Bucking the Trend (Patriot-News article)

[Livia]

http://www.pennlive.com/entertainmen...420.xml&coll=1

Bucking the trend
Family has helped musician find balance in life
Thursday, March 29, 2007
BY KIRA L. SCHLECHTER
Of The Patriot-News
Lindsey Buckingham has spent 30-plus years finding musical fulfillment, both as a solo artist and the guitarist-songwriter for Fleetwood Mac. But it's only in the past several years he's found personal fulfillment as well.

The deep contentment he's found as husband and father has served to profoundly influence his work, particularly his latest solo effort, the beautifully offbeat "Under the Skin." That's most notable in the track "It Was You," a tribute to his wife, Kristen Messner, and three young children.

"Someone who could scare me a little bit was needed," Buckingham, 58, said of his long search for a soul mate in a phone interview from a Pittsburgh tour stop. "And that person happened to show up at exactly the right time -- had it been too much later, it probably would have been too late. And as the song acknowledges, she had a great deal to do with getting it to the next step."

Buckingham, who said "it's a pretty great time for me right now," brings his first solo tour in almost 14 years to a sold-out Whitaker Center in Harrisburg.

How it happenedBuckingham explained how he got to this point in his life, a process that really started in the midst of Fleetwood Mac tearing itself apart on a personal level -- he and singer Stevie Nicks breaking off their long relationship, bassist John McVie and keyboardist wife Christine breaking up their marriage, all the while making the greatest work of their careers, 1977's "Rumours."

"Being around Stevie, producing hits for her and in a sense helping her to move farther away, while never having gotten any distance or closure from our situation, wasn't the greatest," Buckingham said. "It tended to make you remote. And one of the things I think happened was that I tended to build up a fortress around myself."

Part two"After I left the band [in 1987], I was putting my energies almost solely into a creative thing because the rest of it wasn't being paid much attention to," he said. "I had a few different girlfriends, but nothing that was very constructive -- and I certainly would take responsibility for that being what it was as much as I would put it on someone," he added with a rueful laugh.

The happy endingMessner came around "by accident," Buckingham said.

"You meet someone who you connect with, and they also have built a fortress around themselves," he said. "And you recognize that in each other, and that becomes a point of common ground."

He never thought he'd be a father, because he loathed the idea of being a stereotypical rock-star parent.

"I grew up in a family in northern California where I have nothing but good memories," he said. "I had two older brothers and the camaraderie we had growing up was great, and my mom and dad were just great parents. I would never have done anything to dishonor that legacy."

But family life now has enabled him to find "a resonance between the external and the internal" parts of his life.

"I felt as though I had done the right things and that it was an incredible opportunity to jump in to all of this stuff," he said. "And then, of course, trying to find a new balance, where you can somehow prioritize that and still find the place for the music. There's still a little bit of a push-pull with that, considering I'm out here on the road, but beyond that, it's just been an incredible gift."

The solo urge"Under the Skin" is Buckingham's first solo album since 1992's "Out of the Cradle" and only the fourth of his career. They give him a vital opportunity to "keep that left side of the palette going," as he said.

"[It's] the tightrope you walk between being part of a mainstream group that wants to see you as one specific thing and doesn't want you to travel too far outside that box," he said. "You move away from that set of labels and nobody wants to know, even the record company -- it's like, what, another art record?"

But those so-called "art records" are critical, he said.

"The new things are what help you to grow and what nurture your imagination," he said. "After 'Tusk' [Fleetwood Mac's groundbreaking 1979 double album], which was a representation of something fairly radically different from 'Rumours,' there was a backlash that we weren't going to do that anymore. That was really the only reason I started making solo albums."

His albums are very much in the left-field spirit of "Tusk," and "Under the Skin" is no exception. It's a mainly acoustic effort, full of layers of his extraordinary finger-picking guitar technique and very little else, the instrument providing melody, harmony, and rhythm all at once.

On a rollBuckingham plans another solo album for the first part of next year.

"I have a bunch of material floating around in various states of completion," he said. "Someone was saying it would be a rock album because some of the tracks at the time were presented in that format. But the more I play what we're doing now, the more I feel like it should be somewhat of an extension of what I've started on 'Under the Skin.' I think to just jump to a rock album with drums and lead guitar just wouldn't feel quite right.

"But having said that, I don't know how far it goes," he said.

KIRA L. SCHLECHTER: 257-4763 or [email protected]

[BTFLCHLD]

wow great interview...thanks livia.

[tuigirl]

Arghhhh...nooooooo!! please don't turn your remaining stuff into UTSpart 2

[Peestie]

I don't care if it's UTS part 2 as long as he is doing it for artist reasons. If he's decided "this has got me critical aclaim I'll stick with it"... well... if he's thinking that then he isn't the real Lindsey Buckingham lol. If he wants to do it because he finds it fun and it satisfies his artist urges then I say go ahead!