¶ Intro / Opening
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¶ Welcome, Early Life, and Fleetwood Mac Journey
Welcome everyone to Soda Jerker on Songwriting. This is Simon, here as always with Brian, and joining us for episode 212 is a legendary American singer, songwriter and all-time great guitar player. Best known for his long, storied and phenomenally successful association with Fleetwood Max.
Just a couple of weeks ago he released his eponymous seventh solo album, which is a worthy addition to what was already an extremely solid body of work. and we had the great honor of chatting with him a few weeks back about the record and much more. We're beyond excited to welcome the great Lindsay Buckingham to the show.
It goes without saying how thrilled we are about this episode, doesn't it, Bry?
Mano, mano. We did, like many of you listening, I'm sure.
And he's been high on the wish list since day one of this podcast as well.
Yep, so this is a big moment for us.
I'll say. Lindsay was born in Palo Alto, California in nineteen forty nine and grew up in Adherton, just south of San Francisco. As well as being an avid listener to his elder brother's forty fives, he was obsessed with guitars as a child. The first one he owned was a Toy Mickey Mouse model on which he'd learned to pick out Heartbreak Hotel, but he later graduated to a thirty five dollar harmony.
His early influences included Scotty Moore, Chet Atkins, and folk group the Kingston Trio, and the guitar would be his principal focus throughout his teens. In fact he really didn't start writing his own songs until his early twenties.
Lindsay met fellow high school senior Stevie Nicks in the late sixties and asked her to join his band Fritz. When Fritz dissolved, they forged ahead as a Tusom Buckingham Knicks. After moving to LA in nineteen seventy two, by which time they were romantically involved, they wrote and demoed some songs which ultimately found their way onto a self-titled album.
Released on Polydor in nineteen seventy three, the record didn't fare well commercially, but it's now considered very much a lost gem and highly collectible.
In late 1974, upon hearing the Buckingham Knicks track Frozen Love, one Mick Fleetwood invited Lindsay to replace Bob Welch on guitar and vocals in Fleetwood Mac. Lindsay agreed on the condition Stevie joined two, Mick acquiesced, and nineteen seventy five's self titled White Album, as the fans call it, was the duo's recorded debut with the band.
The addition of Lindsay and Stevie's vocal and songwriting talents ushered in an era of stratospheric success for the group, the apogee of which remains, of course, nineteen seventy-seven's Rumours, which went on to become one of the biggest selling albums in history.
Lindsay's highly inventive recording approach characterized the ambitious follow up, nineteen seventy nine's Tusk, a record which couldn't hope to shift as many units as its predecessor, but was an undoubted artistic triumph and proved a creative watershed for our guests.
The nineteen eighties saw him veer between solo albums like the brilliantly quirky Go Insane, my personal fave, band Project. tracks and the occasional contribution to movie soundtracks, not least the indelible holiday road which adorned the opening titles of the nineteen eighty three hit comedy National Lampoon's Vacation.
Which of course we had to mention during the interview or we'd never have forgiven ourselves.
Actually I think the first time I became aware of Lindsay himself was seeing his name in those opening credits.
Probably the same for me. Anyway, 1987's excellent tango in the night marked the end of his first Fleetwood Mac tenure. But Lindsay returned a decade later for a tour and accompanying live album The Dance, which featured his justly celebrated solo acoustic rendition of Big Love.
He made one more studio album with Fleetwood Mac, two thousand three's rather underrated Say You Will, and remained a member until twenty eighteen, when he departed again in rather controversial and well documented circumstances.
Other terrific solo efforts include nineteen ninety two's Out of the Cradle and two thousand six's Under the Skin, and the twenty seventeen Lindsey Buckingham Christine McVeigh album is well worth your time too. Basically if Lindsay's name is anywhere on a record, just buy it.
Keep up with our guests latest news at Lindsay Buckingham dot com, Facebook dot com slash Lindsay Buckingham, at L Buckingham on Twitter, and at Lindsay Buckingham on Instagram. Find us at Sodajeker.com, Facebook.com slash Sodajaker and at Soda Jacker on Twitter and Instagram.
