Lindsey Buckingham gets screwy...or screwed ?...again

From the minute Lindsey Buckingham started to really let loose during the making of Tusk, furthering the minimalisms of "Never Going Back" and cranking up the paranoia and craziness, there was no going back. He might've liked being a pop star, but he also was the joker in Fleetwood Mac at the time, and the joker's wild. If you wanna go back to Liddy Buck the nervy new waver be sure to check out Not That Funny, the OBG alt album that presents variants of Lindsey's Tusk contributions as his hypothetical solo debut. But with today's One Buck Record you can easily go back, at least partly, as my version of Gift Of Screws has anumber of decidedly Tusk-era Buckingham jams, none more so than the unhinged title track, whose blast of nervy, even hysterical energy serves as an energetic album opener here. But tracks "Twist Of Fate" and the miniature "Given Thing" also give off that loony Liddy vibe. 

On most of the other tracks, Buckingham,shows that his gift for writing perfect pop melodies hadn't diminished. In fact, you could argue that he wrote some of his best and most beautiful pop songs during the period that Gift Of Screws covers, and then let only a part of the songs be heard. Because the story of Gift Of Screws is one of commmercial considerations, unfulfilled potential and compromises. The original Gift OF Screws is an album that never existed as such, only as an idea of Buckingham fans who had gotten hold of some of the demos he recorded in the latter part of the 1990s, somewhat overlapping with the Fleetwod Mac comeback with The Dance. So when he presented his work - a sizable number of elaborate demos and finished songs, all finished mixes - to his label as the first version of an album he wanted to call Gift Of Screws, Warner Bros./Reprise asked Buckingham to hold some of the material back and rather use it for the proposed upcoming Fleetwood Mac album, which he finally did.   

Whether that was the right decision is certainly up for debate, but what isn't for debate is that a number of worthwhile songs bit the dust due to the decision to move some of the material to Say You Will. When Buckingham finally issued his solo album called Gift Of Screws in 2008 only the title song had made the cut, though most of what's on my version of Gift Of Screws had made it into the world in one way or the other. "Miranda", "Steal Your Heart Away", "Bleed To Love Her" and "Say Goodbye" appeared with minimal extra touches on Say You Will, and "Down On The Rodeo" and "Someone's Gotta Change Your Mind" - both recorded with Mick Fleetwood and John McVie - appeared on the 2006 solo album Under The Skin, together with his cover of Donovan's "To Try For The Sun". Probably as a warm up during these demo sessions he also cut a beautiful finger-picked version of "She Smiled Sweetly", which is one of the tracks that never saw official release. 

Thankfully for everyone involved, Buckingham's songs for the original Gift Of Screws album, given to Warner Brothers on a CD-R quickly got leaked on the internet, so a look at what the original Gift Of Screws could have sounded like was the intent behind this alt album. I dropped a couple of songs from the line-up, as with the full twenty songs the album just ran too long, whereas at fifteen tracks - some of them quite short - and a running time of around 57 minutes, this is pretty much the perfect length for a CD era album. And an album this is, after careful sequencing, rather than just a bunch of songs. And considering how strong the material here is, this version of Gift Of Screws quickly becomes a contender for best Lindsey Buckingham solo album of all time. The cover art came with the booted tracks, it obviously is too nice looking to be mine...

So, sit back and listen to how Liddy Buck's best album in years, if not ever, could have sounded like, had it come out in 2001...