Lindsey Buckingham on the last good Fleetwood Mac album: “I think we lost something”
Not every band is going to have moments where they love everything they put out. A lot of the best songs might come from tension, but when that tension dominates every single aspect of the studio, there comes a point where people start to either ask questions or become disillusioned with what they’re making. Even though Fleetwood Mac was in a constant state of dysfunction when Lindsey Buckingham was in the group, he knew enough to realise when that dysfunction could strike gold.
Because looking back on his career, Buckingham was nothing if not a perfectionist. He was the kind of person who was more than happy to make whatever he could from scratch, and if that meant hurting more than a few band members’ feelings along the way, he would gladly steamroll over them to get what he wanted. That might work in some cases, but Rumours saw him cross a line more than a few times.
From getting confrontational with engineers to having a screaming match with Stevie Nicks in between recording backing vocals, nothing was holding him back whenever he stepped up to the microphone again. While the band did manage to get one of the best-selling albums of all time out of the deal, Buckingham was way off if he thought that his contributions were all that mattered in that case.
But judging by how Tusk sounded, you’d swear that Buckingham figured that his “genius” was the only thing that mattered to the group. The album is rightfully considered one of their masterpieces today, but at the time, Buckingham was running wild in the studio, often putting together pieces of music that had faint wisps of their old sound but filtered through his vain attempts to sound deliberately quirky, as if he was going for a song in between their classic sound and Talking Heads-style eccentricity.
If anything, having Nicks and Christine McVie on the record is what keeps the record from moving too far off the track. Buckingham’s songs were fantastic in places, but having something as emotionally gripping as ‘Storms’ or as romantic as ‘Brown Eyes’ really helps balance the problems with tunes like ‘Not That Funny’. As for Buckingham, though, there was no way of topping this kind of record.
While the band would get back together for new records, Buckingham said that there was no point in trying to match what they did, saying, “They said, ‘We’re not going to do that again.’ I felt dead in the water from that. On Mirage, I was treading water, saying, ‘Okay, whatever,’ and taking a passive role. For me, none of the albums after Tusk quite had it. I think we lost something after that.”
The version of ‘The Mac’ with a thin layer of 1980s sheen on top of it might have been considered too soft for some, but it still had its place, too. ‘Little Lies’ wasn’t the same kind of artsy freakout that they had promised earlier, but it was worth revisiting a lot more than the usual tunes that left fans scratching their heads wondering what they were smoking in the studio.
But in terms of camaraderie, it makes sense why Buckingham would see this record as the last time things were smooth sailing. After all, part of the reason why Nicks left for a solo career was because of how much she resented not getting enough work on Fleetwood Mac albums, so when she returned, it had to become more of a democracy than what the guitarist had originally intended.
