Lindsey Buckingham

I remember being a kid - if a new member joined a group, I just didn't like that at all.

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 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.

'Tango' was a good experience, looking back on it, and it seems to hold up pretty well.

You could almost say I'm someone who doesn't practice age.

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.

You're not going to reinvent the wheel every time you go out, because that would disappoint the audience.

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.

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.

For me, none of the albums after 'Tusk' quite had it. I think we lost something after that.

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.

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.'

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.

'Big Love' was originally an ensemble song, but it's done now as a single guitar piece.

You come off the kind of commercial success that 'Rumours' had, and you see that there are limitations to that as well as freedoms.

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.

You get to be a certain age - I am 58 - and it becomes tricky not to become a caricature of yourself.

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.

I was always interested in listening to music - and, of course, when my older brother brought home 'Heartbreak Hotel,' that was it.

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.

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.

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.'

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.

Certainly, whatever I learn while I'm out solo, I bring back to Fleetwood Mac.

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.

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.

I put out an album once every four or five years and it's kind of like starting over every time.

My center is not really my singing so much as my guitar playing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There is a lot of pressure to top yourself... to come up with a 'Rumours II,' and that seemed like a trap.

I liked 'Rumours,' but to me, there was some point where the focus became the sales, not the music.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Studio D has a lot of symbolism for me.

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.

I left Fleetwood Mac to make myself happy, and fortunately, it worked.

I feel like fifteen years with Fleetwood Mac was like working on my thesis, doing research for some kind of paper.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.