If you've just discovered the show, check out our interview archive and follow, rate and review us on your favoured podcast platform. Give whatever you can spare towards the upkeep of this fully independent pod at Sodajaker.com slash donate.
Before we move on, many thanks to Ben for his help setting this up.
Okay, it is now our great pleasure to introduce our chat with the one and only Lindsay Buckingham.
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¶ New Album Inspiration and Solo Songwriting Process
Thank you for talking with us today.
Oh my pleasure. My pleasure.
To say that we're excited would be something of an understatement.
Thank you for the compliment. I appreciate it.
Well congrats on the new album. Typically fantastic, we thought.
Oh, thank you. Yeah, you know, it took a while to finally get it out, but it's out or it will be out soon, so that's nice, finally. You know, better late than never.
Yeah, yeah. Well we love it and and right from the get go with uh Scream, there are all the hallmarks of your sound, aren't they? You know, the percussiveness, the layered vocals, the repeated figures in the guitar parts, stuff like that.
Yeah. On this particular album I was working on it while I was working with Christine on that duet album and I I just thought I wanted to make something that was a little more pop than I'd been making, you know, running through it, maybe even having reference points back to early work with Fleetwood Mac on some level and it it just seemed like the right time to sort of refer back to some of that. So hopefully that comes across a little bit, you know?
It really does. I was thinking that actually. A lot of the stuff kind of reminded me of maybe Mirage era.
Right.
Yeah, yeah. Is the guitar still central to your writing process or are you just as likely to start a song like Scream on another instrument?
No, I mean once in a while on the piano, but normally it's the guitar and you know, the writing really has become sort of part and parcel with the recording process when I work on solo work because I you know, I'm doing it all myself.
And unlike working with a band where you could make the analogy to it being a bit more like movie making, you know, because it's more verbalized and conscious and you have to have your ducks in a row before you go in. Working alone is more like painting where you can start to
throw paint on the canvas and you don't have to even have a fully formed song. Most of the songs that are on this new album began as just little voice memos in my phone, you know, like seeds of ideas and not fully fleshed out and over the period of committing to putting something down you start to the the specifics of what it's going to be start to reveal themselves to you in a way
that is I I would say subconscious and meditative, you know, as painting is because it's a kind of a one on one with the work. So I I just really enjoy that process a lot. Yeah.
And Scream has paired quite nicely with I Don't Mind at the start of the album, which has also got that lovely kind of ostinato in the guitar in the chorus.
Yeah.
I was wondering do you tend to write all those ancillary little flourishes once you've got the main meat of the song idea together?
Well once you you have a general idea of what the melody and the form is going to be, yes, that's been one of my fortees going all the way back. You know, if you look at a Fleetwood Mac song like Dreams, you know and and take it down to its bare bones. I mean it's all about the the architecture around it that creates
the finished product and the finished level of effectiveness. And it's the same. I mean, I've always done that for Fleetwood Mac and I've always done it for myself. So yeah, you're always looking for things that are going to sort of uh not only support the lyric and the melody of the song, but are going to in some ways stand on their own as, you know, sort of architecture that uh hopefully elevates the song a little bit too, you know.
Right. And so does that mean that you're getting into the recording process quite early on in the writing as well? Or do you sort of separate those things?
If I'm working on a solo album, I've just gotta sort of take stock of what my raw materials might be in terms of rough song ideas. And you just go in and it's sort of like writing a book too. You know, you gotta have that routine where you're gonna maybe go in in the late morning and work and maybe take a lunch break and work till dinner or something. I mean, that's kind of been my routine.
since I've had a family, you know, in the early days with the band, of course, we used to work nights, which was always somewhat problematic for me, not being a night owl like some other members of the band tended to be.
And you know, there were times where I tried to leave at one in the morning and Mick would come and grab me and pull me back in and I I I used to have to lie and say, Well, I'm just going to the bathroom and then I'd go to my car and you know. So uh But yeah, I mean it's it's really just all about saying, Okay, now I'm making a start and then following through on that consistently until y you have something like a body of work, you know.
