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. Continue reading »
OK, skip the awful title and possibly, too, the cover, but as tributes go, Ian McNabb’s Fleetwood McNabb is pretty solid. McNabb is arguably better known, in America anyway, as the prime force behind the Icicle Works, still sometimes touring under the name, give or take the availability of various ex-members. Aside and away from that, he has an enduring solo career with dozens of releases. We’ve seen him here before, his covers set of 2018, 
Tom Petty was always open in his love and respect for country music. Debt, even, with many of his songs a mere pedal steel away from sounding that way. So the new tribute album Petty Country: A Country Music Celebration of Tom Petty is not remotely any leap into uncharted territory. And, go figure the number of existing covers of his songs, effortlessly traversing into the full Nashville, Bakersfield or wherever you want to be the center of the genre. And then go figure who is lined up here, with Dolly and Willie, to start with, they who need no surname, right through Steve Earle and Margo Price and to more conventional hat acts like Chris Stapleton and George Strait.
