Showing posts with label Buckingham McVie. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Buckingham McVie. Show all posts

Monday, June 19, 2017

CD Review Lindsey Buckingham Christine McVie "Red Sun lives in the same neighborhood as “Hold Me” does"

Review: Buckingham/McVie – Lindsey Buckingham . Christine McVie
By MARowe
Musictap.net

From the goofy, Animal House silliness that weaves in and out of the pop perfection of “Feel About You”, to the way that the opening number, “Sleeping Around the Corner” makes you smile when the band suddenly kicks in after a tortured vocal on the intro, Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie is almost everything that you could possibly want from a Fleetwood Mac album.

Which of course, it really isn’t. For a variety of reasons and speculation that you can find everywhere, Stevie Nicks sat this one out. Thankfully, in an odd parallel to her own beginnings, we get to stand back and discover her bandmates, Buckingham and McVie as a duo.

Full review at MusicTAP

CD Review Lindsey Buckingham, Christine McVie "A worthwhile exercise"

Lindsey Buckingham / Christine McVie
Drowned in Sound
by Joe Goggins
6/10

There’s a couple of possibilities in play when it comes to the title of this collaborative LP from Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie. One is that they’re especially paranoid about the possibility of falling foul of the Trade Descriptions Act, and feared that a simple Buckingham-McVie moniker might have had fans storming record shops in their droves and demanding refunds after discovering that this isn’t, in fact, some kind of creative partnership between the House of Windsor and Fleetwood Mac bassist John McVie, who by all accounts would rather be pursuing his love of sailing these days than touring the world in a famously tortured rock and roll band. The other line of reasoning, of course, is that comparisons with the highly-charged Buckingham-Nicks label would’ve been uncomfortable at best and an outright distraction at worst.

It’s exactly that line of thinking, though, that brings you to wonder what it is that Buckingham and McVie were looking to get out of this joint effort; after all, the former has always quietly served as his band’s musical director and the latter was, until recently, entirely off the radar, having effectively spent the best part of two decades as a recluse in the English countryside before finally rejoining Fleetwood Mac on the road. That said, the idea that their partnership was somehow less worthy of attention than that between Buckingham and Nicks is daft; after all, the last truly classic album that the band turned out, Tango in the Night, was built primarily around their songs, with McVie - who, of course, was a part of the setup before Buckingham - laying claim to the classics ‘Little Lies’ and ‘Everywhere’.

It’s worth mentioning that McVie’s ex-husband and Mick Fleetwood both chip in on this album, meaning it’s only a Nicks guest turn away from basically serving as the first new full-length from the group since 2003’s tepid Say You Will. Perhaps that’s the best prism through which to view it, especially given that the last recorded output we got from them as a whole was Extended Play in 2013, prior to McVie rejoining. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, absolutely rubbish. It also felt really regressive, a cynical jab at recapturing some idealised Fleetwood Mac sound, when of course that in its genuine form relies on a cornucopia of different ideas from different songwriters.

Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie comes quite close to it. Both sound pretty free; there’s plenty of experimentation, which is ultimately for both better and worse. ‘Feel About You’ is slight and would barely be there without the peculiar, Grease-esque backing vocals, and yet it’s an earworm. ‘In My World’ is the opposite, thickly layered and constantly shifting shape - it’s deliberate and considered, with the midsection recalling ‘Big Love’ with the vocal back-and-forth.

There’s inevitably missteps. ‘Too Far Gone’ goes all-out in its pursuit of disco and falls short on pretty much every front; the guitars have a weird, off-putting buzz to them, and both vocalists sound achingly uncomfortable, to the point that it’s astonishing that they listened back to it and were happy to put it on the record. Additionally, ‘On with the Show’ is a mid-tempo plodder that might conceivably have been intended for Fleetwood Mac, given that’s what their last world tour was called - it certainly wears the lethargy of Extended Play.

