Friday, September 02, 2011

Lindsey Buckingham, "Seeds We Sow" hermetically-sealed, satisfyingly odd album

“Seeds We Sow” feels like a hermetically-sealed, satisfyingly odd album

Last time I wrote about Buckingham and “Gift Of Screws”, my self-professed ignorance/suspicion of a lot of Fleetwood Mac drew a fair bit of approbrium from his more dedicated fans. Nevertheless, I’ll risk it again, because “Seeds We Sow” is another really interesting record.

Even more than that last album, “Seeds We Sow” feels like a hermetically-sealed, satisfyingly odd album, an absolutely driven pursuit of a singular artistic vision. On one level, “In Our Own Time” is a pretty orthodox rock song, but Buckingham smartly flaunts his home studio solipsism and his ProTools rig rather than faking a virtual band with it. The results are fractured and disorienting, with some unearthly, obsessive-compulsive guitar textures.

While there are certainly some beautiful, rippling reveries like the title track and “Stars Are Crazy”, which hark back to “Under The Skin”, many of the songs on “Seeds We Sow” sound – to a relative neophyte, remember – like they’d work pretty well for Fleetwood Mac. It’s the treatments - so micro-managed and fastidious; hyper-sharp and dreamy at the same time – that see Buckingham really asserting his independence. I like it, if that’s OK with his proper fans…

John Mulvey
Uncut Magazine

Uncut also dedicated a full page to Lindsey's new album in their October, 2011 issue - HERE

"Stand Back" PNC Bank Arts Center - Holmdel, NJ

Video: September 1, 2011 - Opening Number...

Lindsey Buckingham "Sense and Pop Sensibility + 24 Hrs Interview & Seeds We Sow Review ★★★★


Review: Lindsey Buckingham "Seeds We Sow " ★★★✩✩

Seeds We Sow (Eagle Rock)
The Daily Mail - UK
Sept 2, 2011

AS FLEETWOOD Mac gear up for another reunion in 2012, guitarist Buckingham’s solo renaissance continues apace. In contrast to his arena-pleasing day job, this homespun album has a maverick charm. There is an Arabic feel to his fretwork on In Our Own Time. That’s The Way Love Goes is a surging rocker, and She Smiled Sweetly is a faithful cover of an obscure Stones gem.

Thursday, September 01, 2011

Photos: In Your Dreams Tour - Boston | Prior Lake

STEVIE NICKS
Prior Lake, MN (Mystic Lake Casino) August 24, 2011
Photos by: Adam's Travel Photography

STEVIE NICKS
Boston, MA (Bank of America Pavilion) August 29, 2011
Photos by: Mary Ouellette


Stevie Nicks | Fleetwood Mac - Billboard Chart Update with Sales

Billboard Top 200 Charts for the week ending August 28th, issue date September 10th:

Stevie's "In Your Dreams" jumps back onto the Top 200 Albums Chart this week at # 150 with 3,103 in sales for the week up from 2,532 last week (Total accumulated since release = 146,971.  In Your Dreams also moves higher on the Top 200 Current Albums Chart to # 132 from # 170 last week.

Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours" also re-enters the Top 200 at # 155 this week on 3,037 units sold vs 2,052 last week (Total accumulated since 1991 = 2,879,330).  Both albums taking a jump in sales could be as a result of her appearance on Good Morning America on Thursday August 26th, but because the sales week ended Sunday the 28th that leaves only 2 days to accumulate enough for a re-entry.  It's likely just a combination of GMA and the current tour.

