Many of Buckingham’s solo releases have been pressure valves for when Fleetwood Mac was feeling a little too tense or controlled. After steering the group more left of center with the edgy and eclectic “Tusk” in 1979, the drummer and (in Buckingham’s words) “vibe master” Mick Fleetwood said they would have to reorient in a more commercial direction. Buckingham told him, “OK, well, I guess I’ve got to make some solo albums.”
Buckingham was able to release his first two — the taut “Law and Order” (1981) and the angular “Go Insane” (1984) — while still in the band, but after recording Fleetwood Mac’s 1987 blockbuster “Tango in the Night,” he took a decade-long leave to fulfill himself personally and artistically. (Buckingham’s decision to step away from an environment of excessive drug use and drinking was also, as he put it, “for my own survival.”) He made one of his best albums, “Out of the Cradle” (1992), and met Messner, when she photographed him for another solo project. He returned to the Mac in 1997 for their triumphant Clinton-era victory lap, “The Dance.”
“That guy is one of the best producers on the planet,” said Rob Cavallo, a record industry executive and Grammy-winning producer who’s worked on and off with Buckingham since the mid-90s. “So much of the style and techniques from ‘Rumours’ on, so much of it is him,” he added, referring to one of the most successful and storied albums of all time.
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“Lindsey Buckingham,” a blend of California-sunny power-pop and partly cloudy ballads, is perhaps the most straightforward release of his solo career. “I went into it thinking I wanted to make a pop album,” Buckingham said. While he noted that its musical reference points date back to “Rumours,” the subject matter is “family and long-term relationships.” Though he wrote and recorded the album in 2018, long before Messner filed for divorce, he now believes some of the stormiest songs were “a little bit prescient.”
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Still, these songs aren’t all emotional turbulence: Buckingham sees them as being about how “joy and pain have to coexist side by side.” Perhaps that, too, is prescient: After a period of separation, he and Messner are once again spending time together, even though he’s not yet sure what the future holds for their relationship.
A similar haze of uncertainty clouds the future of Fleetwood Mac: Even though Buckingham and some of his bandmates are once again on speaking terms, and he admitted he’d “be back like a shot” if they’d have him, his potential return is contingent upon one member in particular.
As he tells it, the latest tensions began simmering in 2017 when he asked to postpone a proposed Fleetwood Mac outing by three months so he could release and promote a solo album: “At least one person in the band” — his eternal ex Stevie Nicks, he clarified — “wasn’t very receptive to that.”
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