You get to be a certain age - I am 58 - and it becomes tricky not to become a caricature of yourself.
— Lindsey Buckingham
'Big Love' was originally an ensemble song, but it's done now as a single guitar piece.
You can look at 'Rumours' and say, 'Well, the album is bright, and it's clean, and it's sunny.' But everything underneath is so dark and murky. What was going on between us created a resonance that goes beyond the music itself.
After the success of 'Rumours,' we were in this zone with this certain scale of success. By that point, the success detaches from the music, and the success becomes about the success. The phenomenon becomes about the phenomenon.
You could almost say I'm someone who doesn't practice age.
If you look at the whole time I was in the band, I only did, like, three solo albums - two, really. 'Out Of The Cradle,' I had already left because we'd done 'Tango In The Night,' and it was sort of the logical extension of crazy in terms of everyone getting ready to hit the wall with their habits.
I couldn't put any kind of label on my production aesthetic.
When you make music, and even if it's commercially successful, it doesn't mean that it's going to hold up. It takes time to sort of take stock of what you've done and whether it's got legs and whether it's going to really have a place.
The want to return to the fold doesn't mean you can repeat history.
There have been times when I've feared for my own well-being in the great scheme of things because, historically, the track record has not been kind to the guitar players in this band.
When I was a kid, and Elvis Presley broke through to a middle class, white audience, it was a sociological phenomenon that lasted through the Beatles and even a bit through Fleetwood Mac.
That's one of the real downfalls of celebrity. You're something that's about you at some point, and that gets latched onto and pumped into the machinery. Then you start having a million other people telling you who you are, and what you should be doing and why, and it's easy to lose your way.
I'm trying to break down preconceptions about what pop music is.
My personal life is fairly barren.
I'm not really concerned with the outer success.
I think when you work alone - the way I do it, anyway - you could sort of liken it to painting, where there's sort of a one-on-one with the canvas.
One thing I admire about the Eagles is they always seem to know what they want. They always seem to know why they want it. They always seem to want it at the same time.
If you go back to 'Louie Louie,' there's the whole element there, where you need to be able to appreciate what 'dumb' is in its profoundness.
The most disappointing thing to me after 'Tusk' was the politics in the band. They said, 'We're not going to do that again.' I felt dead in the water from that. On 'Mirage,' I was treading water, saying, 'Okay, whatever,' and taking a passive role.
For me, none of the albums after 'Tusk' quite had it. I think we lost something after that.
You're not going to reinvent the wheel every time you go out, because that would disappoint the audience.
'Tango' was a good experience, looking back on it, and it seems to hold up pretty well.
There is nothing like this extended family that is Fleetwood Mac. And I think you have to say, for all the perceived and real dysfunction that there has been, underneath that, there is and always has been a great deal of love. And that keeps pulling us back together.
I do think my lyrics have gotten... not necessarily more poetic, but more open to interpretation; they're less literal.
Lyrically, you know, most of the things on 'Rumours' were very autobiographical and very much conversations the three writers were having with other members of the band.
We really were poised to make 'Rumours 2,' and that could've been the beginning of kind of painting yourself into a corner in terms of living up to the labels that were being placed on you as a band.
I have an amazing wife and three beautiful children, and that certainly makes you less obsessive about your art as a musician - which I've always felt was more like painting than anything.
I actually like Taylor Swift. I admire what she's been able to do on some levels.
You just get out there and be what you want to be. That's part of evolving and part of staying true to yourself - part of remaining alive in a real authentic, long-term sense creatively: not listening to what other people tell you to be.
I love to be in the studio. That's what I like to do best.
Warner Bros. never really got behind the solo work. They always kind of drew a blank. I think they always were thinking, 'Well, this is nice, but let's get back to what's really important.'
Most people don't know who the hell I am. But that's not really important.
You work in a band, and it tends to be more like moviemaking, I think. It tends to be more of a conscious, verbalized and, to some degree, political process.
You know, I was never totally thrilled with being a Fleetwood Mac member, but surprisingly, I was having such a good time reuniting with John, Mick, and Stevie.
You come off the kind of commercial success that 'Rumours' had, and you see that there are limitations to that as well as freedoms.
The rest of the band had a cynical view towards the way 'Tusk' was made and the reasons why I thought it was important to move into new territory. It wasn't just negativity. There was open hostility. Then I got a certain amount of flak because it didn't sell as many as 'Rumours.'
If you want to be an artist in the long run, it isn't necessarily a good axiom to repeat formulas over and over until they're used up.
Creating a set list is like making a running order for an album. Certain things get pitted against one another that make more sense. One song sets another one off, or it might diminish it. You're just constantly looking for the next thing that's gonna make sense in a particular place.
I honestly think part of the appeal of 'Rumours' was that it was sort of heroic. We managed to push through in the face of so much personal adversity.
I guess you can look at Fleetwood Mac as the 'Pirates Of The Caribbean' movies and my solo career as indie films.
Defining something being a Fleetwood Mac song is calling it a Fleetwood Mac song, you know? Nothing becomes Fleetwood Mac until that's what you call it.
If things are crazy in the studio, usually the road is times 10.
I'm very fortunate.
I seldom look back.
As autobiographical as say the stuff on 'Rumours' was, I don't think we thought of it as such when we were writing it.
I don't know what 'genius' even means. It's just a matter of keeping your eye on the ball.
A house full of new furniture doesn't mean a whole lot.
I'm in the position where I don't have to make commercial music to feed myself, so I have the luxury of being more experimental, if that's what I choose to do. I guess I've earned the right by being in the business for a while and paying the dues and taking the lumps.
I can't judge myself by 'God Only Knows.' No one writes songs as good as that.
There have been several occasions during the course of Fleetwood Mac over the years where we've had to undermine whatever the business axioms might be to sort of keep aspiring as an artist in the long term, and the 'Tusk' album was one of those times.
