Category: News

Geraldo Rivera is no stranger to the way things are done at Fox News, having been a part of their team—initially as a war correspondent—for the past 20 years. But ever since COVID-19 became the biggest headline, the 78-year-old has regularly found himself butting heads with several of his colleagues. On Tuesday night, he tweeted out a no-context message that many understood to be a clear shot at some of his fellow Fox News hosts, saying:

“Nothing is more contemptible than vaccinated commentators urging their unvaccinated followers to fight (and die) for their freedom. It’s like the punk-safe on the street-urging the guy in the ledge to jump.”

While his tweet elicited plenty of snarky replies, it almost seemed like a prelude an hour or so later, when he appeared on Hannity to discuss the backlash against Aaron Rodgers, who lied to the NFL about his vaccination status (and who, apropos of nothing, apparently has a huge dong). While Hannity and fellow Fox News personality Dan Bongino think Rodgers is being treated unfairly, Rivera says what Rodgers did was a total a**hole move, as Yahoo! Entertainment reported.

Though Rivera claimed that Rodgers and Shailene Woodley are one of his favorite couples (random), he went on to tear into the Green Bay Packer for being selfish, saying: “If I’m in your room with my grandchildren who are not vaccinated because they are too young and you lie about vaccine status and you sneeze on my grandchildren, that could be a crime. That is absolutely so selfish.”

Meanwhile, Hannity was complaining that while he believes in the science behind vaccines (and is reportedly vaccinated himself), he’s not necessarily a fan of vaccine mandates. Which is when Rivera really lost it, telling his colleague:

“I despise vaccinated people who are smug in their protection who urge unvaccinated people to exercise their freedoms. It’s like the guy in the street telling the guy on ledge to jump.”

To be continued.

“I can’t pretend to be humble about it,” Lindsey Jordan, more commonly known as Snail Mail, tells me about her new record Valentine, out Nov. 5 via Matador. She’s wearing a white tank top, a golden locket around her neck, and silver slacks with intricate prints. She doesn’t look like she should be humble; she looks like the embodiment of the real deal.

The 22-year-old was not prepared for the success and fame that her debut full-length Lush ushered along, which is something she’s disclosed many times in interviews. It’s not exactly surprising; she was only 17 when she wrote the record, and the project of Snail Mail started off by playing basement shows. A few years after receiving praise from Pitchfork, NPR, and pretty much every other prestigious music outlet, she appears to be readily accepting the royal status.

“I feel like I’m really growing as a musician and a songwriter, and it’s hard to look backward at all,” she says. “Any expectations that are held that have to do with my teenage self are just super unfair because I’m a thousand percent different person. It’s uncomfortable because I feel like I have to kind of ease everyone into the adult version of my music and myself.”

Valentine pushes us into Jordan’s maturity, instantly portraying distance from the completely separate world of Lush. The songs on the first record are known for their visceral honesty, but it’s anchored by a kind of timidness; this new album is elevated with a newfound sense of strength and confidence. The opening song alone reaches a louder, more unabashed climax than any of Lush does, and the rest of the album oscillates between those roaring highs and intimate lows.

Her fashion choices communicate this with sophistication and a refined nature. Her suits give off an aura that explicitly demonstrates growth from Lush; Lush is someone who wants to see the world, and the aesthetics of Valentine are that of someone who has seen the world.

“My stylist Alexa [Lanza] and I worked for months together on figuring out how everything was gonna be,” she explains. “I think it’s really important to be careful when you start working with a stylist that you don’t start looking dumb. Bringing fashion into things is a slippery slope. You want to look cool, but not look like you’re wearing a rockstar costume. A big thing about being a part of the process was getting everything so that it’s like a high-stylized version of how I actually feel inside. I think it’s important to not let the clothes wear you. I have a very distinct style and a distinct eye for what I like and what I don’t like. It’s made the shopping process extremely difficult, but I also am really happy with everything that I wear. It’s like a sweet spot of glam and preppy and kind of androgynous.”

