Zitat des Tages von Lindsey Buckingham:
For me, none of the albums after 'Tusk' quite had it. I think we lost something after that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You could almost say I'm someone who doesn't practice age.
That's basically what's going on now: Everything is propaganda.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
The 12 years I was in Fleetwood Mac before were not particularly happy years. I was not in a very good place, psychologically, when I left. I didn't have a lot of confidence in what I was doing.
When I work alone, it can be like dabbling with a canvas. Maybe you paint over bits, and it starts to form its own life and lead you off in a direction. It becomes an intuitive, subconscious process.
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.
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.
When I work alone, my process is like painting. With Fleetwood Mac, it's more like movie making.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I just find things that work and embellish them.
This time, there were no drugs involved. The hours were completely normal daytime hours. I think we were able to appreciate the interplay, where before we had taken it for granted.
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.
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.
I didn't take lessons, and I don't know my scales.
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 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.
My center is not really my singing so much as my guitar playing.
Ironically, that was quite a bit of the appeal of Rumours. It's equally interesting on a musical level and as a soap opera.
When you become successful on the level that Fleetwood Mac did, it gives you financial freedom, which should allow you to follow your impulses. But oddly enough, they become much harder to follow.
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.
When Stevie and I joined the band, we were in the midst of breaking up, as were John and Christine. By the time Rumours was being recorded, things got worse in terms of psychology and drug use. It was a large exercise in denial - in order for me to get work done.
A house full of new furniture doesn't mean a whole lot.