By C. Bottomley & Jim Macnie
VH1.com
Thursday, May 29, 2003

The Big Mac is back, and Lindsey Buckingham explains how the pop stalwarts pieced together the very impressive Say You Will.

Never say never. In 1987, Lindsey Buckingham bid farewell to Fleetwood Mac, and it was a big change for the band. With partner Stevie Nicks in tow, the lanky singer/guitarist/songwriter joined the ever-morphing Brit ensemble in 1975; during this 12-year stint he helped transform the group from respected also-rans to the epitome of platinum-selling rock stars. Inspired by Buckingham’s romantic turmoil with Nicks (as well as the disintegration of John and Christine McVie’s marriage), 1977’s Rumours sold 17 million copies. It was full of irresistible soft-rock and passionate hard pop. Ultimately, it even spawned Bill Clinton’s campaign theme, “Don’t Stop.”

He issued a string of gorgeous solo discs, but retirement didn’t agree with Buckingham. Something was missing. Maybe it was Nicks’ witchy mysticism and gentle soul. Perhaps it was Christine McVie’s perky pop-craft and honeyed harmonies, or Mick Fleetwood and John McVie’s rhythmic backbone. Either way, with 1997’s The Dance, Buckingham was back in the fold, and the band began working on a stockpile of his songs.

Younger groups might still look to Rumours as their template, but Say You Will, the Mac’s first album in eight years, beguiles, bewilders, and rewards. Buckingham’s guitar takes center stage, with fertile freak-outs and up-to-the-minute atmospherics that dazzle with their daring. McVie sat this album out, so songs like “Peacekeeper” bristle with Buckingham-Nicks’ethereal harmonies and chug-along pop beats. There’s even the odd diversion into political commentary. The band that made Say You Will is an inclusive and broad-reaching entity. Unlike many groups their age – 36 years if you’re counting – the Mac still have their teeth. Or should that be tusks?

On the eve of their American tour, Buckingham spoke to VH1 about reinventing the Mac, painting in the studio, and which of the band’s songs could get him out of bed.

VH1: Is getting back into action and starting a new tour second nature at this point?

Lindsey Buckingham: The challenge of getting into that mold is more about how you present it. People like The Eagles tour all the time without having an album. For us, it’s how you dignify having made a very fresh album which is basically a reinvention of the name Fleetwood Mac, and present it in a way that is still familiar – not too challenging!

VH1: Say You Will is a very progressive album, though. Some parts border on being experimental.

LB: I would say so, too. I remember when Rumours came out, it got some crappy reviews. But in a year’s time, a lot of people were revising their opinion of it. But yeah, this album is a sort of marriage between the best of Rumours and the best of Tusk. And yet, it is breaking new ground.

VH1: How did the album come about after such a long lay-off?

LB: It was an epic effort. It started off as a solo album of mine. Most of the songs that ended up on Say You Will were cut with Mick before we did the Dance tour. After Mick and I had gone into the studio and John [McVie] came in to play some bass, some people thought, “This is interesting.” There was this intervention happening, where people said we needed to do a live album and tour. When the tour was done, I went back into my garage and finished all those songs pretty much in the state that you hear them on the album. “Peacekeeper” and “What’s the World Coming To” were the only ones that were cut later.

VH1: You like to play with the studio on your solo albums, and Say You Will is pretty thick with audio ideas and treatments.

LB: It was gratifying for me, because during my time away from Fleetwood Mac, I felt like I got better at using the studio as an instrument. I consider the process that I use on my own to be a kind of “painting.” The studio is not only an extension of the guitar; it’s an extension of your imagination.

VH1: How was the recording process this time around as a reformed group?

LB: One of the things that we wanted to do was present something closer to the energy of what we do on stage. Some of that was suggested by the fact that when we played as a three-piece, we all had much more room to maneuver. In a way, we’ve done the best playing I’ve ever heard on a recording. So it was about reeling that out and not worrying about anything other than what we do best.

