'Buckingham Nicks' Is an Engaging Blueprint for the Classics to Come

NEW YORK (AP) — There are two ways to review “Buckingham Nicks,” the long-awaited digital reissue of the 1973, pre-Fleetwood Mac album by Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, their only recording project as a duo.

Imagine you had never heard of them, that they were an obscure 1970s act who made one album, broke up and left the business. You might think of “Buckingham Nicks” as a kind of period curiosity, a taste of vintage Los Angeles singer-songwriter pop, with its folkish stylings, well-crafted melodies and earnest sensibilities (“Do you always trust your first, initial feeling?/Special knowledge holds true, bears believing,” Nicks sings on “Crystal”). The scale is modest and nothing is likely to strike you as a lost classic, but you’ll probably take to at least a handful of the 10 songs — the strumming riffs on “Crying in the Night” and “Stephanie,” the catchy chorus of “Races Are Run,” the way Buckingham’s sensitive tenor is filled out by Nicks’ husky vibrato. You might end up wondering what happened to the two hippie-artists, who look out from the album cover naked, long-haired and unsmiling, as if the photographer had barged in without warning.

But if you’re in the great universe of Buckingham-Nicks obsessives, encyclopedic on their breakups and reunions and musical sparring matches, you’ll find (or rediscover) a trove of clues and portents. The skillful acoustic picking that opens the instrumental “Stephanie” will remind you of Buckingham’s work on Fleetwood Mac’s “Never Going Back Again.” The opening gallop and heavy bass of “Don’t Let Me Down Again” looks ahead to “Second Hand News” and the slow buildup of “Lola My Lola” feels like a test run for “The Chain.”

Buckingham and Nicks were in their mid-20s during the album’s production and if they ever enjoyed a phase of easy, blissful love, they already seem past it. “Crystal,” the only song also to appear on the breakthrough “Fleetwood Mac” album of 1975, is a rare expression of devotion, or gratitude. Other tracks seem closer to the hard lessons of Nicks’ future chart-topper, “Dreams.” There’s the wary refrain of “Long Distance Winner” — “Yeah, you’re the winner/Long distance winner,” echoed on “Races Are Run” and its reminder: “Races are run, some people win/Some people always have to lose.” Buckingham’s “Don’t Let Me Down Again,” in which the singer fears his lover’s departure, feels like a prequel to the breakup narrative of “Go Your Own Way.”

The reissue adds clarity to the sound of “Buckingham Nicks” that you don’t get from the muddled, unauthorized downloads which turn up online. And the album has a solid cast of session musicians, including Elvis Presley veterans Ronnie Tutt on drums and Jerry Scheff on bass and LA fixture Waddy Wachtel on guitar. But the arrangements never quite anchor or amplify the songs the way drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie would after Fleetwood’s fateful invitation to Buckingham to join his band, and Buckingham’s fateful insistence that his girlfriend come along.

Give “Fleetwood Mac” a listen if you haven’t lately and the difference will grab you from the opening track, Buckingham’s “Monday Morning” — an instant leap into a future that Buckingham and Nicks had only begun to imagine.

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“Buckingham Nicks” by Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks

Three stars out of five.

On repeat: “Races Are Run”

Skip it: “Django”

For fans of: You know who you are.