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¶ Early Recording, Multi-Tracking, and Cubist Approach
And I think you had an old Amphex tape machine back in the day, didn't you, when you you were starting out?
I did, yes.
Is that where you learn to kind of multi track yourself mm playing lots of parts?
Yeah, I I think it was. I mean even before that I had just a home stereo uh Sony machine, but it had this feature called sound on sound where you used to be able to sort of record something on the left channel and then bounce it over to the right channel while you're recording something else and you could actually
build back and forth, much in the way Les Paul did, you know, one track at a time, committing to your your balances and and your instruments as you went along, obviously. And some of that, you know, was reapplied to the AMPEX. four track, you know. Um and I did in many ways cut my teeth on that. I mean that gave me a lot more flexibility to sort of paint the painting, if you will.
But it also forced you to sort of make choices that you had to commit to, just as the Beatles did. I mean, they cut Sergeant Peppers on one of them.
Mm-hmm. There is something beautiful about saying, Okay, we're gonna put this with this and now it's written in stone and we can't go back and rethink it. You know, with the Pro Tools today, one could certainly argue that perhaps there are too many choices at any given time and it doesn't necessarily always serve the best purpose of a a linear kind of forward motion in terms of creativity.
Yeah. We spoke to um Jeff Lynn a couple of years ago and he he mentioned how he had a Bang and Olofson tape machine when he was he was young and just starting out and he says that essentially that taught him how to produce records just using that little tape machine.
Yeah. I mean you you experiment around and y and if you're interested in the sounds and not just you know, the center which is the the lyric and the melody, then yes, all of that is gonna provide a great sense of discovery, which it did for me as well. Mm-hmm.
I really like the way you use the voices on I Don't Mind as well. I was wondering with the BVs on that, are you sort of triggering those somehow?'Cause they've got that lovely kind of synthetic kind of quality, like they've been sampled and played back somehow.
No, they were just uh broken down into facets. You know, years ago I I started thinking in terms of almost a a a musical sense of cubism, you know, taking uh a lead from Picasso and others who who broke their painting form down into facets and created something surreal out of that.
And it just occurred to me that if you took a melody or a phrase or uh an instrument or anything and and broke it up into pieces that you had to then perform separately, that it would actually add its own character that was in a way sort of musically cubistic and that's something I've been pursuing probably since the Out of the Cradle album in ninety two, whenever that was. And um so yeah, I I think the vocals you're referring to on I Don't Mind are
are very much in the spirit of that. And they were all performed, you know, in real time. There was no sampling. It was just having the idea in my head and then performing it as such.
Right. So you're achieving those things in quite an organic way then, it sounds like
Absolutely absolutely.
¶ Rhythmic Experimentation and Intuitive Creative Style
And Swan Song, I mean, that's another one with a quite sophisticated rhythmic backing. How are you achieving that? Are you not using computers or anything like that?
Uh not really. I had uh some drum loops sitting around and I ended up combining them. That one and um power down are drawn from the same set of drum loops and those two songs are sort of almost like a pair in a way in terms of their approach and the fact that they're probably the most too edgy to the left song song on the record. And yeah, I mean a Swan Song I was just interested.
shit in.
something other than just a kit. of drums and that's that's what I came up with.
There's quite a lot of rhythmic experimentation in your catalogue, isn't there? Especially from kind of Tusk onwards. And, you know, on Tango in the Night too, with songs like Caroline. Will you often start a song with a kind of interesting rhythm or groove?
Sometimes, yeah. I mean, as a guitarist, sometimes you just come up with a riff or or a set of chord changes which then becomes the foundation for something to follow and sometimes you try uh two or three different melody ideas before you settle on one, you know. And the impetus for that, which can be a riff or again a set of chords or something that remains the same, but whatever you put over it can uh evolve
You know, but yes, absolutely. You know, guitar and the rhythm of the chords or the riff is key to what I do in many cases.
