Warner Bros. COO Speaks

[michelej1]

[Guy sounds supportive like they like Lindsey's stuff. I guess they really like the thought of making some money with FM in 2009-2010. Hey, give Lindsey a video!]

From Business World Week, September 19, 2008

http://www.bworldonline.com/Weekende...php?id=stayin3

BY GARY GRAFF, Billboard

Buckingham delivers unexpected Gift

DETROIT — With Gift of Screws, Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham has given a surprise present to his fans — and his record company.


"The record just showed up. We didn’t expect it at all," Warner Bros. Records COO Diarmuid Quinn says. "Lindsey wanted to get it out quickly. He’s got a window he has to deal with and we’re willing to do whatever he needs us to do for him because we think he’s great."

It is indeed a small window that Warner Bros. and Buckingham are dealing with for Gift of Screws. With a Fleetwood Mac tour and possibly some new recording looming in early 2009, the album came out Sept. 16, while Buckingham hit the road for six weeks of dates Sept. 7, in Saratoga, California.

A song-by-song interview will be used on Buckingham’s upgraded Web site and MySpace page and with "key online partners," including Borders.

"It means turning around quickly, getting the [single] and the album into the marketplace," Quinn says. "The overriding sentiment is that we’re here to support him in whatever he wants to do."

Buckingham acknowledges that the album is "a little more accessible and familiar" than some of his other solo releases, including 2005’s acoustic-oriented Under the Skin. Gift of Screws, in fact, has an interesting history that dates back to the beginning of the decade.

Buckingham was making a solo album with that title — including sessions with the Mac rhythm section of Mick Fleetwood and John McVie — in 2001 when Fleetwood Mac decided to reconvene for sessions that became 2003’s Say you Will album and the world tour that followed. Buckingham allowed the group to pilfer several of the songs intended for that album — with, he hastens to explain, no regrets on his part.

"It’s happened maybe five other times in the past that the machinery or the politics of Fleetwood Mac moved in, intervened and something was put on the shelf," says Buckingham, who joined the group with then-girlfriend Stevie Nicks in 1974, left in 1987 and rejoined for The Dance in 1997.

"So that’s been a pattern. It’s always seemed to me that’s the right thing to do. Gift of Screws as an album wasn’t really finished, so I was trying to do the right thing for the good of the whole."

Buckingham’s initial Gift of Screws recordings have been widely bootlegged and the current version includes several of those songs, among them the title track, "Right Place to Fade" and "Wait for You." Fleetwood and McVie still appear on the album, as do the musicians who accompanied Buckingham on his Under the Skin tour and appear on the Live at the Bass Performance Hall CD/DVD that was released earlier this year.

"I didn’t really go in there and plan to make a rocking album," says Buckingham, who produced all but two of the 10 songs. "For whatever reason, this seems to hearken back to earlier work, Fleetwood Mac in particular. I think that’s something the record company recognizes and feels good about."

"A big part of this is going to be reactive," Quinn says. "We hope ’Did you Miss Me’ sticks, and if the song takes hold, who knows what he’s going to want to do or have time to do." — Nielsen Entertainment News Wire