Last weekend I got tickets to see Lindsey Buckingham at the Ryman Auditorium on October 7, and I'm more than a little excited. I've been a huge fan of Buckingham-era Fleetwood Mac ever since the video for "Tusk" was in heavy rotation in the early days of MTV. Although the guy is a fantastic singer, songwriter and guitar player, his greatest strength is as a producer and arranger. Stripped of his brilliant production, Christine McVie's tunes would just be pretty pop songs, and Stevie Nicks would probably still be working as a waitress. But with Buckingham's magic touch, the Mac went from being a past-it's-prime British blues band to one of the great pop acts of the 70s and 80s. His solo albums have been equally fantastic artistically, though less successful commercially. I always joked that if I ever became a rock star, I was going to hire Lindsey to produce my first solo album. He is one of the few people I feel comfortable using the word "genius" to describe.
Lindsey Buckingham - "Steal Your Heart Away" (mp3)
This is a solo version of a song that later ended up on Fleetwood Mac's Say You Will album, and it's a perfect example that sometimes history does in fact repeat. Buckingham was working on a solo album when Fleetwood Mac reconvened to make Tango In The Night, and many of the songs that were meant for his own project were folded into the band's album. Ten years later he was working on another solo album... sessions that became the impetus for the Fleetwood Mac reunion after Mick Fleetwood played drums on a few tracks. Though it lacks Stevie Nick's backing vocals and has slightly different instrumentation, this is the same basic track that ended up on the Mac album. This version was released on a promotional CD put out by Best Buy in conjunction with Fleetwood Mac's 1997 tour, and is commercially unavailable.
His new album Under The Skin comes out on October 3, and you can listen to five of the songs from it in their entirety on his website.
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