And are you led mainly by your intuition in terms of what needs to come next if it's repeating something or...
Yes, because really it's all I got. You know, I started playing guitar when I was about six. when my brother my older brother started bringing home Elvis Presley records and you know, uh obviously if you were of an age to be influenced and exposed to the first wave of rock and roll back in the mid and late fifties You know, it was just such a life changing event.
But you know, I first started on a ukulele and then a year or so later got a small a three quarter size guitar. And I r I never had a lesson and I just taught myself to play with a chord book and I was very much into learning songs and then later folk music came in and and I was um very much taken with the finger style that was used in in that form.
and also took in some sort of light jazz and classical from people like Charlie Bird who were playing very orchestrally. So my my style as a a musician, but more importantly just as a creative person. develop totally intuitively and totally without any
schooling or or any sense of what was right or wrong, you know. And that in a way you could say it could be a weakness, but I think for me at this point it's more a strength because, you know, it's just the triumph, hopefully, of imagination over knowledge.
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We've heard you say in the past.
We were wondering if you were just being modest there because so many of your melodies they're just they're like Kevlar, aren't they? They're just impenetrably solid.
Well, that's good to hear. You know, right after all the stuff went down with Fleawood Mac at the beginning of 2018, I decided I would put out a best of compilation of just my solo work, which I had never done before. And then going back and taking it in, so much of it, i it became a a more visceral thing and I I really did begin to feel a bit better about my writing and a bit better about the fact that um you know that I actually have
pulled a few things off here and there. But I think I wasn't necessarily trying to be modest when I made that statement. I would not think of myself as a skilled writer in the way I would think of Henry Mancini or Bert Baccarac or anyone who I would admire or, you know, McCartney or Lennon or Brian Wilson, I think I do
approach it more from a certain set of limitations that I have as a writer that then are um enhanced hopefully by style. And I think that's all I meant. You know, it wasn't necessarily trying to diminish anything But, you know, having said that, I would say hopefully over time the writing part of it has gotten a little more mature and a little more poetic. I I certainly feel my lyrics
have gotten better over time because they've gotten less literal and so become sort of more of a rorshock for whomever is listening to them. And hopefully, you know, some of the constructions of the songs themselves have have matured and and gotten a little more uh skillful over time. That would be the hope, especially considering the choices I've made, which were all about you know, continuing to aspire to be an artist in the long term and not be just a commodity, you know? Mm-hmm.
¶ Crafting Choruses and Lyric Development
Mm. Well there are so many strong tunes on the new album, you know, uh Santa Rosa and On the Wrong Side really leap out to us and and of course the catalogue's kinda peppered with these huge choruses. Do you have any kind of specific process for fashioning a great chorus or or for knowing when you've got something good?
Well, I think you just have to have a a kind of an abstract sense of of what is required of a good chorus, and that is probably more than anything that a chorus achieve uh some sort of sense of arrival when it kicks in. Um sometimes you hear choruses that feel more like they should have been bridges, like they're sort of more passing sections. You know, the chorus should be the place you arrive at that the verse and every other part of the song has led you to.
And um it's not something that I can nail down in terms of what that means even specifically, but I I just feel that there needs to be grounding to a chorus and when you move past that for the first time, you're left with a sense of waiting for it again.
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Trick tends to come with the chorus when you write one of those big choruses, or does it at least suggest the shape of the words to you in some way?
Uh sometimes. I mean Stevie always wrote her lyrics first. and then wrote her melody. And I'm really very much the opposite. So most of the voice memos that I draw from when I begin songs don't have lyrics at all, or maybe they've got some sort of mumbling intimation of a lyric, but nothing, you know, specific. But there's always the sense of a melody and in order for me to even get if I go back and I start going over rough ideas that I've, you know, uh
put down over a period of time, the things that always catch me are those things where the melody in the chorus has a sense of arrival to it, even if it has no lyric yet. And the lyric may change two or three times. Or parts of it may stick and other parts of it may fall away. Um so yeah, the lyrics are probably the last thing that I get to in some ways before you start working on the architecture of the song.