VH1: How is it now that Christine has left?

LB: Well, when I first joined the band, I had to adapt to fit in, because so much of the [musical] space was already taken. John is a fairly intricate bass player, and Christine’s keyboard sound took up a lot of space as well. Not in a bad way, just in terms of what was left over. We don’t see her absence as any kind of detriment. It’s just different. Stevie and I were able to broaden our own particular landscapes as writers. It was kind of a gift, and very much in the tradition of a band that has re-invented itself many times!

VH1: Mick and John are an unbelievable rhythm section. Describe what it is that they do.

LB: Mick is a diamond in the rough. He does what he does, and after all this time, he still doesn’t know quite how he does it. He doesn’t want to know! There’s a real Zen feel to that: he knows he has a feel. But he’s just the ultimate in “dumb” – in the best sense of the word! He values that: he values the idea of feeling loose and having a groove that sits appropriately behind the beat. John is sort of an enigma. He’s a strange combination of [Charles] Mingus and [Paul] McCartney. He doesn’t talk about it, but he’s extremely smart and extremely melodic with what he does. It’s very easy to underestimate what he does – until you really listen to it. Through all the incarnations of the band, those two guys have been the thread.

VH1: Which of Stevie’s new tunes touches you the most, as a fan of hers?

LB: I like “Illume” a lot. I like “Thrown Down” a lot, too, sort of for my own petty needs because I felt I helped [articulate that tune]. “Say You Will” is real catchy, and will probably be the next single.

VH1: Is making a record all craft or do your ideas come to you from your subconscious?

LB: Sometimes when you’re in the process of “painting,” you get yourself into some sort of a reverie, where the subconscious comes to the surface a bit. With me, the songs don’t come fully formed before they start being worked on. I tend to think the process of making the record is part of the writing process, in terms of being flexible about what comes in and what changes.

VH1: What message would you want listeners to come away with after listening to “Murrow Turning Over in His Grave”?

LB: Edward R. Murrow was around when there was some standard for reporting on television. When he retired, he gave this speech about how TV was being used to distract and amuse and not particularly educate anyone. He said if the people responsible for what was on TV didn’t strike a balance, “history would take its revenge.” I wrote that song during the OJ Simpson trial. In some ways, that was the beginning of a new low, with Court TV popping up out of the blue and all that stuff which pretends to be objective news reportage, [but] is completely opportunistic.

VH1: In our house we often play “Think About Me” to start the day. If you were to play one Fleetwood Mac song in the morning, what would it be?

LB: I guess you could always fall back on ‘’Don’t Stop.’’ It’s harder to respond to a question like that when it’s you who’s made the music. But that’s one that goes across the board as an uplifting message.

AP ─ Seven years ago when guitarist Lindsey Buckingham began working on a solo album, he was confronted by a cold reality: his record company had no interest in a Lindsey Buckingham solo album.

A Fleetwood Mac album, however, was a different story.

The company got its wish. One of rock ‘n’ roll’s brand names – and longest-running soap operas ─ has been revived this spring with four-fifths of its most famous lineup.

A new album, Say You Will, is the first project with all-new material for Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, drummer Mick Fleetwood and bass player John McVie since 1987. Missing is retired keyboard player Christine McVie, making this edition more muscular and guitar-oriented.

“All of us in this band, every time it comes around and happens again, are surprised and delighted, because we never think it is going to happen again,” Nicks says.

The classic lineup ─ with Christine McVie included ─ had reunited for a nostalgia tour and live album in the late 1990s. But becoming a creative unit again was another thing entirely.

Even before the tour, Buckingham had invited the band’s old rhythm section to work with him on his solo album. But Buckingham’s solo work has never sold very well and Warner Bros. was disinterested. Realizing it was the only way to get the music out, and after years of work, the three men decided to invite Nicks to join them in the summer of 2001.

