Lindsey Buckingham: How Being in Fleetwood Mac Was Like Walking a ‘Schizophrenic Tightrope’
Lindsey Buckingham has never been one to hold back on most things related to Fleetwood Mac, but he’s opened up a bit more on what it was like to make music with the band compared to his solo work.
In a new interview with Classic Rock, Buckingham was asked whether it was fun making an album all by himself compared to collaborating with a band. He responded, “I think working on my own has become a strength – that process of sitting alone with a machine and being able to discover things just as you’d slap paint on a canvas. I find that to be very exciting and very inspirational…I was basically taking the lead from how Les Paul had bounced tracks back and forth, and playing everything myself. After ‘Rumours,’ I think because I wanted to make an album like ‘Tusk’ and undermine the external expectations that were about to take hold of us as a band had we made something like ‘Rumours 2,’ I started down a path where I worked on my own.”
Buckingham would continue, “I probably would’ve been quite happy to go on making more esoteric albums like that in Fleetwood Mac, but the politics dictated otherwise within the band. Mick [Fleetwood] and everyone else was initially sort of skeptical about what I wanted to do on ‘Tusk,’ and then got drawn into it. But then when it didn’t sell sixteen million albums like ‘Rumours’ there was a kind of a rethink about whether that was what we wanted to do.”
He added, “So at that point, I realized the only way for me to sort of continue to explore the more left side of my talent – which I was pretty sure was where the growth was going to lie for me as an artist – was that I was going to have to do it on solo albums. So I had this sort of schizophrenic tightrope thing I was walking between the big machine and the small machine, if you will.”
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