Yeah. We love the chorus of uh powered down, particularly on the new album.
All right.
Yeah, it just seems to kind of emerge out of nowhere that the use of the title comes at such a an odd moment over those back and vocals.
Yeah. I mean you could take it as any number of things, you know. Um and for me I think it was the sense of power in a relationship or the dynamic that I'd been used to in a relationship having shifted, which, you know, that's what happens over time. And you've got to r adapt to it.
But um there had been times around the writing of that song where I I'd felt that um a certain power in my uh marriage had been somehow pulled out from under me and uh I was at least briefly left with a kind of an a not too clear idea of of how to deal with that.
Yeah. It's a great title and it suggests all kinds of images I suppose. As you say it can be interpreted in different ways.
Yeah, I mean it could be about the lights going out in your house. Or your computer going down or something, you know.
Yeah. Are you often on the lookout for distinctive phrases for titles or for lyrics in general?
Well, I mean I'm not on the lookout per se. I mean and and it's funny with creativity s uh sort of out in the ether if you wanna get a l a little bit sort of new agey about it, but um but you know, in order to capture those ideas
I mean at any given time if you let yourself be quiet you could come up with something if you sit down with a guitar or even without an instrument and just hearing something in your head. You have to have the commitment to have your antenna up and then once you've sort of captured an idea and have it in your head, you've got to make sure that you don't let it go.
Uh you've gotta then put it down in some form, even if it's just humming in a rough form into your phone, which is a lot of what I do now. But you know, there are times where your antenna's up and there are times where your antenna is not, and you can't be on the lookout for
what might be passing over your head twenty four seven either. You've gotta, you know, live your life as well. So, you know, there are times where it becomes more crucial in that moment to to sort of be vigilant for that w um and uh again it's sort of the choice you make to say, Well, now I'm doing this and uh
Whereas like say right now I'm just trying to get my solos together for a live show, you know, and writing a new song is the farthest thing from my mind at the moment. So, you know, it's kind of an interesting cycle you go through.
Yeah. I guess it's a question of taste as well, isn't it, being able to choose the things that might be worthwhile. You know, like a a title like What Makes You Think You're the One or Not That Funny or something that might be almost like a provocation or, you know, fire the imagination before you even hear the song.
Right.
¶ Tusk, Relationships, and Solo vs. Band Material
Well, you know, the stuff on Tusk in general, aside from the fact that the Tusk album was made for very specific reasons in a post rumors environment where perhaps there was potentially a a lot of pressure to make something like a rumors two and I didn't want to go that way. I wanted to, you know draw a line in the sand and continue to define myself as an artist, as I said, and take risks and look for things outside my comfort zone and certainly outside the listener's comfort zone.
But I think also on an emotional level, many of the songs, the two you mentioned, those titles, there's still a kind of a residue going on in terms of my relationship with Stevie and And, you know, just sort of in the process of putting all of that to rest, rumors was all expressed in a slightly more vulnerable way. And by the time we got to Tusk,
as you say those titles could be seen as somewhat confrontational, it's certainly a lot more irony in in the whole thing. And um that was progress, just as the music and the experimentation was progress. So yeah, that was just a moment in time for
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I know a lot of tracks written for um for your solo projects have have ended up being on on Fleetwood Mac albums. I know you said earlier that the approach to um your solo work is kind of painting and Fleetwood Mac is more like film making, but would you say there are similarities between writing solo and and writing for the band as well?
Well, sure. I mean, certainly on more than one occasion I would go either into the studio myself or in the case of say you will, in two thousand three, I d you know, most of my material was drawn from stuff that I'd been in the studio with with Mick doing, you know, and uh that had been sitting on the shelf for a few years. Because in ninety six Mick and I had gone in the studio with a producer Rob Cavallo and it was my intention to make a follow up to Out of the Cradle.