She was just about to leave for a long concert tour to support her own solo album. So she sent a disc of 17 songs she had written over several years ─ but never released ─ to Buckingham, Fleetwood and John McVie, who were working in a California studio.

Buckingham, the band’s producer, saw Nicks’ gift as a test. And the Fleetwood Mac soap opera began a new installment.

“Her involvement emotionally came in stages,” he says. “She had sent stuff over, but I don’t think she had a lot invested in what she sent over.”

Not so, Nicks says.

“I didn’t feel like I was dipping in my toe,” she says.

“I had to go on this tour because Warner Bros had just released my record. … I gave them the CD and said, ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can.”‘

Buckingham and Nicks with different interpretations of the same event?

There’s a shock. Even cursory fans know their history: The couple’s romantic breakup fueled the mega-selling album Rumours, and they’ve danced delicately around each other’s psyches ever since.

“All of that is never going to be behind us,” says Nicks, as she gazes at the ocean from her California home. “Our destinies are so entwined. We fight a lot. We have a lot of arguments. But in the long run, we’ve worked it all out.”

Buckingham is now a married father of two. Nicks is single, and has spoken candidly about how hard it is to mix relationships and her career; the new song “Silver Girl” is a big-sisterly ode to friend Sheryl Crow, who is confronting the same issues.

David Bauder / AP (press release) / Friday, May 9, 2003

Pop’s longest-running soap opera has been renewed for another season. Harmonious negotiations, a revised cast and a fusion of two scripts yielded Fleetwood Mac’s long-awaited studio reunion, Say You Will, which enters Billboard at No. 3 after selling 218,000 copies its first week.

Singer/songwriters Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, former lovers whose Rumours-era split left a bitter wake, each contribute nine songs, some originally destined for their solo albums. Drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie, founding members of the storied band, returned to the fold, while keyboardist Christine McVie opted to retire.

Sturdy musical roots and fragile emotional ties make Mac both a reliable and unpredictable commodity in rock. Fans embraced the band’s lucrative comeback in 1997, yet the players retreated into uncertainty. Buckingham resumed work on a solo album, but when a Warner Bros. executive disparaged it, he shelved it in anticipation of a leadership change at the label.

“It was a lame-duck situation, so I played a waiting game,” he says. “I said to Mick, ‘Let’s cut some tracks with Stevie.’ If there was no interest in my solo album from the new regime, I figured it could morph into something else.”

Incoming chief Tom Whalley did fancy Buckingham’s songs, but it was a moot point, since a Mac homecoming was in full swing. Before Nicks left on a solo tour in July 2001, she handed Buckingham a 17-track demo containing songs dating back to 1976. On New Year’s Eve, she listened to the tracks Buckingham had polished while producing the record.

“I realized I needed to add new material,” Nicks says. “I told Lindsey, ‘I know you’ve already been waiting for me for six months, but I need 30 days.’ I told my brother, ‘Fire up the 12-track Akai,’ I got all my journals and went to work.”

She delivered four songs in four weeks. Smooth sailing? Not quite. Sparks flew when Buckingham’s desire for a two-CD set was overruled, despite his willingness to absorb any financial loss entailed in a configuration that yields less profit per track than a single disc.

“Some things conspired to force me to rethink that: politics in the band, certain things that were said,” Buckingham says. “Then we had a confrontational experience in getting a running order everyone was all right with.”

Now he’s fretting over the set list for a tour starting May 7 in Columbus, Ohio, and heading east. The tour swings to the South and Midwest in June and hits the West Coast in July.

“It’s more daunting than ever,” he says. “The new album needs to be dignified, but people with a bottom-line mentality say you can’t do too many new songs. How do you do a show that’s not too much of one thing? I’m losing sleep.”

Nicks says creative tension and her uneasy dance with Buckingham are the least of her worries.

“Mick and John could fire us and start over,” she says.

