Lindsey Buckingham Interview with Don Sanchez

By Don Sanchez
BURBANK, CA (KGO)

Hall of Fame musician Lindsey Buckingham is celebrating the release of his new CD, Gift of Screws next week by launching a national tour that kicks off at the Mountain Winery in Saratoga Sunday night.

For Buckingham, it's coming back home.

ABC7's entertainment reporter Don Sanchez sat down with Buckingham at the Warner Brothers studios in Burbank.

Download the interview - it's about 18 minutes or so, and click this link to watch the video interview.

The Backstory: Meeting Lindsey Buckingham

Beautifully Crafted, Just a Touch of Experimentation (Review)

Lindsey Buckingham
Bloomberg.com

Another musician who defined the sound of West Coast rock is Fleetwood Mac singer and guitarist Lindsey Buckingham.

His latest solo release is beautifully crafted, with just a touch of the experimentation he showed on group efforts such as ``Rumours'' and ``Tusk,'' which he called his first solo LP.

Buckingham, now 58, has gone his own way musically for a long time -- the new CD is titled ``Gift of Screws,'' a recherche reference to an Emily Dickinson poem that shows up in its chorus. At the same time, he has always retained enough of a mainstream sound to keep Fleetwood Mac fans on board.

I had the review copy a month ago: It won't be released until Sept. 16, but give it an early mention for the Wilson comparison. There's a lot of Californian contemplation, echoes of the author's main band and one of the best tracks is called ``Bel Air Rain.''

This is a mid-pace collection, with lots of guitar flourishes and layered vocals. It retains a mellow feel, as if Buckingham went into his home studio after a long meditation and with mature determination to do exactly what he wanted to.

Rating: ** 1/2.

(Mark Beech writes for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)
To contact the writer of this review: Mark Beech in London at mbeech@bloomberg.net.

Got Some Good News... And Got Some Bad News!!

The Bad News... The release of Stevie's Soundstage DVD (according to Amazon) has been pushed back to December 31, 2008... This is the 5th push back of the release since July... Not Good!

The Good News.. Strike that! The GREAT News is that PBS is finally starting to ship the orders that were placed for the Soundstage show after it aired in July. Fans are already starting to receive their DVD's. So if you haven't ordered, I'd order through the Soundstage website (click the Soundstage banner to the right of the page, it will take you to the order site at PBS). It's cheap, $19.99plus shipping!

Couple of notes about the tracklisting. It's exactly the same as what was aired on PBS over the two nights in July. There is one disc in the package, with no booklet inside... and there is no bonus footage like PBS described in their ad at the end of each airing of the show. Most of the tunes are here from the actual show, a couple of notable songs missing are Dreams and Beauty and The Beast, which were both performed that night.

Couple of pics courtesy of LiamMcConville over at Seven Wonders... Two screen caps of the DVD Menu and the front and back covers courtesy of Stevie-Nicks.INFO.

ON STAGE | MOORE THEATRE | LINDSEY BUCKINGHAM

Buckingham Moves in a Rock Direction
By Alan Sculley - For Kitsap A&E - Friday, August 29, 2008

There's one place Lindsey Buckingham wishes he could have snuck into after finishing the controversial 1979 Fleetwood Mac album, "Tusk."

"I make the joke that I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall in the board meeting when they first put 'Tusk' on and started listening to that thing over at Warner Brothers," Buckingham said in a recent phone interview.

The reasons for Buckingham's curiosity are obvious enough. "Tusk" was the follow-up album to Fleetwood Mac's blockbuster 1977 album "Rumours." Rather than filling "Tusk" with the kind of finely crafted and accessible pop of "Rumours," Buckingham steered Fleetwood Mac in a quirkier, more adventurous direction. What's more, "Tusk" was a double album that would have to carry a higher-than-usual retail price.

Buckingham can only imagine the uneasy atmosphere that must have filled the room as the Warner Bros. executives realized their expectations for eight-digit sales of the next Fleetwood Mac album had gone up in smoke.

