Andrew Bird and Madison Cunningham on Why They’ve Covered the Rare, Pre-Fleetwood Mac ‘Buckingham Nicks’ Album: ‘It Was Appealing That It Was Inaccessible to a Lot of People’ (EXCLUSIVE)
Is “Buckingham Nicks,” the 1973 album that Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks recorded just before joining Fleetwood Mac, a classic album, a lost album, or both? The LP falls into an odd category shared by possibly no other in the world: a record made by superstars that has never been issued on CD or in any digital form, let alone re-released on vinyl. Bootlegs abound, certainly, but more than 50 years have gone by now without any legitimate chance to hear it, except for picking up a copy of the original, which was never manufactured in the mass quantities that a Mac album would have been. The most inexplicable part of all: It’s a great album.
Enter “Cunningham Bird” — that is, great-in-their-own-right singer-songwriters Madison Cunningham and Andrew Bird, who have joined forces to record their own version of the ’73 album, top to bottom, set to come out Oct. 18. It’s an “exercise,” to be sure, but it also works as a piece of music that will stand on its own, and surely will reach audiences that Lindsey and Stevie’s buried classic never has.
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This duo announced the project Tuesday after having given the idea a sort of stealth release by playing the album all the way through, unannounced, at the Newport Folk Festival, Bumbershoot and a surprise Hollywood Bowl mini-set. They’ll continue that with just a few other upcoming dates, including a show at the Troubadour — where Buckingham and Nicks played the album a half-century ago — on Sept. 30.
Prior to officially putting official word into the world about the project becoming incarnate as a full-length record (which can be pre-ordered here), they talked with Variety about how it came to be.
“I came to Madison with the idea. We’ve been looking for something to do together for a while, like a dedicated project that we could collaborate on.” says Bird, sitting with his musical partner of the moment in a coffee house in L.A.’s Frogown area. ” =And I stumbled on that album at a friend’s shop, and I was like, ‘Oh yeah, this cover, we know this,’ like some Herb Alpert record… But I didn’t know the record very well, and I was asking my friend, ‘What’s the story with this?’ He said, ‘Yeah, it’s out of print. You can’t stream it, or really hear it anywhere, but it’s this storied prequel to Fleetwood Mac, and you hear all the kind of drama brewing in the songs.’ So that appealed to me, that it was inaccessible to a lot of people. I brought it to Madison and said, ‘What if we cover this, top to bottom?’ And she was game. But neither of us were that familiar with the tunes before doing it.”
Says Cunningham, “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 had heard a few songs before — like, ‘Long Distance Winner’ I had heard and really loved. I thought the chord changes were so fascinating, and they felt very close to what we do, or the chords we would be drawn towards. But it felt like this wonderful project of to just try to make it our style, something we would want to sing and play together. And because there’s the folklore of all of their sort of dysfunction brewing in the songs, it was a really great thing to go into and try and make duets out of, because there’s a lot of emotion to work with.”
“I think the fact that not many people know it to begin with is what inspires me to want to cover things in the first place,” Bird says, “to say, ‘Hey, check this out, this is a great song you may not know,’ rather than to cover a really well-known song. That seems redundant to me. Especially the way I hear them done often is with such reverence, to get the exact drum sound, I’m like, what’s the point?”
Cunningham adds, “Just kind of hanging around Largo a lot or places like that, there’s sort of this folk tradition that inspires me, when a lot of the musicians that play there, like Watkins Family or John C. Reilly always come to the table with these old songs that they’ve kind of resurrected. I’ve always been so attracted to that idea of going backwards and refurbishing old songs.”
It became a three-person project as they brought Mike Viola in to produce and to add bass and Rhodes piano to Cunningham’s guitar and Bird’s violin. Complete fidelity to the sounds and tones of the original “Buckingham Nicks” album was never part of the plan.
“I got a little alarmed how far afield we were going with new sections,” admits Bird, who notes that they altered the harmonies and arrangements fairly significantly at times, even as they were stripping the sound down. “It’s like, is this gonna be okay? Is this gonna piss people off? But we couldn’t censor that. You know, I just have thought for years that Maddie’s like one of the most talented… maybe the most talented musician I’ve encountered, and I wanted to do something more full-on than just having her come sing on one of my albums or something, or vice versa. And it was a very fun session, very freeing and full of ideas. But there was this thing hanging over us, like, are we going to get in trouble for this? Is this gonna work? Are we allowed to do this?”
If that was a real and not just rhetorical question, the answer is yes. Although the reasons Buckingham and Nicks have never reissued their version remain mysterious — over the years, when asked, they have often said they want it to come out again, and then don’t follow up — the material is there for the covering. (And indeed, Fleetwood Mac did end up redoing a handful of the songs, live or in the studio.)
“You’re allowed to cover songs without permission,” notes Bird. “But as a courtesy, we sent them the album and let them know this is happening. Lindsey’s camp has been very warm and friendly, and we haven’t really heard from Stevie yet. But we weren’t necessarily asking for the blessing or permission, because we were just afraid that that wouldn’t go well.”