And of course that led to them sort of urging me to come back and rejoin the band, which I did, you know, I was happy that they had worked out their own personal lives in a way that was gonna make things easier and I I was happy to come back. But yes, I mean there have been many times where the material that was intended for a solo project has ended up on a Fleetwood Mac album. And so in that sense, I mean, you know, there is some sort of crossover between
Fleetwood Mac and and solo work for sure. But you know, just as often the work I've done has been far more insular.
Yeah. We always love the sound of what appears to be just Lindsay doing stuff, you know, multi tracking yourself. I mean something like slow dancing, for example, just feels very much like you having fun, you know.
Well that was a fun album to make. Go Insane was you know, um I had uh only done one solo album before that.
And I really only started doing solo albums because, you know, even though the band was very uh happy with Tusk when it came out, when it didn't sell sixteen million albums I mean it was a double album and I don't remember what it probably sold like four or five uh initially, but you know, Mick came to me and said, Well, we're not gonna do that process again and I said, Well, okay, but at that point in order for me to sort of
keep exploring the the more esoteric or the left side of my palate, I realized I was gonna have to make solo albums. So I had done one with Richard Dashett, who was, you know, one of the the people that worked with Fleetwood Mac. But by the time I got to go insane, I completely made a break from anything Fleetwood Macken was working with a great engineer named Gordon Fordyce and with Roy Thomas Baker.
And a lot of other things had come into the picture, including the original eight bit fair light, which had a million and two great sounds on it. That opened up a whole new world for me. Um The Lynn drum machine had come in and so all of that allowed for some of the atmosphere you hear on tracks like slow dancing for sure.
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¶ Movie Soundtracks and Wordless Choruses
It's a new album. Another favourite of ours is is on the wrong side.
Oh, yeah.
Is that the guitar you're playing there or or another instrument or i is it just a a high voicing on the guitar?
Uh it's just a guitar. Um it's uh Roland Synth. Uh. And um I cut the album I did not use Pro Tools, I cut it on an old forty eight track Sony digital machine, reel to reel machine. And I think I slowed the track down a little bit. So it would come up sounding a little bit more like a violin, you know, or something. And I think that's what you're hearing probably.
Rice. Yeah. It brought to mind for me um Time Bomb Town, which has a similar kind of uh you know, almost like a capot guitar sound.
Yeah. That's a funny one to bring up because it's so obscure, you know, it kinda got lost in the shuffle in in uh Back to the Future and you know but yeah, I mean I I went back and listened to that and I thought, wow, that was a pretty cool track. And um that's one of those things that hardly anyone ever heard.
Oh, well, we're children of the 80s, Lindsay, so we remember the Back to the Future Central.
There you go. I love that.
We we always loved your songs for movies actually like uh obviously Holiday Road and and dancing across the USA for National Lampoons Vacation.
Sure, yeah, that was so much fun to do. Yeah.
Are they examples of you kind of responding more to a brief or did you just have something already you thought would fit the movie? No, uh
Uh I mean that came out of left field and Harold Remus, the director got in touch with me and I don't remember I think I might have seen it some scenes from the movie or maybe a rough cut.
Um so I I had to have something to go on and and certainly I knew what the story was and was trying to address that through the lyrics. But beyond that I was just trying to make a couple of songs that would inform the spirit of the movie, you know, and um and I'd never done it before and I really haven't done it
since, at least not with that level of focus. I mean I I did one or two things for Judd Apatow a few years ago, but nothing that you would even notice in the movie. And um Yeah, it was so fun to have Holiday Road come to life. And then to eventually play it, Harold came down to the studio and we played it for him and obviously he was just thrilled right away and so it was just a nice interaction and he was such a great guy.
that we uh we kinda clicked and that was just a fun thing to be involved with, for sure.
Wow, so cool. Yeah, that's kind of a staple for us that one, isn't it? We've we've loved that forever.
Well, you know, it's it's a tuneful little thing. It's kinda camp and kinda kind of uh tongue in cheek, but still, you know, it it's got the spirit of rock and roll in it somewhere, so
I love the way you expand the word road. It has about fifteen syllables in it. It's great.
That's right, yes it does. I never thought about that, but yeah. Yes, yes, you're right.
