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Back in Mac
Guitar
World
June 2003
Story by Alan Di Perna
Lindsey Buckingham Rejoins Fleetwood Mac for Say You Will,
his first album with the group in 15 years.
“You
sense that, in a weird way, we belong together,” says Lindsey Buckingham
of his fellow members in Fleetwood Mac. “And people who feel like they
don’t belong anywhere else can at least feel good about that. I think
that’s one factor in the band’s longevity.”
After a long hiatus, Fleetwood Mac are back with their first studio album
in eight years (and their first with Buckingham in more than 15). It’s
called Say You Will (Warner Bros.), and it artfully blends the sleek pop
songcraft of Fleetwood Mac’s Seventies heyday with the edgy guitar
experimentalism of Buckingham solo albums like 1992’s Out of the Cradle.
“One of the big questions on our minds was, Do we want to this in a safe
way or do we want to go for an element of surprise?” says Buckingham, who
produced Say You Will as well as played guitar and sang on the album and
wrote about half its songs. “I think we’ve been able to do a bit of both.
We’ve been able to get in those radio-friendly elements and still have
room to look into the arty side of things.”
The time seems right for Fleetwood Mac’ reentry into the pop marketplace.
The stage was set in 1997, when the classic Fleetwood Mac lineup --
Buckingham, singer Stevie Nicks, drummer Mick Fleetwood, bassist John
McVie and singer/keyboardist Christine McVie -- reunited for The Dance. An
MTV special, home video, live album and concert tour. The Dance found the
group revisiting blockbuster hits like “The Chain,” “Dreams,” “Rhiannon,”
“Say You Love Me” and “You Make Loving Fun,” bringing these tunes to a new
generation and rekindling the fondness of older fans. And just this past
year the Dixie Chicks have had a monster hit with Fleetwood Mac’s
“Landslide” -- a development that Buckingham views as a mixed blessing.
“’Landslide’ is a great song, but I don’t want anyone to get the funny
idea about Fleetwood Mac and country. Somebody at our label was talking
about how we should broaden our audience, and they started talking about
putting us on Country Music Television. I had to say, ‘Whoa! Stop right
there.’ There’s a certain kind of profile you want to put out there. And
that isn’t it.”
Fleetwood Mac’s career to date has been more akin to a soap opera than a
country music video. The group’s defining moment was 1977’s Rumours album,
which was recorded amid the very public breakup of John and Christine
McVie’s marriage and the romantic split between Buckingham and Nicks, who
had been a couple since ‘71. The album’s songs were a direct reflection of
these turbulent life changes.
“I don’t think you can discount the importance of that whole subtext to
what we were doing in the Seventies,” says Buckingham. “That was our real
lives out there, laid bare for people to see. It made an appealing selling
element.”
Ever since then, Fleetwood Mac have been a pop culture emblem for the
convoluted difficulties of adult relationships. The band’s constant
personnel changes, breakups and reunions have made Fleetwood Mac seem like
some charming yet emotionally unstable couple who keep getting divorced
and remarried. And, true to form, the story behind the making of Say You
Will is filled with complicated twists and turns. The album actually
started life circa 1994 as a Lindsey Buckingham solo record. By this
point, Buckingham had been out of Fleetwood Mac for seven years, having
left the group largely out of frustration over the drug excesses that
hobbled the making of 1987’s Tango in the Night. But in the mid Nineties
he renewed his friendship with Mick Fleetwood, who was, as Buckingham puts
it, “conducting his life differently by then.”
It wasn’t long before Fleetwood began contributing drum tracks to the solo
album Buckingham had in progress. One by one, Nicks and the McVies also
got involved. Realizing that the classic Fleetwood Mac lineup had, in
effect, gotten back together, Warner Bros. persuaded the group members to
participate in the aforementioned reunion MTV special The Dance. While all
this was taking place, Buckingham shelved the solo album he’d been trying
to make since ‘94. “I was once again sucked into the gravity of the black
hole that is Fleetwood Mac,” he says laughing.