“Forgiveness is what we asked for,” laughs Cunningham. “Well, if it was my first album and someone was like, ‘We’re gonna make this better,’ I might tbe pissed. Well, not mad at them. I would just be so embarrassed that my first work was on display. But you know what? I would also be deeply flattered that someone cared enough.”
“I mean, this is part of their story,” Bird says, “and they should be proud of it. It’s a super ambitious, great record.”
Agrees Cunningham: “They should be proud of it. Something about this record that was so special is like, I came into it going like, what a cool project, and what a cool reason to work with Andrew. We’ve always wanted to do that. But it started to mean more as we dug into the songs. I started going through personal stuff and I started to really see myself in some of these stories and words that these songs have, and playing them live has meant something totally different too, because I feel it so deeply. There were some days in the studio where we would be recording, and my eyes would flood with tears. Like the song ‘Crystal’ was one that, jut hearing it, I couldn’t quite get into it. And when we finally recorded it and found our voice…”
“That’s my favorite track on the album,” notes Bird. “Every time I hear it, it really affects me. Something comes out in your voice that I hadn’t heard before.”
“It’s called sadness,” respoinds Cunningham, laughing.
They did not feel that they were taking on the roles of Nicks or Buckingham, though, in any sense.
“What we had to figure out,” says Bird, “was: What’s the gender? Who’s taking what roles? How is this gonna work as a duet now? Our first idea was not to go with the obvious ‘I’m Lindsey, and she’s Stevie,’ but to play with the gender roles, which we did quite a bit. And I think a classic example is ‘Lola My Love,’ which as we kind of worked our way through the album, we were both dreading it and like, ‘Who’s gonna do this one?’ Because neither of us were like… well, it’s just such a…”
“Sex blues ballad,” says Cunningham, completing his thought.
Says Bird, “Yes, ‘Sex blues ballad’ is not generally in our wheelhouse.”
“I know you had a phase of that,” adds Cunningham, “but you left that in the dust.”
“And then, thankfully, Maddie took it on,” Bird notes, “and it completely flipped the script on that song — both the tone of it and the mood of it, but also the fact that it’s from a female perspective.”
The pair recounted some of the history together that led up to this undertaking.
“We were actually just recounting it before you got here to trying to remember how we officially met,” Cunningham says. “I have this memory of moving to L.A., freshly 21 [she’s now 27], and getting a call from an unknown number, and it was the one day where I was like, let’s just see who this is, and I answered it and he’s like, ‘Hey, this is Andrew Bird.’ And I was like, ‘This has gotta be a joke.” Like, I was a fan and really excited. We have a lot of mutual friends and they were all playing on that record and I think it just made sense.”
Bird says, “I heard her on ‘Live From Here’ with Chris Thile, and I was like, ‘What a remarkable voice.’ I hadn’t heard that kind of singing much. I had her come into do the ‘My Finest Work’ session, and on ‘Sisyphus,’ she doubled my whistle with her voice at the end of the song. It was just like so nailed, and I didn’t say, ‘Hey, why don’t you double the whistle?’ She just went off and did it, and it was just so instinctual and musical. I have to say, I really respect the perfect nailing of the pitch — not to be such a stickler about that; I usually don’t care that much if something’s a little out of tune. But it just warms my heart when someone’s that on the nose.”
“Well, not to get in a compliment war here,” says Cunningham, “but I never heard anyone sing so on-pitch as you live, and I always say to people when they ask, ‘Where did you learn to sing?’ And I actually credit you a lot, because when I was 21, we started touring a lot. I was playing guitar and singing in Andrew’s band, and we had these moments around this old time mic…. The way that you kind of leaned into the mic and just kind of danced with dynamics. I was very much paying a lot of attention to that just to keep up with you. I feel that I brought that into my own world, and so that was another reason I really wanted to do this record, because it’s so rare that you meet someone that, when harmony happens, you feel like it turns into this one thing, and I started to feel that way when we sang. Making this record felt so much like that. Sometimes our vibratos would match, unplanned, and I was like, man, that’s just special, and exciting.”
The arrangements Cunningham and Bird created for this album aren’t altogether faithful to what their predecessors did. And neither, unsurprisingly, is the album cover, which does not feature these two naked. But — surprisingly — it did cross their minds, as a real possibility, before cooler heads and less revealing bodies prevailed.
“We thought about it,” says Bird. “But it’d be hard not to do that album cover without having some sort of sense of humor about it, and then that would be perceived as disrespectful.”
In any case, they had the right combination of syllables between their two names to offer homage in that way.
“Yes!” says Cunningham. “I wanted to talk about that. I’m so proud of that. Our initial joke was like, ‘Well, the syllables matched up. That’s why we did this project.’ The copywriters and designers were drooling over that shit,” she kids.
Ironically, for an album that has only ever come out of vinyl in its previous 51-year lifespan, this set will come out only in digital formats on Oct. 18, but CD and vinyl editions will follow on Dec. 13.
Tickets for the duo’s Troubadour show on Sept. 30 will go on sale this Friday at noon PT via the artists’ websites. Go to cunninghambird.com to sign up for a chance at tickets. The other two shows they currently have planned are additional festival gigs at Hardly Strictly and the Infinite Dream Festival.
Look to Variety for a full-length version of this interview to accompany the album’s release in October.
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