The song Lindsey Buckingham wrote in anger at his record label
Balancing a solo career with life in Fleetwood Mac was always challenging for Lindsey Buckingham. As they were one of the biggest bands in the world, Buckingham was under pressure to save his best songs for the group/ Something which would eventually become incredibly frustrating for the musician.
While the guitarist could comprehend why his label, Reprise, a subsidiary of Warner Bros who had Fleetwood Mac on their roster, would want to ensure the best material was going to the more commercially viable act, the process was infuriating. Often, songs were left in purgatory for many years, and all Buckingham wanted was for them to be heard, regardless of the vehicle.
Buckingham is inspired to write songs largely due to his desire to share them with fans, and having that taken away is understandably hard to accept. After the commercial failure of 1992’s Out of the Cradle, which only charted at 128 in the US, Buckingham’s solo career was put on the back burner, with his next project taking 14 years to arrive.
Despite his radio silence for almost a decade and a half, Buckingham never stopped writing. Recording sessions for 2006’s Under the Skin began in 1995, but the label refrained from supporting another solo record, instead encouraging Buckingham to save the material for Fleetwood Mac once they reunited.
The recording of his follow-up record, 2008’s Gift of Screws, also began in 1995, and a bootleg edition of the album began to surface among fans in 2001. On the album, which evolved from its original carnation with a few surviving songs such as the title track, Buckingham addressed his dissatisfaction with his label on ‘Underground’. In the effort, the former Fleetwood Mac member hit out at the unrelenting ways of the music business while accepting his position away from the limelight.
He sings on the track, “Give us a song but don’t live what you sing, Say what you mean but please don’t mean a thing.” Later on ‘Underground’, Buckingham utters, “They heard fifteen seconds and that was enough. The idea was new but the business was rough.”
Speaking to EW about the genesis of the song, Buckingham revealed: “They never really knew what to do with my solo stuff. Fleetwood Mac was the priority…By the time I got to doing Gift of Screws, it felt like their interest in me as a solo artist was on the wane, and that’s really what that song is about. The idea was I guess I’ll just keep going underground.”
While it took many years for his two comeback albums to be completed, Buckingham eventually enjoyed the contrast from Fleetwood Mac. Nevertheless, if it wasn’t for the band’s reunion and subsequent world tour, perhaps Buckingham’s solo career would be looked back on differently, but instead, it was forced to exist underground.