The shirt on the cover art of the third single “Madonna” is from the 1800s. The black, puffy garment makes Jordan stand out like a sore thumb against the white background. “It was crazy,” she says with a laugh. “It made me feel gross wearing it. I was like, ‘How would this have been washed if it’s well-preserved?’ And they were skinny as fuck back then. I was [sucking in my stomach] the whole time because there was a jacket inside the jacket and all this stuff. It’s an interesting thing to mess with, especially when you’re messing with the gender of it because they weren’t doing that back then.”

There’s almost a sense of sacrilege in this, but that’s a common theme of Valentine. The singer plays with divinity as if it’s an everyday topic for her, whether it be by calling herself the devil in “Ben Franklin” or summoning Jesus on “Glory.” The songs were primarily written during the pandemic, when she stayed productive and inspired by exercising and cooking. The process of being a newly-successful musician was strange considering there was really only one avenue through which she could do her job: relentlessly working on Valentine.

“Writing a record is a scary thing because, unless you work with songwriters, it’s really you, yourself, and you, just trying to keep your career afloat,” she says. It was the only expectation of her, and it intensified as Lush’s release in 2018 grew more distant. “I was just taking it one day at a time trying to do what feels right. Sometimes that’s writing. Sometimes it’s not,” she says. “It only feels real to me to make songs about things that I feel strongly about, but it doesn’t always translate to music I want to put out. Sometimes I cut songs because they’re too personal. Sometimes I change verses because they’re too personal. Sometimes I think something is just the perfect amount of personal. Sometimes I think something is a little too personal but I put it out anyway.”

The few years in between Lush and Valentine felt long to impatient fans, but it was especially long for Jordan. “[Lush] is so full of wonder and curiosity and pure excitement about life,” she says. “It’s super weird to return as a kind of cynical adult.” Her adulthood is mirrored in her new style as well: “I still hear so many things about what I was doing before, even as far as going into styling for shoots. It’s hard to be like, ‘Yeah, I wore a dress two years ago, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s who I am now.’ It feels uncomfortable for me to even think about it because it’s just a self that I’ve shed. I don’t want to look at my 19-, 18-, 17-, 16-year-old self.”

Things are always changing; she says that things are already even different from when she worked on Valentine. “But I still feel the pain of the songs. It was such an intense process and all of the songs do really mean significant things to me. I think with Lush and Habit, I was writing from the experiences that I had, but a lot of those feelings went away really quickly because they were about crushes and the pressures of growing up and stuff like that. And that just doesn’t cut as deep later as some of the stuff that I’m singing about now. It’s really twisted and turned my life; it really made me the person that I am.”

Valentine is not only a departure from teenage years, but also a goodbye to being regarded as only an indie-rock figure. “Madonna” and “Ben Franklin” are jangly, mischievous pop tracks with R&B undertones; throughout the whole album, there are synth-laden moments, detours into folk, and many places where genre is eluded altogether. “I think I started to get to a point where the guitar-heavy stuff appeases everybody. I was like, ‘If I’m making a guitar record, I’m doing it for someone else,’” she explains. “I didn’t want to make another ‘Damn this chick rocks’ album. I’m so sick of being the chick that rocks. I just want to make something that feels entirely like I’m not doing any kind of people-pleasing here.”

She also learned what to prioritize this time around, taking more creative control with Valentine than she did with Lush. “Last time I was so overwhelmed that I didn’t take any interest in the producing or music videos or any of the stuff that would have taken me out of how busy I already was,” she says. “But something I learned about myself is that it’s more important for me to put the effort in when it’s hard because later it’s a lot more rewarding.” The result is Valentine being not just music, but a carefully-constructed world that’s cohesive and layered with intent. There’s no reason for Jordan to be humble; Valentine feels like the beginning of a Snail Mail empire.