Edna Gundersen / USA Today / Sunday, April 27, 2003

Fleetwood Mac, the zillion-selling adult-rock stars of the Seventies are back. And no, it’s not just for the money. JAMES MCNAIR talks to the band about their soap-opera-like past and hopes for the future

As settings for a Fleetwood Mac interview go, Culver City Studios seems suitably grandiose. Its exterior facade is a white colonial mansion that featured in Gone with the Wind. Orson Welles filmed Citizen Kane here, and in 1933, this is where King Kong fell for Fay Wray. Today, though, Fleetwood Mac are here, just outside Los Angeles, to rehearse for an upcoming US tour in support of their new album, Say You Will. Eleven years after their White House gig in honour of President Clinton’s inauguration, it’s still location, location, location.

The Mac are, of course, best known for their zillion-selling 1977 colossus, Rumours. And the story behind that AOR classic is almost as famous as the music itself. Fuelled by most of California’s cocaine – the drummer, Mick Fleetwood, reportedly considered a sleeve-note dedication to his dealer – Rumours featured “Dreams” , “Go Your Own Way” and “Don’t Stop” , songs that commented on Stevie Nicks’ messy break-up with the guitarist, Lindsey Buckingham, and Christine McVie’s split from the bassist, John McVie. Nicks went on to have a brief affair with Fleetwood, whose first marriage was on the rocks, while Christine McVie started seeing the band’s lighting director, Curry Grant. Even an Eastenders scriptwriter, I put it to Fleetwood, might have baulked at such close-knit dating.

“It was all part of the ongoing saga that makes the band unique”, grins the lanky 55 year-old. “Unique even to this day, let me tell you. I went to Hawaii recently with my wife Lynn and our kids, and Stevie rented a house just down the road. My wife is a soulmate, but Stevie is a soulmate, too, and Lynn knows that. There’s so much you can enjoy with that dynamic.”

Say You Will marks the departure of the keyboardist/songwriter, Christine McVie. More important, perhaps, it sees the return of Buckingham for what many consider the first proper Mac studio album since 1987’s Tango in the Night. The new record has garnered some excellent reviews, and with Christine gone, Stevie and Lindsey share the songwriting credits much as they did in their pre-Fleetwood Mac duo, Buckingham-Nicks. Talking to Buckingham, however, one senses Say You Will’s precise, nine songs apiece tally is not mere happenstance.

“There were some problems with the track-listing near the end”, confides the guitarist, now 53. “Stevie was in Hawaii on vacation while I was in Los Angeles trying to master the album, and we got into some over-the-phone conflicts. It’s been hard for Stevie to feel good about what we’ve accomplished, and I really hope she will at some point. She’s yet to say ‘Good work on my songs, Lindsey.’ ”

Managed by the man Buckingham calls “Big, bad Howard” (Kaufman), Nicks clearly holds a strong negotiating hand. Her solo albums – witness 2001’s Trouble in Shangri La – have consistently sold far more than those of Buckingham, and as many of the Lindsey songs on Say You Will were originally slated for solo release, you could argue that the Fleetwood Mac brand is something he’s falling back on – and not for the first time. What’s unquestionable, however, is that Buckingham’s presence has usually served to enliven Fleetwood Mac. Indeed, without his diligent production skills and sussed, sometimes feral-sounding musicality, the post Peter Green Mac have often sounded rather bland.

This time, Buckingham’s edge and grit fire his US media critque, “Murrow Turning Over in His Grave” (named after the noted critic of McCarthyism, Edward J. Murrow), and the deliciously barbed “Come” (Think of me, sweet darlin’/ Every time you don’t come”). Some have alleged that he wrote the latter about Anne Heche, a former lover who went on the have a lesbian relationship with her fellow actress Ellen Degeneres. “That surprised me as much as it did everybody else,” says Buckingham, but as he’s now happily married with two young children, it’s perhaps understandable that he declines to comment further. Asked whether people still tend to assume that his and Nicks’ lyrics are about each other, however, he’s more forthcoming.