On the Catalogue Chart Stevie's "Crystal Visions" moves up to # 124 from # 149 last week selling 1,470 units this week which is up slightly from last weeks 1,408.  Total accumulated for Crystal Visions = 382,516.  Fleetwood Mac move up to # 22 from # 65 last week with "Rumours".  "The Greatest Hits" moves up to # 90 from # 95 last week on sales of 1,707 down from 1,713 the previous week.  Total accumulated sales since 1991 in the US = 4,487,579.  Fleetwood Mac's other hits collection the double disc "The Very Best Of" moves down to # 188 from # 143 last week on sales of 1,228 vs 1,436 the previous week.  Total accumulated units sold for The Very Best Of = 1,436,657  

Top 200 Albums Chart:
# 150 (-) Stevie Nicks "In Your Dreams" Re-enters The Top 200 Albums Chart
# 155 (-) Fleetwood Mac "Rumours" Re-eners The Top 200 Albums Chart

Top 200 Current Albums Chart
# 132 (170) Stevie Nicks "In Your Dreams"

Top Rock Albums Chart:
# 40 (-) Stevie Nicks "In Your Dreams" Re-enters the Top Rock Albums Chart

Top 200 Catalogue Chart:
# 22 (65) Fleetwood Mac "Rumours"
# 90 (95) Fleetwood Mac "Greatest Hits"
# 124 (149) Stevie Nicks "Crystal Visions"
# 188 (143) Fleetwood Mac "The Very Best Of"

Kings of Leon, Fleetwood Mac, more: The iTunes Store's back to school sale -- where selected albums are sale priced at $7.99 engineers gains for a number of charting sets this week. Among the gainers: Kings of Leon's "Come Around Sundown" returns at No. 144 (up 52%), Nickelback's "Dark Horse" gallops 198-153 (up 9%), Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours" re-enters at No. 155 (up 48%).

(Previous week in parenthesis)

American Songwriter Magazine Q&A with Stevie Nicks

Gold Dust Woman: A Q&A With Stevie Nicks 

By Lynne Margolis
September 1, 2011


This is an extended version of the interview that appears in the September/October 2011 issue.

When Stevie Nicks started her musical and romantic relationship with Lindsey Buckingham, both were still in high school. By the time the romance ended, the folk-pop duo were in one of the world’s hottest bands, which also contained another splitting couple, John and Christine McVie, as well as drummer Mick Fleetwood, who also was in the throes of divorce. Their tangled, cocaine-addled lives—and Nicks’ affair with Fleetwood—would become fodder for 1977’s Rumours, one of the best-selling albums of all time. In the years since, Fleetwood Mac’s members would go their own ways, only to come together again periodically. But of all their solo careers, Nicks’ has been the most successful.

Her string of hits, with and without Fleetwood Mac, represents one of pop music’s most beloved canons: the list includes “Rhiannon,” “Landslide,” “Dreams” (a favorite topic), “Edge of Seventeen,” “Leather and Lace” (a duet with one-time lover Don Henley), “Stand Back” and, with Tom Petty, “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around.” Her gypsy/witchy-woman look—Victorian-inspired gowns, high-heeled boots, leather and lace, silk and satin, romantic hats over long, blonde hair, all shown off with frequent stage twirls—set a tone in the ‘70s from which she hasn’t wavered to this day. Her songwriting methods hadn’t changed much, either, till she called Dave Stewart and asked him if he’d like to produce her first solo album in 10 years. Released in May, In Your Dreams contains the first song collaborations she’s ever done with another writer while sitting in the same room, raw and open to anything.

Their output, it turns out, is remarkably strong. This time, she’s inspired by soldiers, angels, vampires, New Orleans, Edgar Allen Poe and, of course, romantic notions—past, present and future. (Both Buckingham and Fleetwood are on the album, along with guitarist Waddy Wachtel, with whom she’d also reportedly been linked at one time.) Sometime writing partner Mike Campbell also participated. In a wide-ranging conversation, Nicks discusses her unusual methodology.

You’ve written some of the most enduring songs in the pop-rock lexicon. I’m sure you’re very proud of that. How about if we start with Buckingham Nicks? “Frozen Love” was the biggest song that you two were known for as a team. Did you write that together?

No, I wrote it. Lindsey and I did not ever write a song together. The only—strangely enough—time I’ve ever written a song with anybody is Dave Stewart.

Wow!