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Always do interesting things with words in that way though, I think. You know, like uh the oo ah section of Big Love, for example, like another songwriter might have filled that with words or something.
Or second hand news, the course the second hand news.
Yeah.
The art of the wordless chorus.
Yes, maybe it's'cause uh you know, in both those cases it's possible I just couldn't think of anything.
Did you formulate Big Love originally as a guitar piece?
No, I mean obviously it was based around the guitar part and I think something like the way that it is done now, which is just me and one guitar. I think that part does exist on Tango in the Night and and it was the first single from Tango in the Night, but um I never thought of it per se as a single guitar piece. It was an ensemble piece and um
I think everyone had their eye on it to be the first single and that sort of defined it as having to be that as well. But, you know, in the the subsequent few years after Tango in the Night and after I left the band and made um out of the cradle. Then I started to think about How interesting it would be possibly to sort of take this style that I had, which was a very orchestral finger style that covered potentially a lot of ground, you know, with one instrument, and to commit
to presenting that. You know, I'd done that in a sort of a semi non focused way on never going back again, or you could say landslide, but but landslide was just basically a a folk song with a Travis Pick. And I was interested in doing something more complex and more sophisticated with my guitar work and still have it be one guitar carrying the whole thing. So somehow big love over a period of a few years
I think probably came to light the way it's now done. Probably on on the Out of the Cradle tour, but certainly by the time we got to the dance album when I f first rejoined Fleetwood Mac, the dance was a live album. That's what I was doing. And it was just the first of many songs that I felt it was important to have that as part of what I was doing, you know, to always try to include a little bit of that. So yeah, I mean big love has become a r a real staple for me a lot.
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I guess another example of that is uh is the fade of slow dancing, isn't it? Because it gives way to that kinda classical guitar piece.
Oh, yeah.
And was that an instance of you kind of having made the record, then just working that piece out on the guitar?
Yeah, I don't think that it was so much an afterthought. I think there was always this idea of adding a cinematic touch at the end of the song and thinking about a couple sort of waltzing around the room, you know, in three, four time and and so th it was just something that I had in mind, I think, even early on with the song and And luckily it seemed to work out okay.
¶ Dancing the Dance of Life and Future Endeavors
Mm. And you've got another dancing song on the new album, haven't you? The last track? Anything you can tell us about that one?'Cause we're really quite enchanted by the atmosphere of that.
Yes, that's very plain. I mean, it is a single guitar pretty much. There's a couple of little extra production touches on it in a very subtle way, but you know, I think that's just about you're waiting around for for things to resolve sometimes and and you see people who have maybe lost their way a little bit or maybe you've lost your way a little bit and y you're not really sure what's happened but but there's a distance
And so you are not really in command of a way to sort of address it, but you have to what you have to do is be accepting of it. And so, you know, whether it's you or whether it's others around you who may be feeling the same thing in that situation, you know, you all have to kind of play a waiting game and and that's what we do. We're we're just we all are dancing the dance of life.
and um perhaps being disappointed at times, but ultimately being accepting and hopefully retaining some level of faith that there are cycles to things. And um You know, people will always inspire you and they will always disappoint you in equal measure.
I think you've had this album done for quite a while so if you're working on any new projects at the moment or as you mentioned before you're just preoccupied with practicing your solos
Yes, I have to practice and practice. Um Well, I mean, you know, I've done a a few little things here and there. I did do that one song with The Killers and I've done a a something for Trent Reznor. He was working on a a Halsey song and wanted me to play some acoustic. So those are just
really very short term things I've enjoyed doing. But as for myself, you know, just a few months before the pandemic kicked in we had moved houses and it took the guy a while to sort of put my studio back together in the new place that it was, in the new house. And then for a while I think during the pandemic I just didn't have a lot of motivation to go down and work. And then at some point I said, you know what, I've gotta go
do this for a while just because I do. So I I went down to the studio for a period of months. Pretty much every day. And I I did come up with about three new songs. that are I would say ninety percent finished. And um and that's really the only new stuff I've done. I s I still have a a ton of other ideas that I wanna get to at some point and will
uh in the not too distant future. But uh so I I have done a little bit, you know, but uh it's been an interesting few years for a number of reasons. Not just what went down with Fleetwood Mac, but I had some health issues and then of course the pandemic was like nothing
any of us had ever seen. And so, uh as you said, it this album has been waiting to get out for over three years and um You know, we made a couple of false starts where we thought we were gonna start to gear up to tour and then we had to stop. One was because I had a bypass and then again we were just getting ready to start rehearsing when the pandemic hit and so uh it kinda became a running gag. So I'm just happy that we're here now.
