About halfway through Lindsey Buckingham’s concert in Toronto last Wednesday, he described the difference between being in a titanic machine such as Fleetwood Mac and being on his own. “You don’t expect the same response,” Buckingham told the crowd at the cozy Danforth Music Hall. “You don’t expect the same label response. You don’t expect the same machinery and you don’t expect the public to embrace it in the same way. You really do it for the work and trust that the right ears will hear it.”
This was all by way of conveying his pleasant surprise when he turned in his new album, Gift Of Screws, and found the label believed the song “Did You Miss Me” was a potential single. In another era, “Did You Miss Me” would be catnip to radio programmers. It’s an aching song of absence, filled with lush layers of Beach Boys-like harmonies and a soaring chorus. But it betrays Buckingham’s characteristic edginess; after all, the song addresses loneliness from a skewed perspective, speculating about how much one’s absence affects loved ones. Not “gee, I missed you” but “gosh, I hope you missed me.”
That Buckingham would embrace such a seemingly neurotic sentiment and wrap it in such an appealing pop shell is his special genius. But airplay for thoughtful, complex music? How quaint. The October 10 AAA chart of Radio & Records does not place “Did You Miss Me” in the top 30. His expression of surprise that Reprise would see its potential as a single is a measure of the diminished commercial expectations for artists as singular as Buckingham, who, whether you liked it or not, generated some epochal MOR with Fleetwood Mac back-in-the-day.
Which is not to say that Buckingham is engaged in any act of nostalgia. Since 1984’s Go Insane, which was dense with the then-novel technology of sampling, Buckingham has never been shy about employing the latest studio gizmos and meticulous record production in service of his solo work. A glitchy beatbox and frenzied blasts of shrill guitar give bite to “Great Day” (which opened both the new album and the live show). A Dagwood sandwich stack of vocals and thundering percussive accents adorn the plush chorus to “Love Runs Deeper”.
The comforting, whispered verses to “Time Precious Time” (“Take all the time that you want/Take all the time that you need/Slow and easy/You might succeed”) are undercut by some of Buckingham’s most frenetic guitar arpeggios; it sounds like he’s stabbing the strings with a stiletto. The song says chill out and everything will work out, but the music is maddeningly impatient, like fingers drumming nervously on a table, and parallels the paradox of striving for a state of graceful acceptance in the face of all-too-human impatience and terror of mortality. When he performed “Time Precious Time” as a set closer, Buckingham further toyed with the presentation of the song instead of placid verses interspersed with soaring choruses, the choruses started off in a whisper and then gained intensity with each refrain until, by the end, Buckingham was straining to sing at the very top of his range.
Lindsey Buckingham performing “Time Precious Time” in St. Louis Sept. 29.
It would probably be enough that Buckingham is such a distinctive singer, songwriter and producer, but it’s a wonder he isn’t given more credit as a guitarist. Onstage, it is a pleasure and a wonder to watch him tear into Fleetwood Mac nuggets such as “Go Your Own Way” or a radically stripped-down version of “Tusk”. Typically without the use of a plectrum, he anchors the thumb of his right hand against the strings and appears to gesture with his index and middle finger as if attempting to flick away a booger, but he somehow produces a shimmering shower of notes. Toward the end of the concert, when he dipped back to Fleetwood Mac’s eponymous 1975 LP for “I’m So Afraid”, it seemed like an anticlimactic choice. But then came Buckingham’s solo, a wrenching, soaring, tortured thing of beauty the delivery of which appeared to leave him limp with exhaustion.
This year is not young, but with ten months down and two to go, I haven’t heard too many records that will challenge Gift Of Screws in the best-of-2008 sweepstakes. The title refers to Emily Dickinson:
Essential Oils are wrung
The Attar from the Rose
Is not expressed by Suns alone
It is the gift of Screws
The General Rose decay
But this in Lady’s Drawer,
Makes Summer When the Lady lie
In Ceaseless Rosemary
The gift of screws, for Dickinson and Buckingham, is the toil of creation, of rendering their work in the service of something lasting and beautiful. As Buckingham told his audience, these days doing it “for the work” must be the artist’s primary reward. For the rest of us, we get to simply enjoy the pleasure of the results. Assuming the right ears hear it.
Lindsey Buckingham performing “Don’t Look Down” in Toronto October 8.
