Deep Dive: Lindsey Buckingham, OUT OF THE CRADLE

Today we celebrate the birthday of longtime Fleetwood Mac guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, and we’re doing so by looking back at the album he released in 1992, one which served as his reemergence as a solo artist after eight years.

In fact, the eight-year gap between 1984’s GO INSANE and 1992’s OUT OF THE CRADLE was not something that Buckingham had planned. It was more to do with the way things played out with the non-solo side of his career, i.e. Fleetwood Mac. Although the band had gone on hiatus after wrapping up the MIRAGE tour in 1982, Christine McVie’s assignment to cover “Can’t Help Falling In Love” for the 1985 Blake Edwards film A Fine Mess led to producers Richard Dashut and Greg Droman calling in Mick Fleetwood, john McVie, and Buckingham to provide instrumentation for the song. In turn, Buckingham ended up using Droman on his own subsequent soundtrack contribution (“Time Bomb Town,” for Back to the Future), which led to them working together on what was originally intended to be Buckingham’s next solo album, except it ended up turning into Fleetwood Mac’s TANGO IN THE NIGHT. Unfortunately, not long after the album’s release, the tensions between Buckingham and the band hit a point where he left the lineup and ventured forth to return to his solo career.

It took five years for OUT OF THE CRADLE to fully come to fruition, and while it was not a massive commercial success – it only reached #128 on the Billboard 200, whereas GO INSANE had climbed to #45 – it was a creative triumph, with Buckingham delivering a gorgeously produced album filled with some of the strongest music of his career as a solo artist. The album also served as an opportunity for Buckingham to return to the road, giving concertgoers an opportunity to hear songs from the new album, his back catalog as a solo artist, and, yes, a few Fleetwood Mac classics as well.

If you’ve never heard OUT OF THE CRADLE, then you should definitely give it a spin. Songs like “Wrong,” “Countdown,” “Soul Drifter,” and “Don’t Look Down” are all great when taken individually, which is doubtlessly why they were all released as singles, but the album is best enjoyed as a whole. It’s arguably one of the greatest albums of the 1990s, but it’s also one of the most underrated, so if you like it, do whatever you can to spread the gospel and raise the profile of this lovely LP.