The “Ominous” Rolling Stones Deep Cut Lindsey Buckingham Covered in 2006

“There was a point in time, a few years ago, when I was completely enamoured with all these obscure Jagger-Richards tunes,” said Lindsey Buckingham, calling out the Rolling Stones songs like “The Singer Not the Song,” “Blue Turns to Grey,” and “She Smiled Sweetly,” the latter recorded on his 2011 album Seeds We Sow. “These were songs that anyone who was thinking of the Stones in terms of their hits probably wouldn’t have heard,” added Buckingham, “but they’re all such great songs.”

Jagger once called “She Smiled Sweetly” a “quasi-religious up-tempo shuffler” and it had all the works with drums, bass, and organ, along with arranger and composer Jack Nitzsche—who worked closely with Phil Spector and years earlier co-wrote (with Sonny Bono) “Needles and Pins” for Jackie DeShannon—later a hit for the Searchers—on piano. Buckingham’s version was much more stripped back with vocals and acoustic guitar.

“‘She Smiled Sweetly’ was the only thing I had recorded previously,” recalled Buckingham. “It had been sitting around for a while, waiting to find a home. It seemed somehow appropriate to end the album with it. It turned out pretty nice.”

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‘Under the Skin’

Years earlier, on his fourth solo album, Under the Skin, Buckingham pulled another deep cut from the Rolling Stones’ catalog, the band’s folkier Aftermath ballad “I Am Waiting,” which features Brian Jones on dulcimer and Nitzsche on harpsichord.

Written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, the lyrics long for someone to come from out of somewhere, but keep a mystery around the circumstances of such a union.

Stand up coming years
And escalation fears
Oh, yes, we will find out

Well, like a withered stone
Fears will pierce your bones
You’ll find out

Oh we’re waiting, oh, we’re waiting
Oh yeah, oh yeah
Oh, we’re waiting, oh we’re waiting
Oh yeah, oh yeah
Waiting for someone to come out of somewhere
Waiting for someone to come out of somewhere

Buckingham’s first solo album in 14 years, Under the Skin, was recorded between 1995 through 2004, and was initially delayed around the Fleetwood Mac reunion tours during the ’90s and the band’s seventeenth and final album in 2003, Say You Will. “I Am Waiting” was recorded on the earlier side before Buckingham became a father in 1998.

“’I Am Waiting’ seemed like such an abstraction,” said Buckingham. “I almost took the original intent of the lyric to be more ominous about the state of the world, waiting for something catastrophic to come out of the corner.

He added, “Whether or not that’s right, I don’t know. It could be just that at the time I recorded that, I hadn’t quite become a father yet, and there was a slight void that I could sense was about to be filled in my life.”