Flashes of vintage Mac remain, though, from both Buckingham and McVie. The latter takes the lead on what might be the standout, the gorgeous ‘Red Sun’, whilst ‘Lay Down for Free’ has Lindsey pulling that strange trick of sounding laid-back but emanating urgency on what should otherwise be a breezy, country-flecked rocker; it’s proof that all of his songwriting faculties are still intact. The fascinating thing is the overall sound of Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie and its production; it’s intriguingly low-key, especially given Buckingham’s appetite for lush textures in recent years. Accordingly, the album falls somewhere between curio and convincing; there’s enough here to hold the attention of the casual Mac fan, however fleetingly, but diehards should find a bit more to dig into in the brighter moments. A worthwhile exercise.

CD Review Lindsey Buckingham, Christine McVie


Otago Daily Times

Fleetwood Mac fans as well as casual passers-by will recognise these names. Yes, two-fifths of the rock colossus has headed to the studio and come up with a 10-song duo album that shows big choruses can almost (but not quite) cover up for occasional by-the-numbers clangers (Too Far Gone). 

Still, inviting drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie along for the ride has had its obvious benefits, allowing Buckingham to revel in his guitar technique, an assured hybrid of folk and country fingerstyle and distorted wig-out.

McVie brings the air and lightness of touch, her warm vocals a foil to Buckingham’s more gritty delivery (Red Sun and Lay Down For Free are classic Mac).

• Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie. Self-titled. Warner Music.
• Three stars (out of five)

Single download: Red Sun
For those who like: Elton John

— Shane Gilchrist

Lindsey Buckingham & Christine McVie on SiriusXM

SiriusXM’s Volume presented a Town Hall with Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie, hosted by Mark Goodman.   Buckingham and McVie, founding members of Fleetwood Mac, have a new album out together called, Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie.

During this SiriusXM Town Hall, Buckingham and McVie talk about the writing of their new album, Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie, taking a break from Fleetwood Mac, and the joys of working together.

Hear some of this Town Hall below.  The full hour-long SirusXM Volume Town Hall airs on Friday, June 16, at 7 PM ET on SiriusXM Volume channel 106.

BuckinghamMcVie.com




Monday, May 29, 2017

Christine McVie reveals why she returned to the spotlight with new duet album

FLEETWOOD Mac star Christine McVie reveals why she returned to the spotlight with her band... and a new duet album.

By CLAIR WOODWARD
Express


The new album from Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie feels like a big, warm hug.

The great melodies, intimate harmonies and terrific arrangements are instantly recognisable as coming from two of the band’s songwriters yet they’re new and intriguing enough to make it more than just another side project from an iconic group.

And for Christine, 73 – the understated genius behind the keyboards in Fleetwood Mac and writer of some of their most recognisable songs (Don’t Stop, Little Lies, Say You Love Me, Hold Me and Everywhere) – the sensation of reconnecting with old friends was the inspiration behind the new collaboration.

She officially retired from the band in 1998, after stepping away from touring a few years earlier, and it was her return to it for the 2015 reunion tour that sparked the collaboration with Lindsey.

“We’ve always had a particular musical relationship since he first joined the band – it was immediate,” Christine explains in her warm, honeyed tone.

“The whole band was just chemistry abounding but Lindsey and I, me being the piano player and him the guitar player, understand each other musically without saying anything.

“We’ve always worked well together over the years but never thought about doing an album together until recently and now we wonder why we didn’t think about doing it before.

“The moment I knew I was going back into the band I flew over to Santa Monica to start rehearsals but, before that, I’d sent Lindsey a few demos of stuff I’d recorded and he went into his studio to arrange them. He played them back to me and I said, ‘These sound really great.’ So we decided to go and record them properly. (Fittingly, fellow Mac members Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, on drums and bass, also perform on the album.)

“After we finished the world tour, Lindsey got in touch and said, ‘What are we going to do with these songs, they’re too good to just shelve?’ So we decided to go ahead with releasing a duet album.”

Christine’s return to Fleetwood Mac and her new burst of creativity comes at a time when many people thought that, after several years away from the hurly-burly of rock star life, she would never be seen on stage again.