Back in March, Cardi B achieved a huge milestone: She became the first-ever female rapper to have a solo song be certified Diamond, meaning it garnered over 10 million sales in the US. Now, a few months later, Cardi’s predecessor has followed her achievement. Nicki Minaj’s 2010 track “Super Bass” just hit 10 million sales, meaning she’s the second-ever female rapper to have a song be Diamond-certified.

“Super Bass” originally appeared on the deluxe version of Minaj’s debut album Pink Friday, nearly a decade ago. Now celebrating its new Diamond status, Minaj took to social media to share her gratitude. She posted a video of the official Diamond certification plaque, which is encrusted with shimmering rhinestones and features a photo of Minaj from the “Super Bass” single art. In the post’s caption, the rapper thanked her fans for a “decade of support” and even gave Taylor Swift a special shout-out. “Thank you for over a decade of support,” she wrote. “(special thx to Ester Dean, Kane, Juice, Taylor Swift, Sofia Grace & Rosie, Ellen, Young Money/Cash Money & Republic. This one was released b4 the streaming era, so millions of fans actually purchased the song. I’m so grateful for you guys. Sending love & blessings your way.”

Cardi B is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Picture, if you will, Maya Rudolph coming home after a long day at work saying “bubble bath.” Waiting for her is her long-time partner Paul Thomas Anderson, their four kids, and a Marvel movie. That’s a typical night at the Rudolph / PTA household, based on an interview with the Oscar-nominated (but somehow never Oscar-winning!) filmmaker.

When asked by Variety what movies he’s enjoyed recently, Thomas Anderson replied, “Shang-Chi was good fun. There’s a terrific energy about it, but I also live in a Marvel-obsessed household, so continuing the journey of these Marvel stories is exciting to us.” He also said that he liked Venom 2: Let There Be Carnage and Titane, one of the best movies of the year. He expanded on his feelings for the Julia Ducournau film:

“Proceed with caution: I have no idea how to recommend it, because it’s certainly not everyone’s cup of tea. I don’t know entirely how I feel about it, but, my God, you are in the hands of a real filmmaker. I was holding on tight for dear life, and that is a terrific feeling.”

PTA was also quizzed on whether he thinks Daniel Day-Lewis, who he worked with on There Will Be Blood and Phantom Thread, will come out of retirement. “We can all get together and hope he’ll come back. Wouldn’t it be great? When Phantom Thread came out, I was asked about it a lot, and I feel the same way now that I did then. Yes, I’m greedy like everybody else. I want more Daniel Day-Lewis performances,” he said. “But I also think he’s given us more than enough, and we should stop being so greedy. He’s the king.”

Paul Thomas Anderson’s next movie, Licorice Pizza, comes out this month.

(Via Variety)

Among Us was the surprise hit of 2020 that nobody saw coming. Mainly because the game was released back in 2018 with very little fanfare to it, but with everyone seeking ways to interact with each other online during COVID-19 lockdowns, Among Us quickly became a hit on Twitch and among friend groups. It was the perfect online party game.

Thankfully, most of us are finding some semblance of normalcy in our lives and are able to go see our friends in person again, but that doesn’t mean Among Us has stopped receiving updates. The developers over at Inner Sloth are working on improving the game constantly and recently they released their biggest update yet. It features two huge changes to the game. The first one it showcases is a store with dreaded microtransactions. However, in an appreciated gesture, they’re very upfront about the purpose of the new store: To make money and give players new cosmetics. They say so right in the trailer.

“This is all to make money isn’t it?”

“YUP.”

“We live in a capitalist society.”

While yes video games do need to make money, and microtransactions seem to be one of the more effective ways of doing that, this would be a bummer of a trailer if the only addition to the game was a store. That’s why they saved the best part for last with the reveal of new roles for the game. It used to be that Among Us only had two roles: Imposter and Crewmate. Now there are new roles such as Scientist, Engineer, Shapeshifter, and Guardian Angel to add a little more variety to each game.

