because it is pretty long. However, a few highlights:

AB: Well let’s start by talking about your new album_One Man Show_. So I see that it was recorded on one night, at one show, very simply, very raw. Did you record the entire tour with the intention of releasing this record or is this sort of off the cuff—you loved the show and thought you wanted to put it out there?

LB: No. We were two thirds of the way through the tour and I guess it started off because [there are] these guys who come out and they record shows on a nightly basis and somehow get CDs burned in time to put them out there as merchandise [by the end of the show].

AB: Kind of like bootlegs?

LB: [They] sell them just raw, off the console, and make [them in] a night. And I thought, “Well ok, that sounds ok,” but it sounded a little…I don’t know. Like it was missing maybe one control rod.

It sort of sparked the idea of that spirit, which is just to take stuff raw off the board and see if you have anything. But [you have] to look at it afterwards and have some level of appraising it; you know, making sure it’s something you’d want to put out there rather than just have some guys doing. And so we basically did the same thing—that was where the idea came from—we had my guy who was mixing [start] burn[ing] CDs every night, but we also put up a couple of mics in the halls, just to grab the audience…so it didn’t sound too hermetically sealed or too direct, so you could get some combination of what was coming off the PA and what was coming off the console.

That’s all we did. I ended up coming off the road, and I did one last leg, but this was all done during the time I took a break. I sat down, I went down to a studio and started putting on CDs and just started listening to them and [realized that] there really was nothing to be done. I shortened up spaces between breaks but you know beyond that there wasn’t really anything to do because there was nothing to mix, really nothing to do but get the timing between the songs right. That particular night [that we used for One Man Show ] just seemed to have a flow to it. I took it to the guy I use for mastering and gave it to him and said, “When you’re done, send it over to the appropriate party.” And that was it; it was so low-key.

And:

AB: Well, that’s happening. It’s interesting what you said about music—being shared, passed down and continued along—and this is sort of a two part question: What is your relationship to music on the internet and the idea of file sharing that’s happening? Particularly your relationship to the original cut of Gift of Screws that I know was made widely available through the internet, which was quite different from what I guess they call the bootleg version. I suppose that’s [also] pretty available, but how did you feel when that happened? Did you feel violated at all, like it wasn’t something that was ready to be heard or were you sort of ok with it?

LB: Well some of those things, they got out because at the time I wasn’t necessarily thinking where that material was going and CDs, when you have CDs sitting around, you never know what’s going to happen to them. It is a viral world out there, [and] you just can’t worry about it that much. I don’t know, how do I feel about it? I mean certainly you can say that everyone’s income has been diminished via the value of one’s catalog; how it can be exploited has been diminished. But that’s just one way to look at it.

Another way is as the model of the large company, which used to be our benefactor and our large supporter in the day when it had some level of accountability in the 70s and 80s, when someone like Mo Austin was running Warner Brothers. He was a man who had economy, he was a record man, he was a man who could make decisions for the good. Yes it was a corporation, yes it was a big company, but it was still—and it still does, to some degree, do the same thing, but you know the model of the large company has now become somehow far more broken, not only by what happened to the internet but by the fact that the umbrella of ownership under which all these companies fall has become so big that autonomy to make creative decisions for the artist has sort of [given way] to the decision making of the boardroom. To balance that out you sort of have a new frontier of musical landscape. It isn’t necessarily a frontier of potential profit in the same way that it used to be.

That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist out there. I find it hard for someone who got in under the wire and has no complaints about how well the music business has treated me at a financial level; I can only be sort of philosophical towards where it’s going.

And last but certainly not least:

AB: This one’s tangential—if you had to give up for the rest of your life oral sex or cheese, which would you choose?

LB: Cheese.