Buckingham's 'Skin' has lush, loopy touch

[MacMan]

Buckingham's 'Skin' has lush, loopy touch
By Allison Stewart
Special to the Tribune
http://metromix.chicagotribune.com/n...celebrity_heds

April 6 2007

Just think of Fleetwood Mac as being like the Mafia: Just when Lindsey Buckingham thought he was out, they keep pulling him back in.

Buckingham, who recently released his first solo album in 14 years, "Under the Skin," has long attempted to balance the conflicting duties of family life, a solo career and his sometime band.

"Years go by, you're trying to do your thing and not bother anybody, and there are agendas that exist that kind of pull you in and pull you out," he says. "These people are still people you've been through a lot with, and you're mindful of the needs of the whole." Which is a polite way of saying, What Fleetwood Mac wants, Fleetwood Mac usually gets.

Buckingham, 57, cobbled together much of "Under the Skin," his fourth solo album, during days off from the most recent Fleetwood Mac tour. A lush, mostly acoustic offering, it's dazzling and loopy and intricately constructed. Though it evokes recent works by oddball folkies such as Devendra Banhart, its real exemplar may be "Tusk," the Buckingham-driven Fleetwood Mac now-classic that was regarded as an adventurous failure when it was released in 1979.

"Everybody in the band really loves that album now...but at the time there was a backlash when it didn't sell 15 million copies," Buckingham recalls. "There was this edict that came down like, yeah, we still want you to produce, but we're not gonna do that anymore."

Buckingham spent the early '80s "creatively treading water," disillusioned by the pressure to come up with another hit, and the growing chaos in his band. After departing Fleetwood Mac in 1987, he married, had three children, and launched an interesting and fitful solo career recording "boutique albums for the few." He returned to the group for a 1997 tour and a subsequent studio disc, "Say You Will," contributing to the project several songs intended for his own album.

Why would Buckingham, with his immense wealth and respected solo career, want to subject himself to Fleetwood Mac's cage match of dueling agendas and egos?

"Because I saw light there," he says. "A lot of the issues that had been there before were gone. All that was left was the raw chemistry that had always been there and had always been such a great part of what we were. I saw it as a move toward healing, and as people moving toward being adults. Whatever I like to do as a solo artist, Fleetwood Mac is a great band."

After "Say You Will," Buckingham lobbied unsuccessfully for the band to return to the studio. "We got through the hurdle politically and creatively. We had the potential to pick up and start a second act on a credible and focused level, but the politics wouldn't allow it."

With co-frontwoman Christine McVie retired in England, a full reunion seems unlikely, though audiences may be more interested now than they've ever been. "Now that...other '70s singer-songwriters are having their legacies gentrified by a new generation and recording again, it's inevitable that the exemplar of that whole movement should consider recording too," says Michael Walker, author of the California classic rock history "Laurel Canyon."

"The results could be intriguing if they can lasso enough of the band's classic lineup."

Buckingham plans to release another solo album in the first quarter of next year. He had initially planned to record a conventional rock album, a commercial counterbalance to the idiosyncratic "Under the Skin," though that album's encouraging reception has made him reconsider. Another disc, and, possibly, another tour, will delay the next group album indefinitely. "If Fleetwood Mac is gonna come knocking, they'll knock for a while," Buckingham says cheerfully. "It's kind of a good feeling, to have those boundaries."

Lindsey Buckingham
Idiosyncratic Fleetwood Mac frontman on a solo tour.
When: 9 p.m. Monday
Where: House of Blues, 329 N. Dearborn St.
Price: $47.50-$50 (21+); 312-923-2000