Lindsey Buckingham

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.

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.

I'm very fortunate.

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.

The want to return to the fold doesn't mean you can repeat history.

If things are crazy in the studio, usually the road is times 10.

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.

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.

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.

I do think my lyrics have gotten... not necessarily more poetic, but more open to interpretation; they're less literal.

I couldn't put any kind of label on my production aesthetic.

I guess you can look at Fleetwood Mac as the 'Pirates Of The Caribbean' movies and my solo career as indie films.

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.

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.

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

The thought of being on my own really terrified me. But then I realized being alone is really a cleansing thing.

I'm not ashamed of my personal life.

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 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.'

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.