I mean anybody in the same room. I do write with [Heartbreaker] Michael Campbell, but he sends me a CD that has three or four tracks on it, so he’s not sitting there. That’s very different, because if you don’t like it you can like wait three days and call and say, “You know, I just didn’t see anything/hear anything right now, but I’ll revisit it.” So you can kind of get out of it without hurting anybody’s feelings. That’s a problem with writing songs with people—you can really end up hurting peoples’ feelings, because if you don’t like it, you either get stuck with something you don’t like or you’re honest and you tell them you don’t like it, and, it takes a very special team to be able to write together without that ego thing happening. So Lindsey and I never wrote. He would leave guitars all over our little house and they’d all be tuned in different tunings and God knows what. He’d be gone, I’d write a song, I’d record it on a cassette, and then I’d put the cassette by the coffee pot and say, “Here’s a new song, you can produce it, but don’t change it.” Strict orders. “Don’t change it, don’t change the words, don’t change the melody. Just do your magic thing, but don’t change it.”

Did you ever overcome that feeling that once it was done, nobody could touch it?

No. Very superstitious.

How does that translate into your songwriting? When it’s done, it’s done?

It’s done—pretty much. Sometimes when I write a song, I’ll just write the first two verses and the chorus, and in my head I know I still have to write another verse, and maybe I’ll do that down the line a couple weeks later or maybe even a month or two later, but it’s very set in stone because—I always have a tape recorder going, and usually the first time, if I’m singing [sings] “Now there you go again, you say you want your freedom /who am I to keep you down?”—I’m not changing that. And I know it. The second it comes out of my mouth, I’m like “Oh, that was good.” So I have a little overhead lightbulb thing that goes off, so then I’m never going to go back and change that even though a good example is Don Henley—I was going out with Don Henley when I was writing “Dreams,” and it says [sings], “When the rain washes you clean, you’ll know.” Well, he didn’t like that [sings]“washes you” [accent on “es”], and he wanted me to go, “When the rain washes you clean” [accent on “wash”]. And I’m like, “No, I don’t like it.” [laughs] And he’s like, “Well, wash-ES doesn’t sound good,” and I’m like, “Well, wash-ES is the way it’s gonna be.” So then you start getting into that with somebody, and we’re talking an ego [of] a fantastic songwriter here. So I’m arguing with Don Henley over this, you know? That’s why I really stayed away from writing songs with other people.

To get the full 4 page interview Continue at American Songwriter

Win Stevie Nicks Tickets + Meet Her - Jiffy Lube Live Sept 3rd

Prize(s). The prize(s) that may be awarded to the eligible winner(s) are:
Two (2) Tickets for Stevie Nicks on September 3, 2011 at Jiffy Lube Live in Bristow, VA.
Two (2) Passes to meet Stevie Nicks on September 3, 2011 at Jiffy Lube Live in Bristow, VA.
Prize valued at $211. Prize provided by Live Nation. 1 Winner will be choosen.

(Read The Rules)
Contest closes September 2nd, 7pm

Some great tickets still available for Saturday's show - Choose your seats!
Livenation

DOWNLOAD: Lindsey Buckingham interview with Mike Ragogna


Lindsey was interviewed by Mike Ragogna. The printed version of his interview appeared on The Huffington Post on August 24, 2011

"Seeds We Sow: Chatting With Lindsey Buckingham" 

A Conversation with Lindsey Buckingham

Mike Ragogna: Lindsey, how are you?

Lindsey Buckingham: Good. How are you?

MR: I'm doing fine. It's an honor to speak to you, sir.

LB: Well, thank you. I appreciate that.

MR: I've been a fan since your first solo album, Law And Order. Of course, I loved the Fleetwood Mac material, but I've really enjoyed all of your solo material as well.

LB: Well, that's nice to hear. We do our best, what can I say?

MR: Lindsey, you're on your sixth solo album now, Seeds We Sow. No surprise, you produced, mixed, and performed virtually every note. Oh, and you wrote almost all the songs.

LB: Well, pretty much. There's a Rolling Stones cover at the end, "She Smiled Sweetly," and I co-wrote one of the songs, "Stars Are Crazy." My road band is also playing on one of the songs, but yes, for all intents and purposes, I did. I must have control issues, yes?

