The only way I've been able to keep my sanity is to pull back when I feel like it's time to pull back.
— Lindsey Buckingham
I liked 'Rumours,' but to me, there was some point where the focus became the sales, not the music.
One of the things about Fleetwood Mac, you gotta say, is that it's not very often that you get everyone to want the same thing at the same time.
Studio D has a lot of symbolism for me.
I feel like fifteen years with Fleetwood Mac was like working on my thesis, doing research for some kind of paper.
There's a certain kind of idealism attached to 'Tusk' as a subtext to the music, and I think people now can respond not only to how colorful and experimental it is, but also why it was made.
Arcade Fire seems to be doing very well; certainly, Phoenix is doing very well.
There were a number of false starts where I was trying to make solo albums. They would get constantly folded into group efforts. In retrospect, I can say fair enough, that you call yourself a band member, and you've got to step up to the plate when the need arises.
It hasn't always been easy, but you get to a point where you're not doing the solo stuff with any kind of expectation in terms of commercial or a business outcome, you're doing it because you believe in this.
I'm not that knowledgeable with the guitar - I just find ways that are pretty creative, but it's all within the framework and the limitations of what I can do.
One of the things about Fleetwood Mac is, when we're not together, we don't talk a lot or keep in touch. We keep a healthy distance.
I remember being a kid - if a new member joined a group, I just didn't like that at all.
What happens with artists, or people who start off doing things for the right reasons, is that you slowly start to paint yourself into a corner by doing what people outside of the creative world are asking you to do, and I think that's antithetical to being an artist.
I put out an album once every four or five years and it's kind of like starting over every time.
Certainly, whatever I learn while I'm out solo, I bring back to Fleetwood Mac.
I've been playing since I was about 7. I never really used a pick very much. I mean, once in a while, if you're in a festive mood, you might draw a little blood, but nothing significant... But my hands aren't abused, really.
I was always interested in listening to music - and, of course, when my older brother brought home 'Heartbreak Hotel,' that was it.
As I've grown as an artist, I've gotten more and more in touch with my center, and that center is voice and guitar.
We've always had the sensibility that you work on the set, and you structure it, much like a play, where once you've got the lines down and blocking right, you freeze it, and then you go out and do what you're doing night after night. You want to structure something that has form and that builds the right dynamic from start to finish.
You could say that Fleetwood Mac is a bit of a dysfunctional family, but we are a family.
When people just decide they're going to reconvene, there's no guarantee that they're going to have any of that chemistry. Sometimes people try to do that, and it's a struggle to try to recreate what once was.
Fleetwood Mac was one big lesson in adaptation for me. There were five very different personalities, and I suppose that made it great for a while.
When you work with a band, obviously you've got to present them with something they can get a hold of, so it has to be a little more fleshed out as a song. And then where it goes is more collaborative, obviously; it's more political possibly, certainly more a conscious process than a subconscious process, which the painting can be.
Sometimes I wish we were the Eagles. That's one thing they've always been able to do is want the same thing for the same reasons.
That really was a lot of the appeal of 'Rumours.' The music was wonderful, but the music was also authentic because it was two couples breaking up and writing dialogue to each other. It was also appealing because we were rising to the occasion to follow our destiny.
'Tusk' was clearly a line in the sand that I drew.
I don't practice per se. I learned to play on my own, taught myself how to play. I've never really had a lesson, and I don't read music. So all the stuff that I do doesn't come from the normal set of disciplines that they teach you where you sit down and run through scales for a particular number of minutes a day.
I'm not ashamed of my personal life.
If everybody wanted to follow the left side of the pallet like I had on 'Tusk,' there would have been no need for me to do solo work.
I don't really think of myself so much as a writer as a stylist, someone who came into writing from the back door and has found it through a certain very specific and personal means.
There is a real joy to be able to get up and react to each other and appreciate the whole being greater than the sum of the parts, just the chemistry of the group.
A lot of people who have gone to music school have gotten their individuality stomped out of them. It becomes harder to find those instincts.
My foundation is acoustic guitar, and it is finger-picking and all of that and sort of an orchestral style of playing. Lead guitar came later, more out of the necessity to do so because of expectations in a particular situation.
When I was in a band after high school and in college, I didn't even play the guitar. I played the bass because I couldn't play lead, and I didn't have the gear.
There is a lot of pressure to top yourself... to come up with a 'Rumours II,' and that seemed like a trap.
We're not one of those bands that throws the names of all their songs in a hat and pulls them out right before they go on stage.
Sometimes you can do the work in the moment, and you don't know whether it's going to really have meaning once time has elapsed.
I left Fleetwood Mac to make myself happy, and fortunately, it worked.
I was lucky enough to meet someone when I was about 46 and had my first child when I was 48, so I got started late, but I also got all that other stuff out of the way and was at a point where I could be a consistent presence at home.
When I work alone, and I'm in my studio, and I'm playing a lot of the stuff myself, I think the style of it becomes something a little different.
If you are gonna participate in a band, you've got to be a band member in good standing, and you've got to think about the needs of the whole.
The first couple shows I did by myself, I was looking around wondering where the rest of my band was.
Back in 1985, I was working on my third solo album when the band came to me and asked me to produce the next Fleetwood Mac project. At that point, I put aside my solo work - which was half finished - and committed myself for the next seventeen months to producing 'Tango in the Night.'
I always made the joke that I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when Warner Brothers first put 'Tusk' on and listened to it in their boardroom as a follow-up to 'Rumours.'
The thought of being on my own really terrified me. But then I realized being alone is really a cleansing thing.
You have to look at what 'Rumours' was, what drove the subject matter. You had two couples who were broken up or breaking up. And probably, you could say, success we had achieved was the catalyst for those breakups.
My center is not really my singing so much as my guitar playing.
If you talk about the 'Tango in the Night' album, the reason I didn't do that tour was because the album took about 10 months, and it was such an uncreative atmosphere.
It's always been based around the song, and guitar-playing in the service of the song... The sensibility is about songs. I like to think of it as kind of 'refined primitive.'
I don't read music. I've never had a lesson. I don't know anything about music other than what my inner knowledge is.
