Top 75 Lindsey Buckingham Quotes

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

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.

That’s basically what’s going on now: Everything is propaganda.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Most people don’t know who the hell I am. But that’s not really important.

I’m trying to break down preconceptions about what pop music is.

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.

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.

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.’

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.

Another thing that was unique about working on this stuff was that I was engineering it. I used many of the things I had learned while I was away from the band. It sort of vindicated my decision to leave in ’87.

Those 12 years, they were ambiguous at best.

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.

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 is, when we’re not together, we don’t talk a lot or keep in touch. We keep a healthy distance.

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.’

My personal life is fairly barren.

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

The writing is all done, so it’s all about verbalizing everything from point A to point B, and certainly there’s a bit of politics involved, so it’s a different thing.

I can’t judge myself by ‘God Only Knows.’ No one writes songs as good as that.

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.

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.

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.

After a couple of failed attempts, I came up with a weird tuning where I was dropping the G string down a step so that it became a seventh, and it got me to a place where I could play all these figures fairly easily. It was not an easy thing to work out.

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.

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

But by taking the time away, getting myself off the treadmill, and just slowing down and learning, I felt I had so much more to give back. And maybe that was something that needed to happen for all of us.

Confounding people’s expectations was a way to maintain integrity.

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.

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’m not really concerned with the outer success.

I just find things that work and embellish them.

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.

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

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.

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.

Ironically, that was quite a bit of the appeal of Rumours. It’s equally interesting on a musical level and as a soap opera.

Even though I had pushed through the Tango album, it was just not a very good environment to be in on a daily basis. In many ways, this is the best time of my life.

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.

A house full of new furniture doesn’t mean a whole lot.

You could say that Fleetwood Mac is a bit of a dysfunctional family, but we are a family.

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

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.

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.

I had to seal off my feelings about Stevie while seeing her every day and having to help her, too. But you get on with it. What was happening to the band was much bigger than any of that.

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’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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Years on, Christine and John still have a deep love for each other, as do Stevie and I – we’ve been working together since I was 17.

Some days I would be there at ten in the morning and wouldn’t leave till ten at night, and the others would waltz in for a couple of hours and then leave, because I was doing that painting thing. And they were happy to see that being done.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

They tried to get me to use a pick when I first joined the band. They had certain things they thought were appropriate. I tried to adapt as much as I could.

That’s the only way to do it. Just like an actor. You can get a great performance if you do a bunch of takes and edit it. You find the moments and string them together.

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

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

All of my style came from listening to records.

‘Tusk’ was clearly a line in the sand that I drew.

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.

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.

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.