“It’s a finger hurter”: Lindsey Buckingham’s favourite song to play live
For Lindsey Buckingham, being a good guitarist means showcasing everything you’ve ever worked towards in a way that leaves everybody in awe. For the former Fleetwood Mac player, whenever anybody leaves your set asking themselves the all-important question, ‘How?’—then you’ve truly succeeded in creating an illusion rooted in true artistic capability.
Following the success of 1977’s Rumours, Buckingham and the other members of Fleetwood Mac found themselves caught in a problematic whirlwind of pressure. Although they each poured their hearts and souls into the album at the expense of whatever it might take, audiences and critics felt they set their own standard and that anything that followed would be more of the same.
The expectation to follow Rumours up with part twos, threes, and even fours meant that whatever they did would likely be a disappointment because, after all, the last thing they wanted to do was to try and recreate something that was already a pretty perfect version of what it was. Rumours might have catapulted the band to international stardom, but staying in one place wasn’t of interest to the band in any measure.
For this reason, Tusk was already set up to fail, despite the fact many of its songs were crafted with the same—if not higher—level of passion and intricacy as the album’s preceding opus. As Buckingham so ardently put it to Vulture: “[Tusk] had come from the centre of our beings, and it had been completely spontaneous, and nothing was done out of any sort of expectations other than what we wanted to accomplish.”
By the time Tango in the Night came along, Buckingham knew exactly who he was and where he wanted to go more than ever before. As the band’s guitarist, it was all about technicality at this point and how that coincided with the band’s ever-evolving, sophisticated amalgamation of folk, roots, rock, and blues. The album’s first single, ‘Big Love’, has become one of the band’s most popular hits and one largely celebrated for Buckingham’s guitar playing that sounds more like a reckoning than a love ballad.
“I realised I wanted to try to address that finger style in a more complete way,” Buckingham told Vulture.
He added: “[It] evolved from what it had been as an ensemble to a single guitar-and-voice piece onstage and became the template idea for quite a few other songs to follow, in terms of making the statement both onstage and on recordings. Like, basically having one guitar do the work of a whole track, and wanting to include that as one approach in the making of an album. I don’t think it ever got more rigorous than ‘Big Love’ with the actual demands of the part required. It’s a finger-hurter, for sure.”
Despite the challenge of playing the song live, Buckingham revels in pulling it off, feeding off the raised eyebrows directed at his prowess that follow in the aftermath. During a Q&A session in 2003, Buckingham explained why ‘Big Love’ became his favourite song to play live, admitting that it taps into something deep inside that he associates with his passion for playing the instrument.
“It is very much a presentation of a song that is in line with what I am interested in working on now, which is one or two instruments and doing the whole work of the song,” he explained. “It really gets me back to the roots of my finger picking, so that’s one of my most favourites I think,” he added. Buckingham also named this song when asked by Vulture what the “nerdiest song for guitarists” was. Going back to the illusion created by intricacy, Buckingham regards ‘Big Love’ as the one that impresses audiences the most.
“[‘Big Love’] is the one that most people seem to want to get nerdy with in that way,” he said. “Like, How do you do that? How did you make all that sound? I’ve had young kids who’ve figured it out and will show me that they know how to play it perfectly, which is great, and then there are other people who just don’t seem to know how to get inside it. You have to start with the basics and get the grips of a fingerpicking style, which is having some facility with a folk pick or Travis folk pattern and then building it into something more classical from there.”
