Lindsey Buckingham gearing up for new album, tour

Lindsey Buckingham

LOS ANGELES, (Reuters Life!) – Fleetwood Mac  frontman Lindsey Buckingham has finished work on his third solo  album in six years, a project he expects to release in  September and promote with a tour.

Lindsey Buckingham

The album, “Seeds We Sow,” will also be his first outside  the Warner Bros. family. Buckingham told Reuters that he was  unhappy with its handling of his solo projects, and he was now  considering teaming up with a new label or going the DIY route  with an independent promotion team.

Fleetwood Mac is also a free agent after more than 40 years  at Warner Bros., Buckingham said. The Anglo-American rock icons  last released an album in 2003 and were the ninth biggest  touring act in 2009 with U.S. ticket sales of $55 million,  according to Pollstar.

Buckingham, 61, said Fleetwood Mac will continue to tour  and record. Given classic-rock audiences’ disdain for hearing  new music in concert, he said he enjoys the creative challenge  of giving old favorites a new sheen on stage.

Despite a busy family life, Buckingham has also been on a  creative tear in his solo career, releasing albums in 2006 and  2008, and touring to promote both of them. Before then, he had  not released a solo album since 1992’s “Out of the Cradle.”

Coincidentally, he said “Seeds We Sow” will be similar in  tone to “Out of the Cradle,” which received a rapturous  critical response but was a relatively poor seller.

ANOTHER STONES COVER

The title track opens the album. “I don’t think anyone’s  gonna take that for a radio song because it’s just voice and  acoustic guitar and there’s a lot of that on the record,” he  said. “It runs the gamut. There’s some lead playing, there’s a  little bit of everything on there.”

As he did on 2006’s “Under the Skin,” he covers an obscure  Rolling Stones song, this time “She Smiled Sweetly” from the  band’s 1967 album “Between the Buttons.” He previously reworked  their 1966 tune “I Am Waiting.”

Buckingham said he was a fan of the Stones’ experimental  recordings with original leader Brian Jones, an ill-fated  virtuoso with whom he shares a musical versatility.

He recorded “Seeds We Sow” at his home studio in Los  Angeles, playing most of the instruments and mixing it himself  while fulfilling his obligations as the married father of three  preteens.

While there is no theme to the album, his late-in-life  domesticity inevitably means songs “get filtered through  looking at the world a little differently, perhaps a little  more philosophically.”

Buckingham will take a break from laying the groundwork for  the album when he appears at the annual ASCAP “I Create Music”  Expo for musicians and songwriters in Hollywood on April 29.  His Q&A with pop singer Sara Bareilles will follow the  presentation of the performing rights group’s Golden Note Award  for career achievement.

“Maybe I’ll take a guitar and a little amp and do a little  picking on stage,” he said.

But he warned attendees not to ask him technical questions  related to publishing and licensing. And maybe not to tax him  too much with tips for songwriting.

“I don’t really think of myself so much as a writer as a  stylist, someone who came into writing from the back door and  has found it through a certain very specific and personal  means. It’s all about what you do with the style. Hopefully  I’ll have something good to say. We’ll see.”