Yeah, we're thrilled to hear you're so energized still, Lindsay, by the music and still writing such great tunes as well.
Uh
Oh I you don't know that means so much to me. 'Cause we do the best we can and you know, you see a lot of people who kinda lose their way along the way, they lose their creativity or they lose their perspective on who they are or why they got into music in the first place and you know, maybe they start sort of just making their choices based on external expectations about who they are. And I've tried to do just the opposite. And uh so far I you know, I'm I'm happy with the road I've taken.
Well that's a lovely place to end, I think. Thanks so much for doing this. It's been such a pleasure to chat.
Oh, you too, you guys, you great. You know, you had such insights and obviously had listened to the new work, which is really uh nice that we got to talk about that so much. So I really appreciate our conversation as well.
Oh it's our pleasure. Thanks, Lindsay.
All right. You guys take care.
Bye bye.
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¶ Hosts' Reflections and Episode Wrap-up
That was the great Lindsay Buckingham talking to us on the podcast about his eponymous new album, his other solo work, and of course, his achievements with little-known blues combo Fleetwood Mac.
Well that was just a trip for us, wasn't it, Brighton?
Oh I'll say that.
I mean Lindsay's just been one of our heroes since we were kids, hasn't he?
Absolutely so, to get to chat with him about his working routines was just a joy and and faintly surreal. He was in great spirits though, wasn't he?
He was, yeah, and you know, he's had some trying times over the past few years, but he's obviously lost none of that creative spark.
Yeah, as evidenced by the new record. If you love Lindsay's stuff, you'll absolutely love this, so make sure you give it a listen.
So many great tunes on their killer arrangements.
And of course some choice guitar playing.
It was brilliant to get insight into the new record, but I did love hearing him talk about his songs for movies.
Yeah, we indulged ourselves a little with Holiday Road there, didn't we?
I should check out the video for that by the way.
I've seen it, yeah. It bears no relation to the film whatsoever. It's like this creepy dystopian David Lynch kind of thing, and not remotely about going on holiday.
Yeah.
I'm glad we got to ask him about those massive choruses as well that he seems to be able to just turn out in sleep.
Yeah. As he said, the chorus needs to be something worth waiting for, doesn't it? And you know, there has to be a kind of arrival and everything in the song needs to build to that.
Yeah. Yeah, it kind of brings to mind what Sondra Lurke said to us in his episode, you know, where he said that the verse is a promise that the chorus has to keep.
Yeah, I think about that a lot actually. Um he's a very wise man, is Sandra.
Yes.
But yeah, Lindsey's so strong on all fronts, isn't he? Musically, lyrically, and in terms of the production as well.
Yeah, I mean he was obviously developing those skills from an early age with his Sony machine, wasn't he, and then his Ampex?
Yeah, the record making elements has always been kind of bound up in his writing, hasn't it? And it combine all of that skill with the the taste to make good decisions and that kind of experimental bent that he has and and you get something very special.
Yeah, and obviously the catalogue is evidence of that.
Exactly, yeah, and that cubist approach he brought up, where he's borrowed an idea from the art world and applied it to his writing, I thought that was uh fascinating as well.
It was very illuminating, wasn't it? And you know, now that he's said it, it's kind of a great way for me to explain what I mean when I talk about his music, all those parts just working together in perfect harmony.
So huge thanks to Lindsay for his time, and cheers also to Ben and to Dave for all their help.
We'll be back for another episode very soon.
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