The topic of "Tusk" is appropriate now because Buckingham recently once again has shown his willingness to not play things safe with his music. In 2006, he released a stripped back, primarily acoustic CD, "Under The Skin," that prompted words of caution from the Warner Bros. camp.

"It's almost kind of a 'Tusk' in miniature," Buckingham said.

At the time, Buckingham also had begun work on a plugged-in, more commercially viable studio album, which came to be the newly released CD "Gift Of Screws." Buckingham said the label asked him to consider putting a few of the full-band songs planned for "Gift Of Screws" on "Under The Skin" to make the album more palatable to radio, retailers and fans.

Buckingham, though, stuck to his vision of keeping "Under The Skin" in its acoustic-centric form, and Warner Bros. didn't push the issue, although the label indicated it wouldn't put a big push behind "Under The Skin."

The reaction to "Gift Of Screws" at Warner Bros. Records has been markedly different. And Buckingham said the CD he gave the label might be more musically accessible than even he expected.

"I was actually surprised because on the one hand I didn't really expect to make this as rock and roll as it turned out," Buckingham said. "But once I got my road band down and we started cutting some tracks in my studio downstairs, it just wanted to go that way.

"I'm fairly used to a conservative response, shall we say, from the record company as regards to my work," he said. "But they're pretty excited about this record."

Warner Bros. has good reason for its enthusiasm. "Gift Of Screws" sounds like a CD that could enjoy considerable popularity.

The album is not without its edgy moments. It opens with a pair of quirky (but also attention-grabbing) songs, "Great Day" and "Time Precious Time," before shifting more toward the kind of finely crafted, melodic pop that made Fleetwood Mac multi-platinum superstars.

Buckingham is featuring several songs from "Gift Of Screws" on his tour this fall. The shows find him joined by the same musicians that played on his tour to support "Under The Skin" — Neale Heywood (guitar), Taku Hirano (drums) and Brett Tuggle (bass, keyboards). The character of the evening, though, will be different.

"Last time I was spending a lot of time out there by myself doing single guitar pieces," Buckingham said. "I'm still doing some of that, obviously, but we're going to hit the ground running this time and rock a bit more. That seems to be what the ("Gift Of Screws") album is doing."

Buckingham's tour will run well into the fall. After that, he plans to turn his attention to Fleetwood Mac, the group he joined in 1975 along with his then-girlfriend, singer Stevie Nicks.

The band recently announced that it will tour the United States next year. But this outing will feature the four core band members — Buckingham, Fleetwood, McVie and Nicks, a change from earlier this year when Sheryl Crow announced that she was likely to join Fleetwood Mac for the tour and possibly an album.

Buckingham said Crow's statements caught the band members off guard, and the idea of inviting Crow into the band never went beyond the discussion stage. The whole issue, Buckingham noted, grew out of the fact that Nicks, who is good friends with Crow, was interested in adding a woman to Fleetwood Mac to replace retired singer-keyboardist Christine McVie.

On the tour supporting the group's 2003 CD, "Say You Will," Nicks missed the male-female balance that Christine McVie brought to Fleetwood Mac, and floated the idea of adding Crow.

"I think she (Nicks) missed Christine's presence," Buckingham said "She missed that kind of mitigating force that sort of glued (things) together. And consequently when it came down to us contemplating touring next year, I think Stevie was possibly looking for some sort of a comrade on stage.

"The whole thing was a complete hypothetical," Buckingham said. "There had been no real, anything set in stone at all. It was just something we were considering, period."

Lindsey Buckingham delivers "Gift" to fans

By Gary Graff

Reuters

DETROIT (Billboard) - Fleetwood Mac guitarist Lindsey Buckingham is getting ready to hit the road to promote a new album he considers "a little more accessible and familiar" than some of his other solo releases.

"Gift of Screws" (Reprise/Warner Bros.) comes out on September 16, while Buckingham begins a six-week tour on September 7 in Saratoga, Calif. A special promotion bundles a copy of the album with ticket purchases for the tour.

