Lindsey Goes His Own Way
Split from Fleetwood Mac and recovering from a major health scare, he’s still making noise
Lindsey Buckingham will tell you that he isn’t about the drama these days. He leaves that to his former bandmates in Fleetwood Mac.
Not everyone in his family subscribes to the same feeling. His son Will issued a declarative statement shortly after he was booted out of the band in 2018: “God, they ruined your life.”
“Not even close,” Buckingham replies, flashing a wan smile.
He’s right, in a way. Over the past three years, there have been other life ruination candidates. In short order, Buckingham nearly died, lost his voice, had an album repeatedly delayed, and suffered through a pandemic funk.
Still, he insists, he is in a good place. Right now, Buckingham is in a Burbank rehearsal space preparing for a tour supporting his new solo album, a self-titled 10-song, 37-minute pop gem sprinkled with enough California melancholy, domestic uncertainty, and sunny hooks to satisfy a divorced Santa Cruz poet. The album has been done for three years, but because of the aforementioned hiccups it remained unreleased until last month. Combined with the best songs on his 2017 duet album with exbandmate Christine McVie, Buckingham has churned out an hour’s worth of pop masterpieces at an age when most contemporaries are having a hard time pushing back from the allyou-can-eat nostalgia buffet. The new record is just the latest in a startling late-career renaissance that, not coincidently, began shortly after consummate bachelor Buckingham married his wife, Kristen Messner, and his three children were born.
His new album was recorded in a home studio behind their main house. “Recording with the band was like a movie production, you had to have a schedule, a script, and negotiate everything, a constant push and pull,” Buckingham tells me.
Now, Buckingham insists, he is content. Gone is the Buckinghamdescribed “Big Machine,” with its nonew songs and shows in arenas built more for the NBA playoffs than fingerpicking. Say hello to the “Little Ma
chine,” where he plays with friends in cozy theaters and sings a set that includes songs created in the 21st century. “Working by myself, it’s more like making a painting,” he says. “There’s less drama.”
Maybe not? The prime spot in the rehearsal-space parking lot reads reserved for kristen. This would be unremarkable except that Kristen filed for divorce earlier in the year.
“We’re still trying to work it out,” Buckingham tells me.
His Eraserhead hair has gone gray, and the former rock god now resembles a Roman oracle emeritus. He offers some TMI that would not have been out of place during vintage Fleetwood Mac, back when Stevie Nicks and Buckingham, and John McVie and Christine, were breaking up.
“With the pandemic, we’ve been doing marriage counseling on the phone,” says Buckingham. “During one of the sessions, she told the counselor that she wanted to file to see how it feels. I thought that she should figure out what she wants and then go ahead. But our lawyers told me apparently a lot of people do that.”
The band works through its first number. Initially, all I can hear is Buckingham’s guitar, a fingerpicking marvel that makes a sound so large that it’s like he is playing in 4D. Then, the opening verse kicks in:
Reading the paper, saw a review
Said I was a visionary, but nobody knew
Now that’s been a problem, feeling unseen
Just like I’m living somebody’s dream
My children look away, they don’t know what to say
My children look away, they don’t know what to say
Buckingham sings in an anguished lament usually reserved for kids whose parents forget to pick them up from soccer practice. It’s a bit strange to hear, since for most of his adult life, Buckingham led a band that sold tens of millions of albums. God help the rest of us if he feels “unseen.”
It’s my first experience hearing live music since the pandemic began, and it’s a delight listening to Buckingham and his band work through their entire set. The middle passage features some Mac songs — “The crowd would storm the stage if I didn’t play a few” — and Buckingham tweaks them, speeding some up and slowing others down. His voice is his second instrument, sometimes wielded like an additional guitar. I can hear [