An artist’s (or band’s) first recordings can often be a hit-or-miss, wavering between cringey and underdeveloped to charming and idiosyncratic—early Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham is certainly no exception. The musician’s time as a folk-rock duo is mostly overshadowed by their time in Fleetwood Mac.
This, of course, is unsurprising. Not only is Fleetwood Mac one of the most enduring rock bands of all time. But Nicks and Buckingham’s debut record was pretty commercially unsuccessful (they were looking for work when they found Fleetwood Mac, after all).
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However, a new version of their debut, Buckingham Nicks, completely changed the way I perceive their earliest musical compositions—even if they’re not the ones singing them this time.
An Indie Remake Of A Largely Unknown Classic
Just over five decades after young Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham released their debut album Buckingham Nicks, indie darlings Madison Cunningham and Andrew Bird decided to try their hand at recreating this monumental but largely unsuccessful record. While you won’t necessarily find Cunningham or Bird dominating Top 40 airplay, their innate musicianship and authentic originality make them a beloved favorite among indie music fans.
Their separation between the overtly mainstream served as a useful backdrop to their version of Nicks and Buckingham’s debut, featuring the syllabically appropriate rename, Cunningham Bird. As Bird told Variety, “We’ve been looking for something to do together for a while, like a dedicated project that we could collaborate on. I stumbled on that album at a friend’s shop. 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,’” Bird continued. “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.”
The Album That Made Me Fall In Love With Early Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham
Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham released Buckingham Nicks when they were aspiring folk-rock stars in southern California looking for their big break. They shopped the album’s demos around until landing a record deal with Polydor Records, which later dropped the artists from their roster after the album failed to reach their desired level of commercial success. Just like Andrew Bird’s friend suggested, the album is full of hopeful bravado of young musicians unembittered by the industry and its fair share of romantic tension between the soon-to-be exes.
While the songs are certainly “there” in a bare-bones sense, it’s also easy to see that neither Nicks nor Buckingham had yet hit the creative strides we would later come to enjoy via Fleetwood Mac. But sometimes, it takes hearing someone else performing a song to fully appreciate just how good the composition is (like how Johnny Cash managed to get a whole new audience to resonate with Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt”), and that’s precisely what Madison Cunningham and Andrew Bird accomplished with Cunningham Bird.
With their indie folk approach to arrangements, effortless harmonies, and knack for eccentric instrumentation that defied the at-times cheesy norms of the early 1970s folk-rock scene, Cunningham and Bird manage to celebrate the earliest works of two of the greatest rockstars of all time while still making the album completely their own.
Buckingham Nicks is available online if you look hard enough, and I’d argue it’s certainly worth a listen, if only for a historical appreciation of Nicks and Buckingham’s career. But if you’re looking to hear these songs really sing in a fresh, unique way, I’d stick with Cunningham Bird.
Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