This is a really good update and one that is going to push some people back towards the game. While Among Us has been receiving consistent updates since it broke out, these major ones are always a fun chance to go back and see everything that’s new. Even if it does have to remind us that we live in a capitalist society sometimes.

TikTok is one of the fastest-growing social media platforms, and there’s no denying that it has real effects on the music industry. It’s become a way for some artists to boost their streaming numbers while others, like Lizzo, have absolutely mastered the app and use it go viral and further connect with fans. But other artists are late to the game when it comes to being active the app. Lady Gaga was definitely one of them — up until now.

Though Gaga’s TikTok account already has 3.6 million followers, she just posted her first-ever video. The TikTok wasn’t some dance challenge or a trend. The singer instead wanted to show off the impeccable red carpet dress that she wore to the London premiere of her film, House Of Gucci. The video starts with her delivering a line from the movie before it cuts to her absolutely working the flowing gown.

Gaga is the second celebrity to recently make their first social media post as a way to promote an upcoming film. Jay-Z, who is notorious for rarely using social media, returned to Instagram for the first time in six years just to post the poster to his western film The Harder They Fall. Jay-Z deleted the picture just 24-hours later, but its unlikely that Gaga will be deleting her TikTok that quickly.

Over on the National Governors Association website, there’s a list of incentives for Americans to get vaccinated. There’s free Six Flags tickets in Illinois; free beer in New Jersey; and free fishing licenses in Minnesota. And yet, even though the free life-saving vaccine has been available for months, only 59 percent of the population has been vaccinated. Maybe the problem isn’t that people are skeptical of getting jabbed for… reasons. Maybe it’s that the perks aren’t good enough. As Americans, we love perks. But Austria is lapping the United States when it comes to vaccine incentives.

An Austrian brothel has devised an ingenious way to incentivize people to get the coronavirus vaccine — by offering promised patrons a free fling with a prostitute of their choosing if they get immunized at the bordello

Fun Palast, located in Vienna, Austria (4.1 out of 5 stars on Google!), is offering the jab every Monday from 4-10 p.m. until the end of November. “Best of all, men who get inoculated on-site will be gifted a free 30-minute session in the skin merchant’s VIP club with the lady of their choice,” the New York Post reports.

Fun Palast owner Christoph Lielacher told Reuters that “we are very popular,” but the brothel lost 30 to 40 percent of its clients since the pandemic, and cases are rising in Austria (64 percent of the population is fully vaccinated). “It’s actually such a great action to make such a statement, especially in our industry,” he said. “And now we have a great vaccination site and we are very popular.” I can’t imagine why.

(Via the New York Post)

Riding high off the media coverage for his brutal takedown of Aaron Rodgers, a playfully cocky Howard Stern teased a potential 2024 presidential and boldly claimed that he’d mop the floor with Donald Trump if he actually runs again. Stern made the boast on the Tuesday episode of his SiriusXM radio show where he explained how he’d take down America’s “most winningest” president. Via Mediaite:

“I’ll beat his ass. … I think I’m going to have to do my civic duty and run for president against Trump. I would just sit there and debate and playing that f*cking clip of him f*cking tying to fix the election over and over again. There’s no way I’d lose.”

Obviously, Stern is joking around because despite the myriad of problems surrounding Trump, he has a feverishly devoted base of voters that Stern would have to contend with. Even after the January 6 attack, Republicans routinely place Trump at the top of the polls for potential 2024 presidential candidates. For all intents and purposes, Trump is still the face of the GOP.

Of course, poking at fires is Stern’s specialty. The shock jock recently went to war with Joe Rogan, who has a rabid legion of online followers with a concerning amount of free time on their hands. (Not unlike the MAGA crowd.) However, that didn’t stop Stern from telling Rogan to “go f*ck yourself” after he tested positive for COVID, yet continued to spread misinformation about the vaccine.

