Lindsey Buckingham’s favourite Fleetwood Mac album: “It set me off”
Lindsey Buckingham wasn’t a founding member of Fleetwood Mac, but he certainly embodied the spirit of the band and helped push them to world domination.
Upon his departure in 2018, there was an element missing from their live shows whenever they took to the stage, akin to the years they spent performing without Christine McVie. Both artists were the soul of Fleetwood Mac, who without, they lost their identity.
Buckingham and Stevie Nicks officially joined Fleetwood Mac on New Year’s Eve in 1974. Before becoming part of the band, the duo had released the masterful Buckingham Nicks, which unfairly flopped commercially. Still, their output impressed Mick Fleetwood, and the drummer came calling with a life-changing opportunity.
Initially, Fleetwood only intended to recruit Buckingham to the band. Adding two new members could have thrown the dynamics of the group into chaos. However, it was a take it or leave it offer that was presented to him, and it came to be the best decision he ever made.
They were successfully bedded in on the band’s self-titled 1975 release before the new additions helped Fleetwood Mac hit new commercial and critical heights with Rumours. Although the album was made amid the collapse of relationships between members, they successfully mined the tension and heartbreak into sweet musical bliss, resulting in a classic album.
While it would be presumed that this album is his favourite due to its life-changing impact, Buckingham prefers the follow-up record, Tusk. Rather than try to recreate the success of its predecessor, the band decided to take a left turn and create an ambitiously experimental project. By this stage, Buckingham was no longer a newcomer to Fleetwood Mac, and they put their trust in him by placing him in the driving seat.
Nothing was off-limits with Tusk, which was an expensive album to make even by today’s standards. After ten months of hard work and insanely high studio costs, Buckingham could finally rest after Fleetwood Mac completed an epic double album.
Discussing the project with UPROXX, he later shared, “The people who love Tusk love it for the music, but I think people probably also appreciate it for why we did it and how it does pit itself, in a way, against Rumours. And that was intentional for me. I was ambivalent about us being poised to fall into the trap of trying to make Rumours II.”
Elaborating further, Buckingham said how their previous work was “driven by our own impulses” and maintained he didn’t want “to follow the corporate formula”. He wanted to prove that Fleetwood Mac were a versatile music vehicle, and they achieved that aim on Tusk, which continues to be an immense source of pride.
Another reason why it is sacred to Buckingham is the level of blood, sweat, and tears he personally put into the project. In a separate conversation with Entertainment Weekly, Buckingham went into detail about the obsessive lengths that he went to while acting as a producer.
To provide a glimpse of how he oversaw every aspect of the album, he shared of capturing the drums on the title track, “In those days, you didn’t have ProTools, so you basically had two-inch tape. Someone was holding a spool at one end of the room, and it was going around through the heads and around and around for 10 minutes or whatever we did. That was the basis of how we built the song.”
Buckingham then said he was “very interested in confounding external expectations”, before concluding, “For that reason, not just the song ‘Tusk,’ but the album Tusk is probably my favourite album. Not necessarily for the music, but for why we did it—and it set me off on this alternative path that was a tightrope to walk between the big machine of Fleetwood Mac and the small machine of solo work that followed.”
While Tusk didn’t replicate the astronomical success of Rumours, there’s no guarantee they could have done so if they tried. Additionally, as a creative, there’s no joy in making the same album twice, and Buckingham much preferred to spread his wings in new artistic directions. It was a process that, albeit drove him to the brink at times, was utterly rewarding and elevated his ability in the studio forever.
