Lindsey Buckingham has a new album coming out. I saw a track by him and old flame Stevie Nicks on a new singles list and thought there must have been a mistake but it’s true: a shelved duo album of theirs (Buckingham Nicks) from 1973 is dropping soon. Buckingham seems to have really transformed and grown throughout his time with Fleetwood Mac so I can’t really imagine what it will be like. I enjoyed a few of his post-Fleetwood Mac albums on my album a day run last year. I also got the impression that he is a really weird guy.

He produces some wild stuff, with weird voices that he puts on, repeated lyric fragments that don’t have any appreciable meaning, lots of breathing. A lot of later Fleetwood stuff is like this – “Big Love” for instance – and he really shows himself as something of a studio genius. Probably he’s more publicly defined by his wild vocals and great and unique guitar playing, but it was his commitment and nous that completed the Mac’s “later albums “Tango In The Night”.

The worst of his stuff has this rather harsh frequency preference and a glut of odd choices, with sort of mindless and endless repetition. I’m listening to “I Must Go” as I write this and feeling I will join him in going insane. Perhaps that’s the desired effect, and surely sampling and editing using 1985 technology must have been crazy-making. I can’t imagine – sampling is so streamlined now and I still get headaches with it in Logic Pro X sometimes. Buckingham was something of a futurist. He was one of the proto-bedroom producers. He did everything himself on the record, programming/playing drum machines for the beats and playing and singing everything else.

The title track is pretty cool, and ‘Slow Dancing’ too. There’s cool stuff in the last three tracks too but everything finds its summit in ‘Play In The Rain’ and ‘Play In The Rain – Continued’. They are incredible tracks. The sampling sequence at 0:33 of the first part is something so hip hop and so filmic, it’s really a piece of genius, as is the rest of the two tracks. Sampling gets a bad rap still from some sections of music fandom, who hear the garbage of fully sampling the hooks of great songs and doing nothing but rapping on top of them. There’s so much to be done with using recorded music as an instrument in itself. I have an album in the works and a beat-making persona both very bent towards sampling and creating with and from that.

Best I can do to illustrate is to plant one of my early experiments here, ‘The Thought’. The problem I’m having creatively at the moment is of who to release this music under. When it gets more experimental than Ship Life I wonder if another different persona is in order, with ‘The Thought’ possibly to be re-released under this new name…regardless, I recorded my friend and cabinmate, John Salzano, take a few solos over my track – itself comprised of samples of myself – and then I atomized his playing, moving phrases around, repeating phrases as hooks, effecting them, and then orchestrating them into something that’s not just playing and overdubs, but the almost meta-experience of playing a recording like an instrument.

Anyway, we all owe a huge debt to artists like Lindsey Buckingham, Kate Bush, Brian Eno and Peter Gabriel for being such wonders with this technology when it was clunky and difficult.