(Via Mediaite)

Ed Sheeran has earned himself a lot of clout over the course of his career, as evidenced by the list of folks he’s worked with. While a lot of aspiring artists look up to him for inspiration, his musical role model is Rihanna, as he revealed on The Breakfast Club recently.

In fact, he says that when he’s in the studio, he thinks about what Rihanna would do. He said, “Rihanna is always the benchmark. Rihanna is always… when I go in, that’s how ‘Shape Of You’ was created, ‘Love Yourself’ with Justin Bieber was created. She’s got such great taste in songs that… you can’t say what Rihanna’s style is. It’s just good tunes. So when you go in the studio to create a song, always we go, ‘What would Rihanna do?’ So she’s be somebody I’d always love to work with and write with or for. The fact that she can do ‘Work’ and then she just does ‘FourFiveSeconds,’ and they’re both totally different but both f*cking incredible tunes.”

He also noted they hoped to link up on his No. 6 Collaborations Project album, but they didn’t have “the right tune.” He explained why that didn’t discourage him, saying, “I submitted songs to Beyoncé before and she hadn’t picked any, but then I did ‘Perfect’ and she wanted to sing on it. So I know people rate me, but sometimes the songs aren’t the right songs.”

Few people in the modern era have created music as popular as songs and albums made by Lindsey Buckingham. As the musical director of Fleetwood Mac during their most successful era in the 1970s and ’80s — which includes blockbuster albums like 1977’s Rumours and 1987’s Tango In The Night — he had a hand in writing, arranging, and producing dozens of hit songs. But he also indulged an experimental, anti-commercial side on LPs like 1979’s Tusk that has proven to be surprisingly influential for several generations of indie rockers.

During the recent publicity run for his latest solo record, Lindsey Buckingham, the spry 72-year-old guitarist generated headlines after making some disparaging comments about his one-time lover and eternal foil, Stevie Nicks. But when I caught up with Buckingham last week, I was more interested in discussing his distinguished catalog spanning nearly 50 years. How easy it is to forget amid the never-ending Fleetwood Mac soap opera that this is, after all, one of the most esteemed pop-rock songwriters and musicians on the planet.

Buckingham gamely agreed to share his thoughts on 10 of his albums, spanning his life’s work both inside and outside one of the famous bands in rock history.

Buckingham Nicks (1973)

Before Stevie and I moved down to Los Angeles to get a record deal, I acquired an old Ampex AG440 4-track, which is what The Beatles used for Sgt. Pepper. I had gotten into this less formal approach to recording, where the idea is setting the architecture down on tape and playing it all yourself and sort of discovering it as you go along. That process was already fairly well fleshed out, even before we went into the studio to cut the Buckingham Nicks album. All those songs had been demoed out by me, and the lion’s share of the musical approach that you hear on the record was taken from the demos.

I think there was a very early point where I arrived at just something stylistically I could call my own. And it certainly does run through the entire body of work. You could say the same thing about the very first Fleetwood Mac album. All those songs — Stevie’s and mine at least — were demoed out in the same way. It all comes from that process of working with a tape machine, and having the writing and the recording and the architecture all sort of become one larger thing.

A song like “Frozen Love” is probably quintessential of my style — there’s a well-played acoustic part, as well as a well-played electric part. I grew up with the acoustic guitar. When I was six years old, I started teaching myself, first on a ukulele and then my parents finally got me a 3/4-sized six string. Once the first wave of rock started to ebb a little bit, folk music came in and was a natural place to pick up, in terms of the finger style and an orchestra style of playing. Sort of marrying aspects of folk guitar and perhaps a little bit of classical in there.

In the later ’60s, after I graduated from high school and got in a band, I wasn’t playing guitar. I was playing bass, but a lot of the music that was coming out was acoustic bass, such as Cat Stevens, who was a big influence on me. The electric certainly comes in — someone like Jimmy Page did so well marrying his acoustic and electric sensibilities in Led Zeppelin. But blues was never something that I gravitated to.

