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Lindsey Buckingham is back in solo groove
e-mail print By Jon M. Gilbertson, Special to the Journal Sentinel
Sept. 15, 2011 6:51 p.m.

Associated Press
Lindsey Buckingham, made famous as a singer with Fleetwood Mac, performs solo Saturday at the Pabst Theater.
Lindsey Buckingham has had a notably brisk solo career of late: In the last five years, he has released three albums, including 2006's "Under the Skin," 2008's "Gift of Screws" and this year's "Seeds We Sow."

That productivity contrasts sharply with the 14 years that passed between "Out of the Cradle" and "Under the Skin," but Buckingham had obligations to a band.

"Fleetwood Mac would come in, so the intention of making a solo album was thwarted by the larger machine," Buckingham said in an interview before his appearance in Milwaukee on Saturday. "If you look at the time before 'Under the Skin,' there had been several times when solo projects got folded over or hijacked, depending on how nice you want to be about it."

Buckingham was inclined to be nice. After Fleetwood Mac invited him and singer Stevie Nicks to join in 1974, the two of them (who had worked together as Buckingham Nicks) turned the band into one of the most successful pop groups of all time.

With Buckingham serving as a songwriter, producer and arranger along with his duties as a singer and guitarist, Fleetwood Mac owned the latter half of the 1970s with such albums as 1977's "Rumours" and 1979's "Tusk."

There have been curses with the blessing, naturally: As noted, Mac reunions have often drawn Buckingham away from his solo career, and his work within the band has threatened to proscribe his work outside of it.

"When you have an album like 'Rumours,' the business model is to identify the brand, find the formula and repeat it until it's all used up," Buckingham said. "It's a good formula from a business point of view, but not from an artistic point of view. The smaller projects are where you take the risks, grow as an artist and follow your heart."

If "Seeds We Sow" is a smaller project, though, it has something big and embracing at its center. Buckingham produced the album himself, as he usually does, and wrote all the songs but one (a fine cover of the Rolling Stones' "She Smiled Sweetly"), but he also performed most of it on his own, at home, and released it on his own Mind Kit label when the usual industry connections proved unsatisfactory.

"We made the rounds with the few major labels that are left, but the model of the large record company is a bit in distress," he said. "It was hard to get the sense of anybody committing what we were comfortable with, so we just thought, 'Screw it, we'll put it out ourselves.' "

The album itself has a deliberately imperfect sound (Buckingham mentioned Arcade Fire's most recent album, "The Suburbs," as a kind of touchstone for "rough edges on a sonic level") that brings the intricacy of Buckingham's guitar playing and the gritty sweetness of his voice closer to the listener.

"It was very offhand, and I didn't have a lot of new material," Buckingham said. "I had some rough ideas in my head, and most of the stuff came about while I was recording. There was no agenda to make the album, nor was there any preconceived concept."

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IF YOU GO
Who: Lindsey Buckingham

When: 8:30 p.m. Saturday

Where: Pabst Theater, 144 E. Wells St.

Tickets: $45, available at the Pabst box office and www.pabsttheater.org