MR: (laughs) Nah, you're just über-creative. "Stars Are Crazy" is one of my favorite tracks on this new album. Who co-wrote that with you?

LB: A gal from San Jose named Lisa Dewey.

MR: Very nice. And which song is the band on?

LB: "That's The Way That Love Goes."

MR: I especially love that song's line, "That's the way love goes...it goes, it goes.

LB: Yes, exactly. (laughs)

MR: Lindsey, why is it that "it goes, it goes" like all the time? What is it about love and all that? Why can't folks just get that stuff straight?

LB: Well the thing is, I have gotten it straight finally -- it just took me a while. You know, all of those years in Fleetwood Mac were very exciting, and creatively satisfying much of the time -- not all of the time, but much of the time. Personally, they left a little to be desired. There was a lot of dysfunction within the band. I don't think that having two couples that had broken up and were working together without ever really having a chance to come to any closure... I don't think that was a very healthy situation, though it was certainly part of the whole package that people were interested in, and it kind of brought out the voyeur in everybody, but it wasn't always the most fun for us. I did see, during those decades, a lot of people I knew who were parents at that time and were not really there for their kids or their spouses and were doing what they thought they had to do to be rock 'n' rollers.

I wasn't going to be one of those guys, so I waited. I didn't jump into the family scene like that, and I was just lucky enough to meet someone relatively late who I fell in love with and who fell in love with me. I actually have three beautiful kids now. So, the loving is there, and it's evolving. It was just one of those lucky things for me. I feel blessed that I didn't jump in before I was ready, and I feel even more blessed that it was something that happened for me at a time when the odds of it ever happening were not that great. That's not to say that you don't write about things that are bothering you in the moment. I think one of the themes on the record is that you have to make a choice, and you have to have faith that things are going to sort of work out alright. The love is actually not gone -- it finally showed up -- that was the beauty.

MR: Nicely put, very happy for you. I want to hear what you have to say about "Illumination." My personal interpretation is that it's about coming out of the fog, you know?

LB: Well it is, it is. It's somehow evolving into a place where you can see things clearly. You can look at choices we make as individuals, if you look at the state of the world or the state of America right now. But that's just a word, it really comes down to the decisions we make and the choices we make as individuals that define who we are -- the sum total of those choices. Then, who we are as a people, or as a world, is the sum total of all of those put together. So, hopefully, we're poised for some new clarity fairly soon, I would hope.

MR: Let's get to your first single, "In Our Own Time." Again, it seems like it's about relationships in the way we've been talking about them. Wait, sidebar here... I feel like a lot of people now take for granted what you've contributed to popular music through your body of works, experimenting and playing. Your guitar work on this song, for example, harkens back to your live version of "Big Love," where this amazing speed meets emotion thing occurs. With "In Our Own Time," if you close your eyes and forget about the musicianship, you easily could dismiss it as a loop, especially since we're being bombarded with them on pop radio and everyone's using them live lately. I mean, you were playing parts in that style for years, but where's your cred, Lindsay? Makes me wanna holla.

LB: The thing that's been nice for me for years is that I've had this mainstream thing with Fleetwood Mac, and that sort of feeds the financial side of things. The solo work has never been anything more than looking at the more esoteric side of what I do -- the left side of the palette, the risk-taking side of things, and really the side of things that helps you to grow as an artist, take chances, and keep your idealism intact. You know, some of those things were certainly there years ago, and are still there, so it's nice to have both, I have to say.

MR: Okay, the song, "When She Comes Down." One of my favorite folk songs is "Wild Mountain Time," and I love how you have a little nod to that in the chorus.

LB: Yes, exactly.

MR: Obviously you have a love of folk, in addition to a love of all kinds of music.

LB: Well, I started playing very young, when my older brother started bringing home Elvis Presley records. Of course, when the initial wave of rock 'n' roll started to peter out, and we started to see all the little Fabians show up, that's when I got interested in folk music. That kind of kept me going for a while until The Beatles showed up, you know?