I didn’t play lead until much later. I’m always trying to think melodically. Even though I use distortion and delay and get a metal kind of sound, my sensibilities still harken to guitar players like Chet Atkins, who were always playing in service of the track and never were playing over it. Half the time you didn’t even notice the parts, because they became part of the architecture of the track. That was a value that I always admired. I thought it was far more difficult than someone who was just noodling over a track.

Rumours (1977)

[Laughs.] You can’t get away from it. But that’s okay.

We were somewhat blown away by the success that the self-titled album had. It was our first shot out of the box, and here was a band with chemistry and synergy among the three writers. For Rumours, I had not wanted to work with Keith Olsen again because I wanted to take over more of the production duties myself. Not that I wasn’t in full force on the first album, but there were certain parameters that Keith had that I wanted to go outside of and just try to be a little bit more experimental.

I think we did know when we got done with Rumours that we had something special. We felt we had achieved not only a worthy follow-up to that first album, but also represented what we’d gone through personally. But no one could have foreseen the scale that it got to. It happened so incrementally that you’re watching it go by with a sense of amazement.

There was a period of time where we were dealing with the mega, mega success that Rumours had become. At some point, the album became more about the success than it did about the music or about the band. It was this whole phenomenon. We were really poised to fall into the trap of succumbing to external expectations, and to begin to define ourselves through a set of formulas and labels. That’s something that I think happens to a lot of bands over time. I’d always tried to think about myself as someone who wanted to be an artist in the long term. In order to do that, you’ve got to keep your sense of self, and not be influenced by what’s going on externally. That’s what made The Beatles so great. And that led, obviously, to the making of Tusk, which was a line in the sand I drew.

But if you cut to 20 years later, you begin to reclaim an album like Rumours. Maybe you’re still doing the same songs on stage, but you see three generations of people out in the audience. And you realize that maybe you did your job right.

Tusk (1979)

The people who love Tusk love it for the music, but I think people probably also appreciate it for why we did it, and how it does pit itself, in a way, against Rumours. And that was intentional for me. I was ambivalent about us being poised to fall into the trap of trying to make Rumours II. Those first few albums had been all from the center out — they were driven by our own impulses and our own sense of what was right and what needed to be done. And I didn’t want to suddenly start to follow the corporate formula: “If it works, run it into the ground.” There was a lot of great music coming from the U.K. and Europe at that time, which reinforced that sense that you didn’t want to make yourself the establishment. You wanted to try to confound people’s expectations.

I took a 24 track, put it in a spare bedroom, and went back to what I was doing on my Ampex 4-track back in 1972 in order to reclaim some of the process. I started by myself in the studio and had the other members augment the tracks. So, in that context, it very much became a Lindsay Buckingham album within a Fleetwood Mac album.

After we did Tusk there was a backlash — because it didn’t sell 16 million albums — from inside the band. I realized the only way I was going to continue to follow the more left side of my palate was going to be in solo work. And it did tend to make me a bit schizoid, in terms of an identity, because you had this big machine of Fleetwood Mac, which was more to the right and drew a whole bunch more people. And then the solo work, which was where I lived and where I grew and how I wanted to keep moving forward. But you lose nine out of 10 people in the process, though the one person you don’t lose is the person you’re making it for.

Mirage (1982)

Mick said, “We’re not going to do the process we did on Tusk. We’re going to go back to a more traditional thing where we all come in and we all present our songs and we all play them.” And that’s fine. Working on my own is like painting — it’s one on one. Working in the band is more like movie-making.

