If you don’t recall the story, Fleetwood Mac were down on their luck, reduced to the trio of Mick Fleetwood, John McVie and his wife, Christine. Fleetwood was looking for a good studio, and the folks at Sound City Studios showed him what they could do by playing him Buckingham Nicks. The ever-resourceful Fleetwood took a leap of faith and asked Buckingham to join the band. Not without my girlfriend, he said. The deal was struck, and the band subsequently became huge, with more people associating Fleetwood Mac with their breezy AOR Californicana than the blues band of the decade before.
You can make the case that Buckingham Nicks provided a lodestone for the whole next few decades, and not just for Buckingham and Nicks. So why is it not a worldwide household item? Astonishingly, there has never been any official release of Buckingham Nicks on CD. A relative failure in its original vinyl iteration, only under-the-counter bootlegs, often incorporating additional outtakes, have ever been released in the format, despite high demand. Buckingham himself has asked for this repeatedly, but no go, for reasons uncertain.
This is where Andrew Bird and Madison Cunningham come in.
Bird is quite the polymath, with a career dodging any identifying label, as he encompasses folk, jazz, classical and bluegrass, with 16 solo releases since 1996. His main instrument is violin, and he is an adept practitioner of looping his play live, so as to layer multiple tracks. He also sings and is an in-demand whistler. No, not on the penny whistle, the “just put your lips together and blow” variety. This features much across his own work, but also led to his appearance on the soundtrack to 2011’s The Muppets for/as “The Whistling Caruso.” Cunningham is a West Coast folkie, by and large, with multiple albums and EPs under her belt. She has worked intermittently with Bird since 2017.
Together, they made the decision to record a cover of Buckingham Nicks in its entirety. “[T]hat appealed to me, that it was inaccessible to a lot of people,” Bird told Variety. Cunningham agreed, saying, “It actually made it a lot easier to climb into it, because we didn’t have any real attachment to or previous deep fondness for it… [I]t felt like this wonderful project of to just try to make it our style, something we would want to sing and play together.”
First track “Crying in the Night” is completely transformed from the Laurel Canyon acoustica of the original, becoming a pleasing meld of swoony 1940s string setting mixed with a vocal arrangement that owes more to Brian Wilson than to anyone else. It works well. Cunningham has a clean and pure voice, reminiscent of Aimee Mann, whereas Bird has a hint of Rufus Wainwright in his somewhat more ginger delivery. Pizzicato violin introduces “Stephanie” over a picked guitar, before Bird slides in with a sinuous violin entry, with Cunningham then moaning sympathetically alongside him. Given the original was as much as anything an instrumental showcase for Buckingham’s guitar, Bird actually does it proud.
With a muted backdrop of organic and electronic percussion, “Without a Leg to Stand On” gets stripped right back. Bird and Cunningham deliver both the individual vocals and the harmonies with care, her guitar and his fiddle adding the surround, with swirls of the latter giving a further evocation of classic ’60s pop. What at first sounds like flute or recorder probably isn’t, almost certainly some fiddle pedal effect. Extraordinarily, a comparison with the Buckingham/Nicks version makes the old song seem desperately dated, despite the amalgam applied of even earlier influences for this one.
“Crystal,” which follows, is, of course, hugely known, as it was picked up and revamped for Fleetwood Mac’s eponymous album of 1975. If Mac improved the original, mainly courtesy the spookily ethereal keyboards, this new version is eerier still. Cunningham’s vocal is perfect for the plangent lyric, Bird’s voice slotting in seamlessly, some elemental echo present to accentuate the capture. There is little to replicate that keyboard, silence just as unsettling, bar a little pizzicato as strings build gently toward a conclusion.
“Long Distance Love” continues the mix of respect with revision; the love for the material shining through, even for this slighter song, made stronger through the “Eleanor Rigby”-esque arrangement. Given the distinctiveness of Nicks ‘voice and Buckingham’s guitar, neither are missed. And, if “Don’t Let Me Down Again” is the rockiest and most identifiably Mac-esque style song on the original, whilst the rhythmic propulsion is still there, it is almost a rockabilly/Everly Brothers enactment. Likewise, “Django,” the brief Flamenco guitar interlude, the only non-original song (it was written by John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet), becomes a slinky Argentine tango, without losing sight of either source. It feels much sturdier, mind, than the filler it probably was conceived to be the first time around.
“Races Are Run” maximizes the Mann in Cunningham’s voice, a track that could be a bedfellow for anything on the Magnolia soundtrack. Again, it becomes hard to appreciate it is the same song as the sultry blues offered by Nicks all those years ago. Then comes “Lola (My Love),” an early representative of Buckingham’s knack and love of experimenting with fingerpicking guitar styles, and ultimately a slidey blues of no great originality. Bird and Cunningham give it a fingerpicking porch country-folk polish that brings out more melody than might be recalled as being initially present. The spooky fiddle achieves more than what are now somewhat tired guitar licks.
Finally comes the track that led Fleetwood to contact and hire the duo, “Frozen Love,” another song the Mac then brought into their repertoire for their live shows. It also is the best display of Nicks’ vocal style, and I can well imagine Fleetwood being stirred. The delivery here is just a little too weak to beat the undoubted emotional heft of the original. But it’s nice enough, even if it contains the first and only example of Bird’s whistling on the disc. It rounds out the album well, and, if you’re ignorant of the 1973 version, you would be none the wiser. Here it stands out by being perhaps the only song where I prefer the original.
Yup, you heard me: I think Cunningham Bird is overall a better record than Buckingham Nicks. It may not be a better record than I remember the original being, and this will be perhaps the position of many, but, by being forced to go back and revisit the Buckingham Nicks iteration, there comes the discovery that, shhh, it isn’t actually quite as good as we would all prefer to believe. Which comes a bit of a shock to the memory of the LP. (Maybe that also explains the absence from any record rack near you.)
Another point worth making: unusually for a covers project, Cunningham Bird stands up in isolation, not really needing any great knowledge of what came before. But that’s not to say today’s artists didn’t enjoy getting to know the work of yesteryear. Bird says, “I mean, this is part of their story, and they should be proud of it. It’s a super ambitious, great record.” May the same be said for Cunningham Bird one day.
Cunningham Bird Tracklisting:
(all songs Buckingham /Nicks, apart from where stated)
1. Crying In The Night
2. Stephanie
3. Without A Leg To Stand on
4. Crystal
5. Long Distance Winner
6. Don’t Let Me Down Again
7. Django (Modern Jazz Quartet cover)
8. Races Are Won
9. Lola My Love
10.Frozen Love