Lindsey Buckingham opens his first solo album in fourteen years with a truly introspective lyric, a soul searching dissection of his motives as an artist at the ripe age of 57. "My children look away," he sings in the refrain. "They don't know what to say."

Listening to Under The Skin, it's hard on first glance not to feel that way oneself. Buckingham's a legend in every sense of the word, as much for his musical genius as for his reclusive nature in a world which rewards artists for filling commercial needs through prolificacy, relegating those who spend a decade or more on an album to the has-been pile. And that's such a shame it's almost gut-wrenchingly so.

Buckingham made a name for himself as part of the popular 1970s American reincarnation of British blues band Fleetwood Mac. He took a back seat to the more "commercial" music of Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie, crafting idiosyncratic songs of love, lust and loss that formed the backbone of Fleetwood Mac and Rumors, the latter of which sold 40 million copies globally and turned the band into a phenomenon overnight. The success was as much for the quality of the music as for the soap-operatic nature of the group itself. The relationship of Buckingham and Nicks, in its many incarnations, fueled sales, and most expected the band to follow up Rumors with Rumors II.

They might have done so, had Buckingham not been in the band. Instead, he took the production helm and crafted the double-album Tusk (a commercial "flop" even though four million double LPs were sold!) and its follow-up, Mirage, before he and Nicks chose to go solo. Her album was a success, while his two (Law and Order and Go Insane) proved to be too experimental for the masses. The band reunited in 1987 to release Tango In The Night, which went top ten in the US. It could have been Buckingham's solo breakthrough had he not selflessly given much of his solo material to the benefit of the band. He then left the group, refusing to tour in support of the album, and five years later released the critically acclaimed Out of the Cradle, a career defining album which got crushed by the development of grunge.

Alas, the world seemed not to want idiosyncratic acoustic music anymore. So Buckingham went into musical seclusion again, spending the next decade working on what would have been his fourth solo album. However, the Mac reunited sans Christine McVie in 2003, and without her songwriting contributions, he wound up donating much of his solo material to that year's Say You Will.

As Buckingham releases his fourth solo work fourteen years after Out of the Cradle, it's not difficult to conclude his feelings of inadequacy when dealing with his "visionary" status, so much as it compares to his lack of commercial success, are understandable. And don't get me wrong -- Under The Skin is not going to change that reputation. The album is at once stunningly beautiful, layer upon layer of acoustic melodies upon which Buckingham adds lyrics that lay his late-life crisis bare for all to hear. The result is spectacular and his many fans will eagerly buy the album -- a large number of whom did so in October when the album was issued.

As for the rest of the music world? Most will go on blissfully unaware of what they're missing, as they have for the last three-and-a-half decades.

Perhaps that's how it should be, if one considers this a long awaited reward for his fans' loyalty. However, the album is so consistently strong -- by far the strongest of his illustrious career -- that it's downright criminal the album peaked in the middle of the Billboard 200 and crashed from there after a week.

"Show You How" is as raw as it gets, complete with almost tribalistic percussion added to Buckingham's multilayered vocals providing the ear-catching sing-song chorus in what amounts to the single best "headphone moment" of my year thus far. "Shut Us Down" made an appearance on the Elizabethtown soundtrack and features his elemental finger-picking style along with breathy vocals eerily reminiscent of his early work, particularly the likes of "D.W. Suite" from Go Insane. And "I Am Waiting" takes a bare-bones, haunting melodic structure and adds echoing vocals in the vein of Elliot Smith, a song with which Wes Anderson is sure to find himself enthralled.

But the album's finest moment, the brilliant, show-stopping "Someone's Gotta Change Your Mind," is the best song Buckingham's ever written. Ultimately I can say that without qualification. Musically, lyrically, nothing gets better than hearing Buckingham sing the chorus, reflecting on on fatherhood and life as he's backed by an arrangement of horns and acoustic guitar that raises chills after months of repeats. This is the single, the single radio will never play because it doesn't fit any of the narrowly tailored niches the industry panders to on a daily basis. This is the song which will define his career on an album which is going to define his rock and roll legacy.

If you're already a fan of Buckingham's music, you owe it to yourself to hear Under The Skin. If you've never taken the time to study his legendary discography, the album still stands as a brilliant introduction, and it's difficult to imagine a neophyte not wanting to immediately dig into his back catalog after hearing Under The Skin on repeat a few dozen times. Buckingham says he intends to release a "rock" album in 2008 to compliment the work he did on this album, hearkening back to the full-bodied arrangements which made Fleetwood Mac into a global sensation. It's hard to imagine, however, that anything could top this magnificent album, one made all the better by the length of time we had to wait to hear it.