There was a conscious effort to try to backtrack a little bit, I think. Not for me so much, but it did leave me treading water. It’s one thing to go from the self-titled album into Rumours, because you’re just going from your gut and that’s where you are at that point. But once you take a step like Tusk, to go back to something that’s a little bit more to the right, it left me feeling like it wasn’t quite as real. Not that it isn’t a nice album. I mean, there’s so many nice things on there. But I felt a little bit disconnected during the process of making it. I let Richard Dashut, my friend and one of the co-producers, have a little more input, and I probably was less worried if something tended to become slightly more generic.

Go Insane (1984)

When I did the first solo record, Law And Order, I was still dealing with a certain level of — not necessarily disappointment — but acceptance, perhaps. I was still trying to program in the acceptance that the process that I had been employing on Tusk was now not going to be used in the band anymore. So, I think Law And Order became a little more ironic, almost more of a parody of certain things. But when you get to Go Insane, it seems to me to be a much more grounded place that I’m at. And that just comes from having gotten from point A to point B as a solo artist.

A lot of technology had emerged in the interim since the first album. Drum machines were not really around when I was making Law And Order. The original 8-bit Fairlight, which was one of the first sampled keyboards that you could get with a computer, was something that I got before I began Go Insane. That made the whole texture of the architecture on the tracks completely different. You had a million different sounds, from drums to horns to strings to voices. It wasn’t synthesized. It was all sampled. For someone who defined their creative process through this painting process, at least for solo work, that was a natural progression.

Tango In The Night (1987)

A lot of what I learned making Go Insane crossed over into Tango In The Night. But it was challenging, because everyone was starting to hit the wall with their substance and alcohol use. Everyone was pretty dysfunctional, so it was a chaotic environment. The upside to that was I was able to employ a lot of things that were just straight from me — it was recorded completely at my house — that otherwise would have had to be navigated more on a political level. But everyone was just kind of up for whatever at that point. And that was actually a help, in terms of me connecting the dots between Go Insane and Tango In The Night.

I didn’t want to do the tour, because it had been, like I said, very chaotic. It had been a big party for the year or whatever it had taken us to do that album. Mick, for most of the time, was living in a trailer in my front yard. Out of close to the year that it took us to make the album, I think we saw Stevie a handful of weeks. I was afraid to put myself in the middle of that on the road, because the road tends to be 10 times the party that the studio is.

I was happy that we had triumphed with the album and had seen it through, under what could certainly be called adverse conditions. I just felt it was time to take a little breather for me.

Out Of The Cradle (1992)

The record that was the most cathartic for me to make, because it was the product of having decided to leave the band. I wasn’t pitting it against Fleetwood Mac, but I did try to cover the ground that existed in both the solo and Fleetwood Mac worlds. It just was a little bit more all-encompassing, I think.

I played most of it, but there are a lot of bass parts by Larry Klein and some keyboards by Mitchell Froom. It gave it a slightly more refined quality. I was interested in trying to tap into that side of myself, the pop side of things, where some of my emotions were living at that time. Songs like “Soul Drifter,” which feel like little pieces of Americana to me now. The closest thing I’ll ever get to “Moon River” or something.

Under The Skin (2006)

The first solo album that I had made since Out Of The Cradle. I had tried to make a solo album somewhere in the interim. First I tried to make one not too long after Out Of The Cradle. I went in the studio with Rob Cavallo, a producer who was working at Warners at that time, and Mick Fleetwood. And that led to this whole instigation by the rest of the band of trying to get me back in Fleetwood Mac. So, we made The Dance, that live album, and did that tour. So that whole idea of a follow-up to Out Of The Cradle got put on the shelf. The band wanted to go in and make another studio album. So, much of what would have been another solo album got put on Say You Will.

I guess by the time you get to Under the Skin — 2006 or whatever it was — that had been a long gap. I had left the band and had grown a great deal in the meantime and then rejoined. And I had met my wife and gotten married and had kids. All of that was so life-changing. I felt like I had a whole new landscape to write about that wasn’t really Fleetwood Mac-based.

