Features

Lindsey Buckingham: Sowing The Seeds Of Independence

Fleetwood Mac guitar guru Lindsey Buckingham was the chief songwriter for some of the most successful pop hits of the last 40 years, so it is strange to re-imagine him as a D.I.Y. artist. But that is exactly the route he’s taken on his self-released sixth solo album, Seeds We Sow, his first work since 1972’s Buckingham-Nicks LP away from Warner Bros. The spry 62 year old’s latest brings together the acoustic intricacies of his most recent material, 2006’s Under The Skin and 2008’s Gift of Screws, with the art pop jubilance of his underrated 1981 solo debut Law and Order to craft what many are considering his finest album outside the Mac to date.

What was the reasoning behind going your own way for Seeds We Sow ?

I’ve been on Warner Bros. for a long, long time and my deal with them recently expired. As you know, the large labels have become a completely different entity than they were 20 years ago; the whole thing has become so tiered and riddled with the boardroom mentality. And I didn’t fit into that. Even in decades past, my solo work was always looked upon with a certain skepticism by Warner Bros., you know? Of course, had it been Fleetwood Mac it might have been different, but that was the situation I found myself in. I did speak with a few independent labels. But at the end of the day, we just decided we could just go ahead and put it out ourselves, because it just seemed like all the things that they had to offer were things we could assemble ourselves and maybe do it with a little less politics.

Did seeing acts like Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead branch out on their own give you any hope of life beyond the majors for established artists?

Well, yeah on a certain level. Someone like Radiohead, who sold an awful lot of records as a band, they have a little more momentum to go on to be able to do that and to have expectations to sell. I think they always wanted me to get back to what was really important, which was Fleetwood Mac. But that’s something you get used to: its the small projects that keep you in touch with your heart and your aspiration to maintain the want to be an artist and not be a product, and that’s a nice place to be. And the outcome commercially is really a secondary thing. The people who are interested in what I do will gravitate towards this, and that’s all that is really important to me.

As someone who was in a band known for yielding bottomless budgets in the studio, what does going DIY mean to you? How liberating was the process?

Well, it isn’t the first time I’ve done that. I’ve done a lot of solo work where I’ve played most of the stuff myself, so the process wasn’t hugely different. I guess it was a little more completely one thing this time as it had been before. The actual idea of releasing it ourselves was not something we set out to do; it was just sort of a reaction to an apathy we were getting from the other side. It was just a way of trying to make an effective situation for ourselves.

“One Take” from Seeds We Sow has to have one of your most visceral guitar solos ever. Are you a big fan of shredding?

Well, I’ll tell you I am certainly a fan of Eddie Van Halen. He’s extraordinary, there’s just no doubt about it. What I think he had a bit of a problem with was making what he did work in the context of the band he was in. It’s hard to work [shredding] into the fabric of a song all the time, so I think in a way what he did might have worked even better in a slightly more sophisticated format. Maybe a fusion thing like John McLaughlin or Larry Coryell, where his skill was brought to bear with other people who could play against it more. In many ways, it always seemed like he was forced to play on top of whatever Van Halen recorded.