In the intervening years she moved from California where she had lived for the best part of 30 years (she grew up in Birmingham and moved to London after attending art college), and bought a beautiful country home in the village of Wickhambreaux, Kent, which she spent several years restoring.

“I felt very at home in California but the place is prone to earthquakes and the one in 1994 scared the life out of me. For months afterwards I felt that every time I sat down I should have put on a seatbelt. It was really bad and I thought, ‘I’m going to get a house in England.’ I got to a point where I’d been in a band for 40 years and wanted to get back to real life.”

Yet being a lady of leisure eventually proved to be not enough for Christine.

“I started to say, ‘OK, now what?’ I had my two dogs there, they were my life. My marriage (to keyboardist Eddy Quintela) fell through, so I was living on my own and felt isolated. Most of my friends were in London or Los Angeles and worked nine-to-five for a living.

“I did have some friends living with me for a while but, eventually, I reached a point where it was time to start changing things.”

The catalyst for this change was Christine’s need to overcome her fear of flying and the intervention of Mick Fleetwood.

“I had a horrible terror that the next plane I got on would crash,” she remembers.

“So I had therapy to get over that, and other issues I’d developed through isolation, and sorted myself out. My therapist and I discussed the idea of me writing songs again and trying to reach out to the rest of the band as well.

“The therapist asked where I wanted most to fly if I could and I said Maui (one of the Hawaiian islands), as Mick lives there and I have a lot of friends there. So I just bought the ticket without knowing if I’d actually go. I’d always stayed in touch with Mick and soon after I bought the ticket he said he was coming to London, so we met up and I flew back to Maui with him. I didn’t even notice the wheels leave the ground. Since then, it’s been great. I’ve even flown in Africa in one of those prop jobs.”

While with Mick in Maui, he persuaded her to get on stage with his local band, gradually coaxing her back into the idea of returning to her musical career.

“Steven Tyler, from Aerosmith, was there. We belted out a few songs and I just thought, ‘This is good...’”

Christine admits that it was performing live that sustained her through her final years before she left Fleetwood Mac.

“When I first left, I didn’t miss it as I was tired of the travelling. The gigs were the only thing that really sustained me.”

And after her long break, being back with her bandmates has given her a new lease of life.

The closing track on the Lindsey Buckingham/ Christine McVie album is called Carnival Begin, written by Christine and with its lyrics of “I want it all... a new merry-go-round” it is clear that she has a strong appetite for change. Fleetwood Mac’s famously colourful previous life, where sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll made for a potent combination, is now a thing of the past and they are enjoying better personal relationships and new respect from audiences.

“Underlying the band now is a great sense of affection,” reflects Christine.

“We bind together my style, Lindsey’s style and Stevie’s (Nicks) style as songwriters, and it’s a democratic band in that we make sure everyone has the same amount of songs to sing both onstage and on record, although I have to say, it’s Lindsey that really directs the band.”

Next month, Christine and Lindsey are touring the States with the new album and she is looking forward to it after Fleetwood Mac’s triumphant world tour in 2015.

“We had such a great range of ages in the audience, from people who bought our albums the first time around to their children and grandchildren.

“I think we’ve become a hip band to the younger generation. After being seen as middle-of-the-road, we are now fashionable again.”

Christine is now living in London and when she gets back from touring in America she will decorate her new house, which is currently “an empty shell filled with cardboard boxes”.

Who looks after her beloved dogs when she’s away, I ask?

“They passed last year. They were very obliging,” she laughs.

“My other house was for sale. They were 16 and had had a good life. It was sad but things came together at the right time. Everything is for the good in the end.”

The single In My World is out now; the album Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie is released on June 9 on Rhino Records.


THE MAKING OF BUCKINGHAM MCVIE





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Tuesday, April 11, 2017

Buckingham McVie Tour Dates Announced - New Album Out June 9th. Pre-Order Now



Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie have joined together to record their first-ever album as a duo. Simply titled LINDSEY BUCKINGHAM/CHRISTINE McVIE, the 10-song album will be released June 9th, followed by a run of special U.S. concerts beginning June 21st. The first single “In My World” will be available on all digital and streaming services this Friday, April 14th.

