  Guitarist-singer-songwriter Lindsey Buckingham.
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The Rumours -- pun intended -- are true: The Mac Attack is coming back next year.
Guitarist-singer-songwriter Lindsey Buckingham said that legendary rock group Fleetwood Mac -- with remaining members singer Stevie Nicks, drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie -- will launch a tour in 2009.
"Fleetwood Mac is going to start doing something, rehearsals for some touring, in January, (and) we will probably be out in spring," said Buckingham, 59, in Toronto this week to promote his latest solo record, Gift of Screws (whose title track was inspired by an Emily Dickinson poem), and play a solo show at the Music Hall tonight after last night's gig at Hamilton Place.
"It'll be the four of us and a couple of other additional backup musicians. No one of note."
That means you Sheryl Crow (see sidebar).
Buckingham says a new Fleetwood Mac album would come later -- hopefully. "We're talking about an album but we didn't want to go in cold," he said. "It's been awhile. And in my mind, the mantra really needs to be, 'Let's put any particular musical agenda second to the agenda of trying to enjoy each other as people.'
"And I've known Stevie since I was 16 and we still have some things to work out, and I think that that's the important thing at this point, otherwise, nothing's going to happen. We won't make it to the album otherwise. Let's acknowledge each other's feelings, let's be adults for a change, if that's possible. It may not be, we'll see.
"So if we go in with that attitude and we use the touring as a kind of proving ground and hang time, then I think it'll make an album after that a much better experience."
Strangely enough, Buckingham originally turned in an album named Gift of Screws back in 2001-02 but the record label asked him if they could use most of it for a new Fleetwood Mac album, which turned out to be 2003's Say You Will (it followed the group's last tour -- both sans keyboardist Christine McVie).
"It has been a bit of a pattern of sort of re-grouping and getting ready to do solo work in one form or another and have Fleetwood Mac sort of intervene. That's happened a few times," Buckingham said. "But you know if you're in the band, you gotta be part of the band."
Buckingham sounds positively easy-going within the dynamic of the famously fractious group -- whose various relationship breakups were documented on their landmark 1977 album, Rumours.
"I'm working on it. I haven't always been," he said. "I've had very definite ideas which to some degree have been, I wouldn't say a thorn in the side, but I've been the healthy troublemaker who keeps things from being too complacent. That would be the way I would see it. Others might categorize it differently."
This time, however, Buckingham saw the rock-oriented Gift of Screws -- the followup to the more acoustic-based 2006 effort, Under the Skin -- through to its fruition with some lyric-writing help from his wife Kristen (Do You Miss Me, Love Runs Deeper) and 10-year-old son, Will (Great Day). The couple also has two daughters, eight-year-old Leelee, and four-year-old Stella.
Still, Fleetwood drums on three tracks and McVie plays bass on two from those much earlier recording sessions.
"This is a completion of a goal which was very specific that I had. And I said to the band, 'Please don't come knocking on my door for at least three years, because what I want to do is put out two albums and tour around both of them.' "
Old album reissued?
Anyone who has followed the long musical and personal saga of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks knows that they made an excellent 1973 album, Buckingham Nicks, which was a commercial failure but has since regained cult status.
It was also re-issued in 1976 when the two hit it big after they joined Fleetwood Mac. However, it's never been released on CD, something Buckingham thinks could happen in the next couple of years with a possible tour behind it for the one-time lovers.
"If it is going to happen it would probably happen in the next two, three years," Buckingham said.
"It's sort of a symptom of the fact that the band spends long periods of time apart, that Stevie and I don't talk a lot, that people who are 'the handlers' tend to think that there will be an optimum time to do that that will coincide with a marketing plan."
Does Buckingham, now married with three kids, mean a tour with Nicks to support its CD release?
"That could certainly happen, that would be fun," said Buckingham, currently on his own solo tour and beginning rehearsals in January for a Fleetwood Mac tour.
"Do we have enough material? Yes, we do. It would be its own hook, the two of us up there, it would be this complete circular thing, bringing us back to where we were in 1974, which has a poetry all its own.
"But again, the people who think in terms of marketing are thinking, 'Okay, but we have to do it at a time when we can remaster it and bonus tracks and all of this kind of stuff.' I would just re-release it myself because it is what it is!"