I really wanted to make something that felt a little more acoustic, a little more folk-based, and was a little more about letting that single guitar part do the work. “Big Love” was sort of the harbinger, the first one of those kinds of songs to transform into something quintessentially better on stage than it had been on record. “Never Going Back Again” was another. There were just a lot of reference points that had changed for me by the time I had got to Under The Skin.

Buckingham McVie (2017)

That was a long, drawn-out effort. After doing The Dance album, Christine had left the band and moved back to England. And so, at that point, it was just the four of us, and our managers all felt it would be great to do another Fleetwood Mac album. I had all this material sitting around and we got together with Mitchell Froom and he and I brainstormed on arranging. And then we cut all these tracks of mine over at his house in Santa Monica.

We cut those and in the hopes of drawing Stevie into doing a new Fleetwood Mac album. But Stevie did not want to do another Fleetwood Mac album. And I can only assume, to this day, that it’s because she didn’t have any material. Had she had songs she was happy about, why wouldn’t she have wanted to do another Fleetwood Mac album? I don’t know. But she refused to participate. So we put that on the shelf and we went ahead and toured. And then at the end of the tour in 2013, Christine reached out to Mick and asked if she could rejoin the band. And of course, we welcomed her back with open arms.

At that point, we thought we would revisit the idea of a new Fleetwood Mac album, because now Christine was sending me, from across the pond, these very rough demo ideas. And I was working them out and refining them and adding to them at my house. She only had a few, like two or three. The rest of her material on the Buckingham McVie album were basic melody ideas that I gave to her, and she wrote lyrics and refined the melodies over them. But the point is, we had round two of trying to orchestrate a new Fleetwood Mac album, and it seemed even more appropriate now that Christine was back. We were in the studio with Christine and with John and Mick again, and cut a new batch of tracks and they all sounded great. And once again, we tried to engage Stevie and Stevie still would not participate. So, Christine and I just put it out as a duet album.

I always did the same thing for Christine that I did for Stevie, in terms of her arrangements and in terms of the architecture around her songs. I mean, not quite as much as a song like “Gypsy” or a song like “Dreams” for Stevie. But still, to a very, very great degree. It was just great. She and I have always had a chemistry. We’ve always had a mutual respect and a mutual rapport.

Lindsey Buckingham (2021)

This is an album that’s been trying to see the light of day for a while. We had several false starts. Events seemed to keep conspiring against it coming out. Twice we were right at the top of rehearsals for a tour and we had to cancel. Once was when I had a health issue with the bypass. And the second time was the pandemic.

In a strange way, it seems like the subject matter on the album has taken on a slightly more visceral meaning, given what’s transpired over the last three years or so. And maybe it being self-titled actually makes a little more sense than it would have three years ago.

There are many things that are addressed having to do with the challenges of being married for a really long time or the challenges of being in a band like Fleetwood Mac, the disappointments and disillusionment side of being in a band like Fleetwood Mac. I mean, the whole album was written before all the stuff went down with Fleetwood Mac. So, all of that seems prescient now.

The idea of pitting the solo work against the Fleetwood Mac work, at this point, it’s become less of a consideration. When I started making this new album, I thought it would be appropriate to keep the experimentalism, but also to circle back around on the more accessible elements that have represented me to a broader number of people. And I think you can hear it on some songs. Like “On The Wrong Side” is certainly a nod in some way to “Go Your Own Way.” And it seems to be getting through, I mean, when people like Trent Reznor tell me they really love my new album, I’m like, “Okay, well, somehow it’s making sense.”

You’ve got to not worry about certain considerations and just try to follow your artistic heart. It’s not about what you’re going to sell, because you’re not going to sell anything. And it’s not a measure that I’ve ever wanted or been able to define myself with. Maybe because we had such an overage of it in the early days. But you have to think about filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch, who’s doing exactly what he wants to do, and knows he’s not going to ever make a huge amount of money. Or even fucking Orson Welles, I mean, Citizen Kane was a flop, right?

Lindsey Buckingham is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.