Lindsey Buckingham

“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.”

“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.'”

“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.”

“All of my style came from listening to records.”

“I don't know what 'genius' even means. It's just a matter of keeping your eye on the ball.”

“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.”

“I'm also married for the first time, and I have two kids. So there's some kind of good karma right now.”

“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.”

“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.'”

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

“That's one of the real downfalls of celebrity. You're something that's about you at some point, and that gets latched onto and pumped into the machinery. Then you start having a million other people telling you who you are, and what you should be doing and why, and it's easy to lose your way.”

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

“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.”

“It hasn't always been easy, but you get to a point where you're not doing the solo stuff with any kind of expectation in terms of commercial or a business outcome, you're doing it because you believe in this.”

“I'm not really concerned with the outer success.”

“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.”

“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.'”

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

“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 seldom look back.”