MR: And you had a friendship with the late John Stewart, one of my favorite singer-songwriters.

LB: Yes, I did. I loved The Kingston Trio, I was a big fan of John's as a solo artist.

MR: And you worked with him a on a couple albums. How did that come about?

LB: He actually sought me out because back in the late '70s, I had mentioned what a fan of his when I was in print a few times, so he sought me out and I worked on some of his records at that point. Yeah, we kept in touch over the years.

MR: I've been talking to a lot of jazz artists, and I've been asking them, "Do you miss Miles?" So, I guess it's fair to ask you, do you miss John?

LB: Well, sure I do. We had kind of lost track over the last ten or fifteen years. He moved back up to Northern California, and I'd only seen him a few times. But I miss the spirit of what he was about, absolutely.

MR: That's beautiful. Getting back to Seeds We Sow, the song, "One Take" seems to focus on a particularly bad boy.

LB: Well, again, it's just about people who have perhaps lost their perspective about how they're impacting the world because all they care about is feeding their own ego, or what they think they need. There's a kind of mass hypnosis that a certain faction of the country has fallen into -- certainly Wall Street. The corporate world, in general, has become so powerful, and to some degree, has displaced governmental power in a way that is unprecedented. Again, I think these are all good people who have just kind of lost their perspective on things a little bit. It's just a little slice of some people that we all might know somewhere.

MR: Now, this album is released on your own label, right?

LB: Yes.

MR: So, you are in the same boat as many of the kids that are coming out with new projects. How are you approaching this?

LB: Call me back in six or eight months, and I might have more perspective for you -- the album doesn't really come out until September. We did take it around... my deal had run out with Warner Bros. It's ironic, to some degree, that I'm putting it out myself. I'm excited about it, and I think it's a breath of fresh air. Even if you hearken back to years previous, with Warner Bros. in particular -- just taking Warner Bros. as an example of a large label -- there have been any number of wonderful people that I have a high regard for that have floated through that company over the years, from Mo Ostin on. Warner Bros., though, never really interfaced with me in a constructive way with the solo work, and I think the reason for that was because they kept thinking, "Well, let's get back to what's really important here," which to them was Fleetwood Mac, obviously. So, even at a time when the model of the large company was not broken, as it is today, and wasn't so dominated by the bottom line mentality that exists today, it was hard.

A friend of mine is over there now, and you think, "Well, this is a guy that I've known for close to twenty years," and you would have thought that he would have found a place for me over at the label. But he did not feel that he had the power to do that -- he started talking to me about the amount of money that he had to make every quarter, and I'm going, "Okay, whatever." Again, that's its own kind of mass hypnosis. It's not his fault, it's just the way things have gotten. If you backtrack to the fact that they never really got my solo work to begin with, and it's just that much more difficult with large labels or small labels today. I talked to (someone at) Glassnote, and he loved the album, but he's got these kids working on his staff -- kids by my standards -- and it wasn't that they didn't like the music, but they just didn't know. You know, there's a demographic consideration. It's symptomatic of what seems to be wrong with the business, and so Irving Azoff and I sat down and we said, "Screw it. Let's just put it out ourselves and see what happens." It will be exciting to see how that works.

MR: With the bigger labels, it's alleged good business sense to just sign new artists because you get them on the cheap, they don't have contracts for years with their royalty rates that have gone up, etc. While we're on that subject, what advice do you have for new artists these days?

LB: Oh boy, if I only knew. I don't have any particular insight into any marketing advice or strategies at all, other than in the same way there were a ton of independent labels in the '50s and early '60s, which all went away at some point, now you've got the Internet, so that does level the playing field a little bit, and it gives people the opportunity to be heard on their own terms. Because of that I would say, as a new artist, I guess it's one thing to have a clever marketing idea, but I think it's most important to find something you can call your own.

MR: I have one last question for you about one of the songs on the album, "End Of Time." I love the line, "When they finally come to bury us, maybe then we'll tell the truth."