“Yeah, they probably do,” he laughs. “And in Stevie’s case, at least some of them may be. Why ‘may be ‘? Because it’s not for me to say if they’re about me. I suspect some of them are, but then Stevie has written songs all through our relationship that I assumed were about me, then discovered that they weren’t, or that they were hybrids. I can be as confused about that as the general listener.”

Stevie Nicks is almost 55 now. Her hair is still pleasingly big and blond. With her Yorkshire terrier Sulamith asleep in her lap, she tells me that she misses Christine McVie and her “crazy English humour” every day. “It used to be like that TV show Charmed, where they go: ‘The power of three!’ ” she says, reminding me that she publishes her songs through Welsh Witch Music. “Chris and I had the power of two.”

Nicks is now single. Her relationship with Buckingham, she said in 1997, “was as close to being married as I ever will be again.” Listening to songs such as “Destiny Rules” and “Thrown Down” – “He fell for her again/She watched it happen,” runs the opening of the latter – it’s hard to decide whether she stills holds a candle for the guitarist or is simply exploiting a highly marketable aspect of rock’s greatest soap opera. She may be doing both.

” ‘Thrown Down’ is about Lindsey,” Nicks admits, “but I wrote that around the time of the Dance tour in 1997. Let’s just say he continues to be a well of inspiration, which is terrific.”

Right. But can she and Lindsey talk about their relationship more openly now? “You want the truth?” , she says. “We don’t talk a lot about our past. We never have. It’s like ‘Do we need to go there?’ And it hasn’t turned out so bad, has it? Each of us has good, balanced lives now, and we’re still able to make music together. So apart from being married and having our own family, what more could Lindsey and I have asked for?”

And her affair with Fleetwood? How does she view that these days? “That was a long, long time ago,” she whispers. “It was like a little dream. What has lived, though, is that Mick and I still have a great love and respect for each other. Our relationship was so short that it didn’t have time to build up animosities and jealousies. Mick will tell you -and I will tell you – that a lot of the reason it didn’t continue was because we knew it would be the end of Fleetwood Mac. So we were very mature about that; we made the right decision.”

One new Nicks song that certainly isn’t about Buckingham – or Fleetwood, for that matter – is “Illume (9/11)”. Nicks was in New York when the twin towers were attacked, and “Illume” documents her feelings at the time. “My Rochester show was canceled because of an act of war,” she says,” and at one point we had a military escort on our wing. That whole period nearly drove me into a mental home.”

“I read Stevie’s poetry for that song before she came in with the music,” says Fleetwood. “She was very unsettled by 9/11, as we all were. The groove for “Illume” is incredibly simple, and she was like : ‘Is this any good? Is it doing enough?’ I said, ‘In my opinion, Stevie, this is all about you; this is your modern-day “Gold Dust Woman.”‘ It has that Edith Piaf element coming through; that thing where the singer’s relationship with the lyric is incredibly personal and powerful.”

Fleetwood, one soon realises, is the Mac’s most fervent flag-waver. He’s done everything in his power to keep this band alive, and his close friendships with Nicks and Buckingham have left him well placed as diplomatic go-between. Toward the end of my chat with him, I can’t resist playing devil’s advocate. What would he say to those who claim the Mac have reconvened for the cash? “Fleetwood Mac has morphed its way back,” he says. “You might say that this album is the result of eight years of people slowly getting to know each other again, so if somebody wants to be cynical and say that this is a money-making exercise, they’d be hard pushed to make a case. I don’t know how we get stuff done sometimes, because we’re a semi-dysfunctional family with four different managers, and it’s a nightmare, really. The truth is that I hope we make a load of cash. But how we’ve come to this point has been in the lap of the Gods.”

James McNair / Independent Review (UK) / Friday, April 18, 2003