Visit BuckinghamMcVie.com to pre-order the album and see a full list of dates and on sale details.

BuckinghamMcVie.com

Tour Dates

06.21 - Atlanta, GA - Chastain Park Amphitheater
06.23 - Nashville, TN - Ascend Amphitheater
06.24 - Raleigh, NC - Red Hat Amphitheater
06.26 - Vienna, VA - Wolf Trap Foundation
06.28 - Boston, MA - Blue Hills Bank Pavilion
06.30 - Philadelphia, PA - The Mann
07.02 - Detroit, MI - Fox Theatre
07.03 - Chicago, IL - Huntington Bank Pavilion
07.05 - Toronto, ON - Budweiser Stage
07.19 - Woodinville, WA - Chateau Ste Michelle Winery
07.21 - Murphys, CA - Ironstone Amphitheatre
07.22 - Las Vegas, NV - Park Theater at Monte Carlos
07.25 - Phoenix, AZ - Comerica Theatre
07.27 - Denver, CO - Paramount Theatre

More dates to follow!

Tickets go on-sale to the general public on April 21st and 22nd. Pre-sale tickets go on-sale prior to those dates. Check Ticketmaster


Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie Announce Joint Boston Concert



Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie Announce Joint Boston Concert

Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie are ready to take their new Buckingham/McVie record on tour. The duo, two parts of Fleetwood Mac’s most popular lineup, will hit Boston’s Blue Hills Bank Pavilion Wednesday, June 28th.

No word yet on whether or not other members of Fleetwood Mac will join the pair onstage. Tickets go on sale Friday, April 14th at 10:00 AM.

WZLX

(the information and link have been removed from the site. Someone likely jumped the gun and posted a little too early so an official announcement will likely be coming soon.)



Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham And Christine McVie Announce Joint Concert

Fleetwood Mac members Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie have announced their first duel concert.

The duo, who have been recording an album together, will play Chateau Ste. Michelle Winery in Woodinville, WA., on July 19. Tickets start at $59 for lawn seats.

Buckingham and McVie began writing songs for a new Fleetwood Mac record three years ago, but Stevie Nicks‘ resistance to recording new music led the pair to record the songs on their own. Buckingham McVie is set to drop later this summer.

Fleetwood Mac drummer Mick Fleetwood opened up to Uncut about his band mates’ side project. “This relationship is a real expression of a musical powerhouse that’s come to the fore, and we’re all happy about that,” he said. “It’s really cool. I think they’ll be walking down some red carpets with this one.”

Ticketmaster




Friday, January 13, 2017

Buckingham McVie Duet Album Tentatively Scheduled For May Release

Fleetwood Mac's Christine McVie and Lindsey Buckingham talk about making their first duet album
By Randall Roberts
LATimes


Longtime devotees of the rock band Fleetwood Mac might be forgiven for letting out a gleeful yelp when registering the news that singer-keyboardist Christine McVie shared with The Times in December while sitting next to her band mate -- guitarist, singer and producer Lindsey Buckingham.

“I've been sending Lindsey demos in their very raw form,” she says, sitting in the Village Studio’s storied Studio D in West Los Angeles, “and he's been doing his Lindsey magic on them, which I love.”

The product of that magic is tentatively scheduled to come out in May, and the two are at the Village to work on vocals. Working with them are two familiar names: Mick Fleetwood, whose towering drum kit is in the next room, and bassist John McVie.

The album coming out of these sessions, however, won’t bear the Fleetwood Mac imprimatur.

Rather, the release with the working title “Buckingham McVie” will arrive as the first full-length collaboration between the pair.

For hard-core fans, it’s not news that, save band mate Stevie Nicks, Fleetwood Mac’s members have been holed up at the Village. At various intervals over the past few years, the band has acknowledged working on an unspecified project thought to be a new Fleetwood Mac album. 

