Lindsey Buckingham breaks down his 10 best guitar riffs
In the early 1970s, Fleetwood Mac was in a period of uncertainty after founding member and guitarist Peter Green exited the band. Disarray followed as guitarist and pianist Jeremy Spencer suddenly left to join a religious group in 1971, and replacement guitarist Bob Weston had an affair with Mick Fleetwood’s wife. Stability only returned to the rock band on New Year’s Eve of 1974, with the addition of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks.
Buckingham and Nicks not only provided Fleetwood Mac with two stable leads, but the duo were to contribute many of the band’s biggest hits. With that, Nicks became the face of the band, penning ‘Landslide’ and the band’s only number one single ‘Dreams’, while Buckingham wrote ‘Go Your Own Way’ and ‘Never Going Back Again.’
As a result of their success, Buckingham became one of the most celebrated guitarists of all time for his soft fingerpicking and catchy riffs. Reflecting on his career to date during an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Buckingham broke down ten of his best guitar riffs. The list includes tracks from across the Fleetwood Mac discography and Buckingham’s solo work, from his first solo single ‘Trouble’ to the iconic ‘The Chain’.
To kick things off, Buckingham states: “The thing about ‘The Chain’ is, yes, it’s a signature piece of ours, but it’s also the spirit of the song and the content lyrically is very much in keeping with the legacy we built over a long period of time of always being to rise above the difficulties in order to fulfill a greater destiny, so there was always a chain.”
He also speaks about ‘Never Going Back Again’, his contribution to the breakup theme that ran throughout Rumours. Buckingham recalls reverting back to his finger-picking style from a time before Fleetwood Mac, during a period in which he and Nicks were making music as a duo. He shares: “Once the first wave of rock & roll started to ebb, folk music became a really big part of my style.”
Buckingham also explained the inspiration behind the lyrics, stating: “Lyrically, it was a bit naive, because it was obviously about Stevie. By the time I wrote that, we’d had a few ups and downs, and she’d moved away from me more than once and come back. It was about Stevie, and it was also about meeting somebody else. It seemed to reaffirm that there was life after that, and yet, you create this illusion of ‘I was down once or twice, but I’m never going back to that again.’ Which is not really the way it works.”
‘Tusk’, meanwhile, the song taken from the 1979 album of the same name, began as a rehearsal riff, while ‘Big Love’ from Tango in the Night initially featured everyone in the band. Buckingham recalls that it started off as “a completely different song. The track was still based around that finger-picking part, but it wasn’t focused in such a clear-cut and singular way”.
While discussing his solo work, Buckingham vents his issues with record labels: “They never really knew what to do with my solo stuff. Fleetwood Mac was the priority.” But Buckingham places just as much emphasis on his solo output as he does on Fleetwood Mac in the piece, telling the stories behind four solo tracks and one duet with Christine McVie.
Buckingham closes the article by summarising his process. He said: “You don’t have to have as clear a notion of what the song is. You have to know your melody and structure before you present it to another group of people, but if you go in with a general idea, things will reveal themselves incrementally to you.”
The method seems to have served Buckingham well, becoming the driving force behind one of the most influential rock bands of all time and widely regarded as one of the best guitarists in music.
