Kansas City Star (interview)

[MacMan]

LINDSEY BUCKINGHAM | Singer talks about Fleetwood Mac and new music.
Getting under his skin Lindsey Buckingham interviewed before coming to KC

Band work is like making movies, and his solo projects are like painting.

By TIMOTHY FINN
The Kansas City Star
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansas...t/16589560.htm

In 1977 rock critic Robert Christgau wondered what made Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours” album so vastly different from other “easy-listening rock” albums.

He answered his own question with a half-dozen other questions, including one that came closest to the answer: “Because this album is more consistent and eccentric than its blockbuster predecessor?”

“Rumours” redefined the word blockbuster. It stayed at No. 1 for 31 straight weeks; total sales now exceed 19 million copies. It also put Fleetwood Mac in a position no one was really prepared for.

“It got to be a little unsettling,” Lindsey Buckingham said. “ ‘Rumours’ was so wildly successful that it began to detach itself from the music itself and began to be more about the phenomenon of the success or the voyeurism we were bringing out in people.”

It also set Fleetwood Mac up for the usual fall: How do you top an insurmountable peak? For Buckingham, the answer was clear: You don’t aim to. And you don’t repeat yourself.

“I saw us poised on the brink of making ‘Rumours 2,’ which is the beginning of starting to do things for the wrong reasons,” he said. “I tried to steer the band into an area where we were doing bold new things.”

The next record, “Tusk,” was filled with many of the wild ideas and eccentricities swimming around in Buckingham’s brain, including the use of a college marching band in the title track.

But when it became evident that “Tusk” wouldn’t be the commercial typhoon that “Rumours” was, the rest of the band let Buckingham know he should probably keep those kinds of ideas to himself.

“The backlash wasn’t so much from the record company as it was from the band,” he said. “They basically told me, ‘We still want you to produce, but we don’t want you to do anything more like that.’ ”

Thus started a solo career that has been anything but prolific. “Under the Skin,” his fourth solo album since 1981 (and first since 1992), was released late last year. He talked recently about the difference between his music and the music he makes for the latest version of Fleetwood Mac. Talk about the band’s response to “Tusk,” which revealed a lot about where you were as a musician and a producer.

“Tusk” is my favorite of all the things we’ve done. In retrospect, I’d say it’s even Mick’s and probably Stevie’s (favorite), too. I don’t think the company quite knew what to think of it. I think the band got drawn into those ideas and the areas we hadn’t explored before.

How long after the record came out did you hear that the band wasn’t so much in line with you?

Probably within the first eight months or so — whenever we began to discuss the follow-up. Within eight months or so there was a clear sense that it was not going to perform commercially the same way as “Rumours,” and in some ways it was unrealistic to expect that it would. It was probably unrealistic to expect that anything would.

Because there was this sort of arbitrary limiting of what I could do, the things that represent the left side of my palate and ultimately the processes that were about me growing as an artist became available only to my solo work.

What’s the difference between writing for yourself and for Fleetwood Mac?

If want to make an analogy to two other artistic endeavors, you could say working with a band is like making movies. You take a scene, you shape it before you shoot it, you move away from what’s on the page a little bit, but you still have to have come in with a complete scene. It’s a more conscious, verbalized — and to some degree political — process.

Often when I work solo, it’s more like painting, where I’m one-on-one with the canvas and you’re just kind of slopping paint on. You don’t necessarily even have to have the song fully formed: The “being” that becomes the painting, so to speak, may lead you off in other directions. That’s the difference. You find ways to discover things that somehow are a little difficult to do in the context of making a Fleetwood Mac album.

On “Tusk,” however, it didn’t sound like you applied those processes to Christine McVie’s or Stevie Nicks’ songs as you did your own. So why the objection?

What happened is I’d apply that process — the painting process — as a beginning to my songs, then bring it into the studio and get the band involved. A lot of the colors or the applications of instruments or attitude of instruments that came into play during my songs — I didn’t do that so much on Stevie’s or Christine’s songs because I don’t think the politics even then dictated that they were comfortable with me going in and bastardizing one of their songs. With their songs, we took the style differences and departures that were fairly radical at time and were represented on my songs and were mindful to do things that hung together with their songs. So you’re right — the processes were really not the same.

You say your solo projects allow you to be more experimental. How do you know when an experiment has gone far enough?

I don’t know music in a formal sense. I don’t read music. Everything I do seems to be from the gut, from somewhere in the center of me. I guess given that it’s all instinctive, it’s pretty much the same thing: You experiment with something until you get a chemical reaction or a sense that you’re as close as you’ll get to what’s in your head.

Technology is radically different today from where it was when you made “Rumours” or “Tusk.” Is it necessarily better for you these days?

It’s whatever you make of it. For me, so much of what I do is in my head, and what you hear in your head isn’t necessarily impacted by changes in technology. It may change your philosophy about things from time to time. As with “Under the Skin,” I was more interested in looking at something — I won’t say anti-technology, but where technology wasn’t particularly relevant.

Songs like “Big Love” and “Go Insane” that I do onstage with just my voice and guitar, they started off as ensemble pieces. But somehow they made their way to being me and a single guitar, and I began to think about how they connect with the audience, which got me interested in paring things down. A lot of stuff on “Under the Skin” was done on a little … 16-track hard-drive unit while I was on the road with Fleetwood Mac. So it wasn’t too high-tech.

You wear several hats: singer, songwriter, guitarist, producer. Is one any more satisfying than the others?

The guitar playing came first. I started when I was about 7 … so I kind of feel like the guitar and I are joined at the hip. I don’t think of myself as a songwriter per se or a singer. So I guess I’m most fond of the production and the guitar playing.