In fact, during a studio visit in 2014, The Times’ Randy Lewis sat down with Christine McVie and Buckingham to discuss her return to touring after 16 years away from the band.  

“I thought, I'm really missing out on something — something that's mine, that I’ve just given up,” she said to Lewis. “I'm not paying respect to my own gift."

Nearly three years later, sharing a couch in the same suite where decades earlier Fleetwood Mac recorded its epic album “Tusk,” Buckingham says that after her return, he and McVie generated an entire album’s worth of material during the sessions.

“We got in here, and it made sense to me with what she had given me and what I done with it. But we still didn't know how it was going to play out in the studio,” Buckingham says. 

He quickly realized that he’d had a pent-up enthusiasm for this kind of collaboration. “I loved doing it, because it's something that I haven't had a chance to do for Stevie as much as I did in the past,” he says, stressing that he continues to compose for solo projects.

“Those are a little more esoteric and off to the side,” he says, “but that's not the same as doing it for somebody else.”

McVie says she reconnected with Mick Fleetwood prior to joining the 2014 Fleetwood Mac “On With the Show” tour. She’d been living a solitary life in rural England when the drummer traveled to London in order to escort her to Hawaii, the destination she chose to help her overcome her fear of flying.

“I'd been virtually doing nothing in the country in 16 years of being a retired lady. Being busy walking my dogs — actually not doing anything very constructive,” she says. “I made one little solo album in my garage.” (2004’s “In the Meantime.”)

Buckingham remembers Fleetwood calling him soon thereafter. “He said, Christine's been over here and, you know, she would like to maybe rejoin the band." For Buckingham, it was a no-brainer.

McVie lets out a big laugh. “It’s unprecedented!”

“Yeah, but a lot of things about Fleetwood Mac are unprecedented,” says Buckingham. “I left for a long time and you guys got two guitar players and went ahead and did that for a while. Then I came back.”

“Weird times,” McVie says.

“Yeah,” Buckingham agrees. “I mean it's a band like no other.”

McVie, who is best known for writing and singing Mac gems including “Don’t Stop,” “Over My Head” and “Think About Me,” acknowledges that, early on in the Buckingham-McVie project, she doubted her ability to reconnect with her muse.

“I suppose I wondered if I believed in myself,” she says. “But I was like, 'Go for it, Chris. Go for it.' And, you know, a better thing's never happened to me. I've reconnected with the band and found a fantastic person to write with.” 

Looking at Buckingham, she adds, “We've always written well together, Lindsey and I, and this has just spiraled into something really amazing that we've done between us.”

For his part, Buckingham’s initial songwriting contributions were the product of sessions with Fleetwood and John McVie, which Buckingham invited Christine McVie to augment. 

“It was just pieces with no wording,” she says. “ so I put melody and lyrics on some of his material.”

“That was a first,” says Buckingham. “She would write lyrics and maybe paraphrase the melody — and come up with something far better than what I would have done if I'd taken it down the road myself.”

Those up on the history of Fleetwood Mac might note in the Buckingham McVie moniker the echo of an earlier duet album, “Buckingham Nicks.” Released in 1973 by the two future Fleetwood Mac members when they were a romantic and musical partnership, the Nicks and Buckingham release led Fleetwood a year later to invite the couple to join his band. 

Nicks hasn’t contributed to the forthcoming Buckingham McVie project. She’s been on her own trip. In 2016, Nicks embarked on her “Rockin’ 24 Karat Gold Tour” with the Pretenders as openers. That tour will continue with a few dozen more dates across early 2017.

Her schedule, however, had little bearing on what Buckingham and McVie were creating, says Buckingham.

“All these years we've had this rapport, but we'd never really thought about doing a duet album before,” Buckingham says. “There is that album that I did with Stevie back before we joined the band, but other than that, it's all been Fleetwood Mac or solo.”

Interrupting with a tone of bafflement, McVie says, “And why on Earth? It seems absurd after 45 years.”

“Sometimes,” Buckingham says, “it takes, oh, about 40 years of perspective to figure it out.”