The album marks the followup to 2005's acoustic-oriented "Under the Skin," which peaked at No. 80 on the Billboard 200. But the new set has an interesting history that dates back to the beginning of the decade.

Buckingham was making a solo album with the "Gift of Screws" title in 2001 when Fleetwood Mac decided to reconvene for sessions that led to the band's 2003 album "Say You Will" and subsequent world tour. Buckingham allowed the group to use several of the songs intended for his 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." The first single is "Did You Miss Me."

"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."

The Fleetwood Mac rhythm section of Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, who helped out during the original sessions, still appear on the album. Also on the disc are 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.

As for Fleetwood Mac, a tour and possibly some new recording loom in early 2009.

Mick Fleetwood in Liverpool

Aug 29 2008 by Dawn Collinson, Liverpool Echo

AT 6ft 6in, Mick Fleetwood has always been head and shoulders above mere mortals.

And now the iconic co-founder of Fleetwood Mac is heading to Liverpool to celebrate his blues heritage with his new band, The Mick Fleetwood Blues Band.

Performing classic original songs like Oh Well, Rattlesnake Shake, Albatross, Black Magic Woman and many more, Rick Vito, Lenny Castellanos and Mark Johnstone will join Mick Fleetwood for what promises to be a musical experience that combines 40 years of excellence in blues and rock.

I caught up with Mick to find out the music that’s getting him through the week.

“I’ve got something of an eclectic taste,” he laughs. “I grew up playing blues, but I love all different types of music.

“Hey Bo Diddly by Bo Diddly has that funny tom tom thing with the maracas. I’ve always been a tom tom maniac and that track really affected my drumming.

“One song that’s always special is Return To Sender by Elvis Presley. I learnt to drum by listening to it and playing along. It was the only record my sister had, and I had nothing, so the choices were limited.

“I also love His Latest Flame (Marie’s The Name) by Elvis. I think that was the next record she got and I loved the breaks in it. I used to mess them up every time. It was hours of torture for me drumming along to that. I still love it though.

“What’s Going On by Marvin Gaye is one of my favourites, and Turn on Your Love Light by Bobby Bland. Great records.

“And anything by George Harrison, particularly from Cloud Nine. I loved George. Like millions of others I was very sorry to see him go, and especially so young. He was the real stuff.

“One last one – Let There Be Drums by Sandy Nelson. I love it.”

The Mick Fleetwood Blues featuring Rick Vito play Liverpool Philharmonic Hall on Tuesday October 28. For tickets and information, see www.liverpoolphil.com.

Rockline - Lindsey Buckingham - August 27, 2008

Lindsey on Rockline August 27, 2008.

Great interview last night with some really interesting questions from callers...

The added bonus was hearing for the first time "Love Runs Deeper" from his upcoming "Gift of Screws". Also played was "Right Place To Fade", which to fans was known as "Twist of Fate".

Accoustic tunes he played in the studio were "Time Precious Time", "Did You Miss Me" and "Big Love".

No Crow...

LocalRythms

Lindsey Buckingham did a roundtable press conference today, on which there will be more in a future article. During the telephone sit-down, he addressed the rumors (Rumours?) about Sheryl Crow joining the band next year, and he didn’t pull any punches:

When Fleetwood Mac was touring [in support of 2003's "Say You Will"], Christine McVie had left, having burned all her bridges, selling her house in L.A. and moving to England. We divided material down the middle. I had a great time because it allowed me to be a guy on stage. In retrospect, Stevie wasn’t as comfortable with that divide. When it came to contemplating working next year… we [thought] bringing Sheryl Crow would be an intiguing idea. We put out the feelers and that’s about as far as it got. Last spring, Sheryl took it upon herself to tell the world she was joining Fleetwood Mac. It was in itself inappropriate - you sit down with a band and announce it. It bothered Stevie a great deal and Mick as well. I thought it was off the wall. There were some harsh words, and she was given her marching orders - not that she’d been in the band in the first place.

