Out today (September 17th) is Lindsey Buckingham's new self-titled album. Buckingham, who had wrapped production on the set back in 2018 — before he was ousted from Fleetwood Mac, underwent open heart surgery, and split with his wife, whom he's now in the process of reconciling with.
Buckingham, who's now 71, has never kept an album in the can as long as he has for the new set, and was asked by Mojo, if the delay made him rethink any aspect of the collection: “Nothing’s really changed on the record. But there has been this sequence of strange events that kept it from seeing the light of day. . . I did the record with Christine McVie (2017's Lindsey Buckingham / Christine McVie) and wanted to go straight on to this. Fleetwood Mac wanted to tour. So we ended up going in a direction I didn’t see coming. Stevie (Nicks) orchestrated that, and the others were stuck in the middle. I thought at this point in our careers it doesn’t speak well of the legacy. So I had to restructure everything. But, hey, that's rock n' roll. . . “
He went on to say, “As soon as I got back into the idea of putting the album out, I started having health problems. So that kicked the whole thing down even further. . . My solo work is often more esoteric, and you lose nine out of 10 listeners because you’re disconnecting from their idea of what Fleetwood Mac is. But I wanted to make a pop record here.”
Even after all the years, Lindsey Buckingham — a guy known for living for the studio — admits recording new music is never as easy as one would hope: “It's always a close call just to get an album done — y'know, and I always feel like I made it by the skin of my teeth. So, whatever it is, I'm just happy that I finished something, that I put a group of tunes together and to some degree, they cohere. And you take what's given to you. You're sort of an antennae, for what's floating around in the ether and if that's what you ended up with — it's as much a mystery to me as it is to you. You're just the one responsible for taking it to the next three or four steps and getting into some form of completion.”