After the first leg of the Dance tour, Christine McVie decided to leave
Fleetwood Mac and devote herself to restoring a stately old home that
she’d bought in England. “Christine just was not very happy being out on
the road,” says Buckingham. “We got to the point where we could have made
the decision to do more dates--to go over to Europe, Japan or
Australia--but she really didn’t want to do that. I didn’t have a problem
with that, because I had all this solo stuff sitting on the shelf and I
didn’t want to see it languish for another five years.”
But as the time approached for Buckingham to release his solo opus, his
record label was in the throes of a major reorganization. “All the people
that I had known at Warner Bros. for quite some time were on their way
out,” Buckingham explains. “It was a lame-duck situation over there. And I
was thinking, Oh, I’m not gonna put this out now. And as that was
happening, somehow that old gravity presented itself once again and we
thought about making it into a Fleetwood Mac album instead.”
Since Mick Fleetwood and John McVie were the rhythm section on all the
tracks, the idea made a lot of sense. Stevie Nicks has a whole cache of
songs that she’d already written, so it was largely a matter of recording
her material in a way that would mesh with the music Buckingham had in the
can. In the process of becoming a Fleetwood Mac album, the project moved
from Buckingham’s home studio to Oceanway Recording in Los Angeles (which
has since become Cello), finally settling down in a rented house near
Buckingham’s home in L.A.’s posh Bel Air suburb.
“It was kind of a luxurious garage situation,” the guitarist jokes. “The
living room was the control room, and it was also where we cut a lot of
the tracks. We had the drums isolated just 10 feet away from the console.
And I was engineering most of that, which was a good thing for me. I’ve
engineered my own overdubs at home, but never Mick's drums or anything
like that. So I got my hands in a lot of areas that I hadn’t gotten them
in before.”
Christine McVie’s departure affected the group dynamic in several ways.
For one, basic tracks were now being cut as a rock and roll three-piece,
with plenty of sonic space for Buckingham, Fleetwood and John McVie to
stake as their own. As a result, Buckingham really comes forward as a rock
guitar soloist on this disc. His solo albums are more about meticulously
crafted guitar overdubs, generally recorded direct and carefully
manipulated via analogue tape varispeeding. But the Say You Will sessions
found him blasting through an amp. Tracks like “come,” “Running Through
the Garden” and “Murrow Turning Over in His Grave” contain some of the
most aggressive riff slinging he’s ever committed to disc.
“When Mick and I started working in the studio, there was this incredible
release of energy between the two of us,” Buckingham says. “I guess it was
because we hadn’t played together in a long time, and my last few years in
Fleetwood Mac, before ‘87, hadn’t been much fun. so when we got in the
studio this time, there was just this great energy there to kick it.
There’s a real live feel to the tracks, and in many ways my guitar playing
was just a response to that.”
In the past, songwriting in Fleetwood Mac had been a three-way split, with
Buckingham, Nicks and Christine McVie all contributing songs. But with
Christine out of the picture, the emphasis falls more squarely on the
Buckingham/Nicks dynamic. There’s an element of historical irony in this,
as Lindsey and Stevie were an up-and-coming duo act when they joined
forces with Fleetwood Mac in 1974.
“Now Stevie and I joke about having played this exquisite waiting game to
go back to being Buckingham/Nicks again,” the guitarist says with a laugh.
“And in some ways, the differences between Stevie’s style and mine are
actually more marked by having only the two of us writing songs for this
album.”
Indeed, the duo has always been one of the greatest yin/yang acts in pop.
“She’s always been more the romantic and the poet,” says Buckingham. “She
romanticizes her own romanticism. That’s what makes her Stevie. I tend to
be more of a realist in my lyrics. She’s more up in the clouds with her
vision, and I’m tending to be more on the ground.”
