In the blissful exile of the recording studio, Lindsey Buckingham dreams of a dozen music boxes tinkling beautifully in various keys without cease. His melodies yield to other singers with extreme reluctance; they and he need coaxing out of their often truculent self-reliance. Yet for three decades fans could count on Buckingham donating tunes to Fleetwood Mac from a mysterious solo album he was tinkering with on the side, or to release this album himself, confident he’d gotten the bug out of his system.
Not this time. Buckingham quit Fleetwood Mac in 1987, then came back a decade later to film The Dance and play in its subsequent world tour. In 2018, band manager Irving Azoff informed him that, according to Buckingham, Stevie Nicks had fired him (Nicks disagrees). It took Crowded House’s Neil Finn and no less than Mike Campbell to replace him in the band’s lineup; meanwhile, Buckingham returned to an album he’d completed before that year’s tour. He’s settled on an eponymous title for his first post-Mac album—a declaration of independence and defiance. Yet Lindsey Buckingham manages to be his best solo effort since 1992’s Out of the Cradle. No dilution of his composing or his production sorcery here: Buckingham, all by his lonesome, has recorded an album whose insistent, almost irritating knack for melody suggests a resurgent talent for making his insularity accessible.
Where once his furiously strummed guitars, multi-tracked harmonies, and plickety-plockety programmed rhythms toughened the one-dimensional plaints, the lyrics and music of Lindsey Buckingham are in congruence, terms settled like a prenup agreement. Nicks and Christine McVie’s contributions to his Mac material added impassioned and rueful complements, respectively; now he coughs up the ambiguities on his own. “If you’re playing a part/I’ve got to understand,” he coos on “Blind Love.” Lest there be a doubt, he offers the following on “Power Down”: “Lies, lies are the only thing that keeps us alive.” On “Santa Rosa,” he repeats “if you go” not as a request so much as a conditional, singing of a “you” who wants to “leave it behind” as his guitar summons the essence of Sonoma County with a couple dulcet tones. The Buckingham of Law and Order (1981) and Go Insane (1984) would’ve kept howling and shredding, but here the prettiness of the tune suggests he’s made peace with the separation.
Reliant on a tension between his need to confess a sense of hurt through psychobabble and the way his tunes eddy in place before surging forward, Buckingham has often come off as a producer stuck with the unforgiving mode of the pop song, instead of a singer-songwriter meeting his audience: The surly punk-influenced tunelets on Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk (1979), the undulant electronic suite on Go Insane, and the hermetic, forbidding grace of Gift of Screws (2011) use verbal tags as excuses for sonic experiments. But on the new album, Buckingham sharpens the familiar modes; its sheen is its own attraction. “I Don’t Mind,” with its touch-activated pitch experiments he mastered on Tango in the Night’s “Big Love,” is second nature to him. Because he’s Lindsey Buckingham, he includes a foil: the spare “Dancing,” in which he breathes the title cushioned by his own oohs, as delectable as a similarly arranged cover of the Rolling Stones’ “I Am Waiting” from 2006’s Seeds We Sow.
To weave exquisite aural curtains protecting his private life has been Buckingham’s métier since the late ’70s; he has presented himself as an artist who shuns the world and its messes. For too long, veneration of his studio mastery resulted in underrating, if not condescending to, McVie and Nicks—longtime Mac fans grew up reading accounts of Buckingham saving their material. So besotted as a culture do we remain with the Solitary Male Genius that we breeze past credible accusations of abuse. Fans endure defensive psychobabble. The reward? In its poise, Lindsey Buckingham is an offensive gesture: nothing seemingly at stake, no fleshed-out objects of desire to trouble daylong studio sessions. It is an austere, beautiful, cruel album, a polished sword.
Buy: Rough Trade
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