Lindsey went on to say that Fleetwood Mac is contemplating doing a “long term thing” beginning in early 2009, which included making a new record and touring. He wasn’t certain that Crow understood that a commitment of 3-4 years was what he had in mind. “Probably in January, the band will start rehearsing, then see what happens,” he said.

No guarantees, but it sounds like the Mac is back.

The press conference was done as part of the promotional effort for “Gift of Screws,” which drops September 16, It’s harder-rocking follow-up to 2006’s “Under the Skin,” featuring contributions from Mac alums John McVie and Mick Fleetwood. Buckingham says the boisterous title track lifted its’ chorus from an Emily Dickinson poem. “I’m always looking to rip off things that are public domain,” he joked. Lindsey went on to call the song, which sounds more like circa-1978 Elvis Costello than anything the Mac ever did, “Mick’s favorite drum track ever. I played the album for him the other day, he came to my house, and he wishes it could have been on a Fleetwood Mac album.”

“Gift of Screws” was conceived way back in 1995, and shelved over the years due to Buckingham’s many (mainly Fleetwood Mac) commitments (he called them “interventions on solo work”). Several cuts from the oft-bootlegged disk, including “Peacekeeper” and “Murrow In His Grave,” ended up on other records. The new CD has only one surviving song from the original “Gift of Screws” - the title track - along with bits and pieces of a few others.

It’s a solid, electrified effort - lyrically mature, well-rounded and tight. It might not be Buckingham’s most successful record ever - the music business has changed too much for that - but it’s among his best. Lindsey’s Mac fans will feel right at home with songs like “Love Runs Deeper” (co-written with Buckingham’s wife) and “The Right Place To Fade,” which is reminiscent of a revved-up “Monday Morning.”

Lindsey Buckingham’s tour to support “Gift of Screws” begins September 7 in Saratoga, California; he’s in Lebanon, New Hampshire October 12, and Northampton, Massachusetts on October 14. There are also shows in Boston and Ridgefield, Connecticut. The tour ends October 19 in New York City.

Will They Dance Again in 2009?

August 24, 2008 by Katherine Epstein

We’ve all heard the Rumours—and I’m not talking about the album. Word on the street is that one of the greatest and most controversial rock ‘n roll bands of all time, Fleetwood Mac, will return to the stage in 2009.

With a tumultuous history, they are a band who defies the term sex, drugs, and roll ‘n roll—add a side of adultery and alcoholism. Ravaged by in and outs with over 15 band members over the course of 40 years, somehow they managed to create some of the best music of all time.

The most popular combinations of artists includes Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, Christine McVie, John McVie, and Mick Fleetwood who created the 1977 Rumours album, the sixth best-selling album of all time and compilation that is adored by even those of my generation.

After two decades of touring, more band member additions and departures, some stints in rehab, and solos careers, the fivesome returned in 1997 recording a live album The Dance which brought Fleetwood Mac back to their superstar status—becoming the fifth highest-selling live album of all time in the United States.

Shortly thereafter, Fleetwood Mac was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. This was the last breath for Christine McVie, who “officially” left the band in 2003, when they recorded Say You Will (even though she lended backup vocals for the album).

Since 2006, Buckingham has been chatty about a reunion tour which has left critics buzzing and Fleetwood Mac lovers wondering. Stevie Nicks gal pal Sheryl Crow was said to be joining—other sources report that Crow would be replacing Christine McVie. Additional media say Nicks would not tour again without McVie. So I can’t help but wonder, will Fleetwood Mac be back for another dance?

Buckingham told Billboard magazine earlier in the year that Fleetwood Mac was definitively talking about touring with the possibility of new material; he also denied that Sheryl Crow would be joining the lineup. He says that the band would most likely record again after the tour, as he thought touring would reunite them artistically.

Meanwhile Buckingham is busy touring and will release a solo album in mid September, and Nicks just finished a tour. However, when I saw Nicks perform this summer (who looked a fabulous age 60 and sounded not a day older than Bella Donna), she mentioned nothing of a Fleetwood Mac reunion.

