Have Mickey Mouse Guitar -- Will Travel

Did You Miss Me, Lindsey Buckingham
Single Review by John Demetry

Pop music hooked Lindsey Buckingham a long time ago. As a California kid captivated by his older brother's collection of 45s, he set out to understand pop's allure by mastering its language. Simultaneously, this pursuit enabled him to form his own identity by differentiating himself from two over-achieving older brothers (who excelled at sports, especially swimming). Now, the deceptively simple pop structure of Fleetwood Mac guitarist-singer-songwriter-producer Buckingham's new solo single Did You Miss Me hooks listeners to Buckingham's personal Odyssey, driven by these twin Desires (pop connection and individual definition). Have Mickey Mouse guitar -- will travel.

In "Did You Miss Me," Buckingham charts this psychological/aesthetic journey -- then brings it up to date. "Did You Miss Me" conveys his loneliness in resonant temporal/geographical metaphors, first recalling Fleetwood Mac's "Gypsy": "I took a trip out of town / A hundred years underground." Then, he summons imagery reminiscent of Irish folk standard "Carrickfergus" to make palpable his longing: "Had to swim / across the sea." Stephen Holden summarized this approach in his New York Times review of Buckingham's 1993 album Out of the Cradle: "Buckingham's psychological changes parallel an exploration of his musical roots." Throughout "Did You Miss Me," Buckingham collapses the temporal and spatial, psychological and musical -- achieving intensity:

I
A hundred years out of town
It's not so long, so I found
Just long enough to get free

II
Look at us now
The years fall down
Show me how

Despite these antecedents, "Did You Miss Me" represents neither Buckingham's solo tendency toward experimentation (Go Insane (1984), Under The Skin (2006)) nor inclination for pastiche (Law and Order (1981), Out Of The Cradle (1992)). With those works, Buckingham deconstructed the pop codes that first turned him on and that brought him unimagined success -- pop connection -- with Fleetwood Mac's Rumours (1977). Unlike those transient titles of singles past -- "Go Your Own Way," "Trouble," "Holiday Road," "Go Insane," "Countdown," "Show You How" -- the query "Did You Miss Me" promises a return, a summation, and -- most tantalizingly -- a seduction.

Buckingham calls for a return to feeling. That's his great 21st-Century theme, beginning with the Fleetwood Mac album, the title of which (from a Stevie Nicks track) acts as an invitation: Say You Will (2003). Of Buckingham's own work, "Did You Miss Me" most recalls his most "pop" couplet from Say You Will, the magnificent duo: "Steal Your Heart Away" and "Bleed To Love Her." With "Did You Miss Me," Buckingham bids to seduce the pop audience through a network of psycho-musical means: lyrical and vocal, sonic and generic. Here, for example, he uses Phil Spector's "Wall of Sound" as the basis for a metaphor (lyrical) about boundaries between people being transcended by the shared recognition of beauty:

Check it out
Hear the sound
All these walls
Are coming down

The Oedipal implications -- constructing a narrative of self -- are breathtaking. At the moment "the walls are coming down," Buckingham cues the listener (in the song and the actual audience of the song) to hyper-awareness of one's self and of the song/singer as a distinct object. Doing so, the listener will enjoy Lindsey's own "wall of sound" (sonic) -- his means of seduction: the signature Buckingham guitar counterpoints and percussive layers (harmonic), the song's structural climbs-and-dips (melodic). Appropriately, the "cover art" for the mp3 download features Buckingham tuning his guitar, resting against a sound board in a recording studio. The song's meta-instruction -- "hear the sound" -- highlights Buckingham's vocal masking as a component in that "wall of sound." However, Buckingham's vocal masking here distinguishes itself from its sometimes-distancing effect on Under the Skin (2006). On that album, opening track "Not Too Late" expressed an artist's feeling of being unappreciated in terms almost-embarrassingly overt until Buckingham switched up the song's poignancy through a father's sense of disconnect from his child. "Not Too Late" conveyed Oedipal anxiety -- recognition of mortality -- in self-referential terms. With "Did You Miss Me," the dreamy, wispy vocal masking serves to emphasize Buckingham's rhyming vocalizations -- tuned to the heart strings. He draws out the vowels of "out"/"sound"/"walls"/"down," thus transforming the words into pure sonic phenomenon. Significantly, the rhyming scheme continues:

That's just you
That's just me
Oh when you were my baby

Buckingham draws out the vowels of "you"/"me"/"Oh"/"baby." In this fashion, he collapses "you" and "me" (previously established as distinct entities) through the sonic encapsulation (the moan: "Oh") of romantic experience (generic). Buckingham's holiday road leads to a pop revelation: that longing and loneliness is a Universal experience. In other words, "Did You Miss Me" is a love song.

The repeated refrain, "Oh when you were my baby," kicks off the chorus, propelled by the drum and then guitar tracks reaching a crescendo. During the chorus, Buckingham pulls the listener into the slipstream. An imaginative, compassionate leap, he ponders the experiences of the Other (a lover, the pop audience). That's a signature Mac touch, which the Pet Shop Boys recognized in their own Mac-inspired single "Home and Dry," in which the lover waiting at home imagines the route -- vagaries of modern Post-9/11 life -- that will bring his beloved back home and dry. There, the Pets enlisted The Smiths'/Electronic's Johnny Marr -- Buckingham's one rival -- to provide Buckingham-esque guitar delicacy to a song that might have been written by Christine McVie (complete with FM harmonizing). "Did You Miss Me" sounds uncannily like that Pet Shop Boys classic, sharing its pristine pop structure. Via Buckingham, that structure -- beauty -- contains the key to the sublime. With "Did You Miss Me," Buckingham defines the experiences of his beloved in terms of the desire and loneliness that instigate searches for meaning (significantly, Buckingham's wife gets co-credit as songwriter):

And did you ever run where the wind blows
Did you ever go where I didn't know
Oh baby did you miss me

To extend the Homeric simile, Buckingham is like Odysseus returning home to woo his Penelope: a nation's fate in the balance. The chorus of "Did You Miss Me" establishes the stakes, Buckingham's particular way of keeping pace with the contemporary concerns of the Pet Shop Boys:

Did you miss me in the morning
Did you miss me in the evening
When everyone is bound to dream

Buckingham restores the language of our dreams, which manifest a common need, a shared yearning. Once again, Buckingham's vocalizations convert significant words into pure emotional expression, familiar from the pop lexicon: "know" becomes a doo-wop-by-way-of-Beach-Boys "woh-woh," "evening" becomes the affirmative, post-coital "yeah-yeah." With "Did You Miss Me," Buckingham now condenses pop to its essence: the sublimity of the hook.