Many of Buckingham’s songs on the album have a topical bent. “What’s the
world coming to?” The title of the opening track frankly asks. And “Murrow
Turning Over in His Grave” envisions the reaction that the late pioneering
new broadcaster Edward R. Murrow might have if he could see the current
state of the mass media. “Murrow gave that famous parting speech when he
left CBS, warning what would happen if we didn’t take responsibility for
TV and use it in the right way,” Buckingham explains. “Obviously, we
haven’t. So ‘Murrow’ is just a song about how the media gets abused and
how it is used for propaganda. Even the fact that somebody like GE would
own NBC. That whole connection--down to the agendas that go into what you
see on NBC, because it is owned by a weapons maker. It’s just kind of
weird and not very good. Not good for the kids. It diverts and deludes.”
Like many a maturing rock and roller, Buckingham finds the experience of
parenthood has made him especially apprehensive about the future course of
world events. “The whole album has been the soundtrack to what’s been
happening in my life over the past six years--getting married, having two
children, tearing down the house on the property I live on and building a
new one. And when you have children, you do get more concerned about the
world. Songs like ‘What’s the World coming To’ probably seem more literal
since 9/11. But all of these things were written before then. And they’re
all probably more about my personal world.
While some of Nicks’ material also has a topical slant, many of her songs
seem to exude a mood of romantic embitterment. “Well, I never know what
the hell she’s talking about,” Buckingham says. “Sometimes I think she’s
writing about me. I never know who she’s writing about. But it always
seems that she’s writing about somebody with whom she has, or has had, a
relationship. She and I never really talk about that. She’s very private
about that. But I wouldn’t be surprised if some of that stuff is still
about me. I think quite often she’ll write a song and part of it is about
one person and then it shifts to someone else. Kind of a
stream-of-consciousness style.”
There’s something endearing in the idea that, nearly 30 years after
Buckingham and Nicks split romantically, her lyrics still have the power
to evoke in him the emotions of their relationship. Creatively as well,
the tensions that have always existed between the duo are still as alive
as ever. Typically, he has always pushed for experimentation in the
studio, while she’s always been more of a traditionalist.
“Stevie sees herself as being defined within a certain set of boundaries,
outside of which things probably don't ring true to her, or to the people
who listen to what she does," Buckingham theorizes. "But at the same time,
I think she's intrigued by the idea of pushing the envelope, especially on
this album. She never wants to go too far with it, though. For example, I
asked her to sing on the song 'Come' and she wouldn't. I think she thought
it was dirty. That tells you something about someone who has been a rock
icon but in some ways is still quite a conservative person. And I don't
see her as someone who has lived her life very conservatively. So there's
an interesting dichotomy there."
The aforementioned “Come” is a prime example of the kind of innovative
production that Buckingham brings to the new Fleetwood Mac album. Vocal
and guitar tracks zip back and forth across the stereo field like
shuttlecocks in some aural badminton game. Buckingham says he took his
inspiration from Cubist painting for that track.
“It’s all based on the idea of trying to break vocal lines down into
facets, the same way Cubism breaks down a visual line. Each part of each
vocal line was sung separately and recorded on a separate track. Then each
track was processed a little differently. So one part of the line might
have a flangy effect, and the next part a wet reverb. So you’re making the
whole thing more artificial, in the way Cubism does, but it gives you a
whole spatial world. A few of the guitar tracks also have that
give-and-take quality that runs across from left to right.”
Buckingham also draw on the analogy between pop music and the fine arts to
explain the enduring presence of fiftysomething rockers like Fleetwood Mac
on the music scene. “There was never any dictum that said painters or
composers were never going to do their best work over age 30 or 40” he
says. “When rock and roll first came up, it was in the context of
rebellious youth. But in the context in which we now see rock and roll,
there’s no reason why people can’t be coming into their most fruitful
creative phase at age 40 or 50 or older. I don’t think anyone’s ever done
that before. Most successful rock bands who reach this age have either
lost interest or have been corrupted by the lifestyle that success can
afford you. But I feel like we’re starting a second phase of Fleetwood
Mac’s career in a potent way that has nothing to do with resting on our
laurels. It’s exciting. This is the best time of my life.”
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