LB: Yeah. (laughs)

MR: That's great. What growth have you seen from your first solo album to this album?

LB: Well, I think that you have to look at what my life was like back then--that was like '81. Probably, I never would have made a solo album at all, had there not been a certain political backlash to the making of the Tusk album. Now, I don't know if you know any of the story behind the Tusk album, but to me, that was in reaction to this ridiculous Michael Jacksonland we were in, in a post Rumours environment, and being poised to make Rumours 2, and me saying, "That's like the beginning of painting myself into an artistic corner."

There is this axiom in the business: "You run it into the ground and move on," and I was not interested in doing that. If you isolated my songs from Tusk as a first solo album -- this is a round about way of answering your question -- but what happened was, in the wake of Tusk not selling sixteen million albums, there was some kind of an edict that came down within the band that said, "Well, we're not going to do that anymore," and it kind of left me treading water a little bit as a producer and as a band member because there was this sense that we were going to backtrack into previously known territory, which was a very deliberate and artificial thing to do. So, I think that first solo album, Law And Order, was probably a bit of a reaction to all of that. I think if you look at it, it doesn't really have a center per se -- it's more of a variety show -- it's way more ironic and tongue-in-cheek in some ways, and it probably reflects to some degree the way that we were conducting our personal lives.

You can kind of see the evolution of moving more and more towards the center, and I think that's one of the things that I've learned over time -- you have to look for what's essential, and you have to look for the center. Of course, if you cut to my personal life now -- because I did see many of my friends who weren't there for their children during those decades, and I didn't want to be one of those, and I waited long enough to meet someone, fall in love, and have children at a relatively late age -- I think that was... maybe it was karmic. But it was also something which grounded my personal life, and it was such a gift that I could appreciate, unlike a lot of people who didn't seem to appreciate their families, or couldn't, at the time they were having them. I think that also reflects back on, not just this album, but the two I did back to back four or five years ago, Under The Skin and Gift Of Screws. This one seems to me to be the most overview of the range that I can do... it seems to bring everything that I'd ever tried to do as a solo artist into a focal point, but I think it's doing it from a real center more so than ever before, and that would be how I sort of track the growth, for sure.

MR: Well, if it matters, this is my favorite solo album from you. And just for the record with Tusk, I think it's in the same category as Joni Mitchell's The Hissing Of Summer Lawns, in that, back in the day, people didn't know what to do with the experimentation that went on with both of those albums. Prince and many others have publicly commented how Joni's album was their favorite, and lately, people have begun to say that Tusk is now their favorite Fleetwood Mac album.

LB: Well yeah, it's mine too. It's hard to be objective about the music, but it's my favorite for what it represented -- for the line in the sand that I drew, for the fact that it was, in many ways, the beginning of the way that I still try to think, in terms of prioritizing what's important, you know?

MR: Yeah, I do.

LB: The choices that I've made have not always afforded maximum profit, you know? Sometimes that's driven the band crazy, but that's the trade off. I'm in this place where I really am happy with who I am as an artist and as a person. That's the tricky thing about choices -- you don't always know that those choices are good in the moment. Sometimes, it takes the perspective of time when you're making choices that are not universally popular with your peers. (laughs) I don't know, I feel good about those choices, and I think if there was a trade off, it was the trade off that I've been happy to make.

MR: Lindsey, I so appreciate your time. It's an honor to talk with you because you are one of my favorite musicians, writers, you know, all that. (laughs)

LB: Oh, I appreciate it so much, man.

MR: All the best with the new album, and maybe six months from now we'll talk about it again?

LB: Love to, absolutely. Alright, take care.

Tracks:
1. Seeds We Sow
2. In Our Own Time
3. Illumination
4. That's The Way That Love Goes
5. Stars Are Crazy
6. When She Comes Down
7. Rock Away Blind
8. One Take
9. Gone To Far
10. End of Time
11. She Smiled Sweetly


The audio version of his interview with Lindsey is now available to download on 100.1 FM KRUU The Voice of Fairfield.  Interview is about 20 minutes long.

Check it out here