So what’s a Fleetwood Mac junkie to do in the meantime? Only time will differentiate fact of the Mac. After all, aren’t rumors and mystique what kept this band going for so many years?

"Outside The Rain / Dreams" Video - Stevie Nicks Jones Beach 06.28.08

Allan Brown at Rumours

Glasgow's new Malaysian eatery serves up a beguiling mix of unusual offerings

Why has a new Malaysian restaurant in Glasgow named itself after a Fleetwood Mac album?

Life is infinitely strange and crammed with tantalising mysteries. If Jerry Hall had married Bryan Ferry, for instance, would she have traded under the name Jerry Ferry? Is it reasonable to assume that time travel will never exist because nobody has as yet come back from the future to tell us if Lenny Henry will ever say or do anything that’s in the least bit amusing? Most pertinently, why has a new Malaysian restaurant in Glasgow named itself after a Fleetwood Mac album?

Rumours off West Nile Street is the restaurant in question. There is, admittedly, some precedent in the city for eateries to name themselves after long-players released by the fractious Californian soft-rock combo who were at their height in the mid-1970s: Stefan King has a place on the south side named Tusk. Nobody, however, has so far staked a claim, as far as I know, to Tango in the Night, or indeed to Pious Bird of Good Omen.

It hardly helps that none of Fleetwood Mac’s album titles are particularly memorable (Kiln House anyone? Penguin?). Which only makes the mystery all the deeper. By contrast Fleetwood Mac contemporaries Little Feat possessed a far catchier hamper of food-related album titles: Dixie Chicken, for example, or Let It Roll; Blondie had Eat to the Beat, Talking Heads had More Songs About Buildings and Food; even Frank Zappa had the albums Thing-Fish and Lumpy Gravy, though for obvious reasons the latter is self-excluding, unless it was being used for a transport cafe.

So we are at even more of a loss to explain the connection between Malaysian cuisine, which is essentially Chinese food in a better mood, and Fleetwood Mac’s multi-platinum-selling account of marital infidelity among the cheesecloth-wearers of Laurel Canyon. Normally Malaysian restaurants tend to have the terms sun and moon and palace and satay in their names. Whenever rumours attach themselves to restaurants of south-eastern Asian origin, they’re usually malicious, unfounded, and posited on the speculation that the kong pao beef used to wear a collar, bite postmen and go by the name of Rex.

In the absence of enlightenment we mused that perhaps Rumours had adopted a Fleetwood Mac theme, with the staff in long, flowery chiffon skirts á la Stevie Nicks and the waiters in voluminous flared denims and Zapata moustaches. Perhaps they took days off because they occasionally found catering to be “like, one big plastic hassle, dig?” Maybe the staff degenerated frequently into acrimonious fisticuffs and split apart to found solo restaurants? Ill-focused solo concept restaurants that nobody liked as much as the old restaurant?

As it turned out, this wasn’t wholly fanciful; like Rumours, the album, which concerned itself with romance as seen from both the male and female perspectives, Rumours the restaurant observes gender demarcation. The waiting staff are exclusively female, while the chefs, glimpsed occasionally through a hatch in the back wall, are male. Located in what was patently once an old solicitor’s or notary office on the ground floor of a block of still-operating businesses, it’s like an unusually elaborate canteen crossed with an Asian travel agents.

Continue...

Lindsey on Rockline - August 27, 2008

ROCKLINE - AUGUST 27, 2008
Lindsey will be the featured guest on the nationally syndicated radio show ROCKLINE on Wed, Aug. 27 at 8:30pm PT / 11:30pm ET.

He will be discussing his new CD Gift of Screws. Fans are encouraged to call to speak with Lindsey at 1-800-344-ROCK (7625). For a listing of stations near you and for information regarding how to listen on-line, go to rocklineradio.com!

ROCKLINE is the only nationally syndicated radio show where fans can directly help interview their favorite Rock and Roll stars live and on the air. It is believed to be the longest running uninterrupted radio show in Rock history.

I'll post the interview once I've recorded it.