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Buckingham Says 'Rumours' Wasn't Personal

Over 30 years after recording Fleetwood Mac's masterpieces Rumours and Tusk, Lindsey Buckingham says that the legend around the projects has changed with age.

Buckingham, who along with Fleetwood Mac is on their first road trek in five years, explained to azcentral.com that the bare bone emotions of Rumours have softened as the band entered middle-age, saying, "Even though we were drawing on our own experiences, I don't believe that we felt that the songs on Rumours in particular were so starkly autobiographical. I think that. . . they sort of slipped into a slightly more generic vein. The meaning of the songs of mine (has) shifted slightly in the same way that the meaning of the band has shifted. You tend to see the irony in the songs. . . we had to rise above the personal difficulties. And we saw that the music could actually have redemptive power for us and could be a symbol of that for other people."

Buckingham took time to explain that Tusk, Fleetwood Mac's 1979 double album followup to Rumours, shouldn't be written-off as just another coke-fueled '70s wasteful extravagance: "With all of the blessings that we had bestowed on us by being successful, I always thought that it was a fully righteous thing that a band such as Fleetwood Mac. . . would plow that money back into the very process that they've been blessed by to have made that money, because it was our money."

He added: "Very often, people assume that you are sort of the star of the show and some production company pays for everything. That is not the case. We never looked at it as some sort of opulent indulgence. I think the lines got blurred with the lifestyle and the romance of the stories of the individuals in Fleetwood Mac."

Buckingham says that the recording of both Rumours and Tusk forced the band to consistently bury their emotions for the sake of art: "If there was one worst thing it was probably just that it was difficult for all four of us as two couples to have broken up, to be alienated -- probably to have not gotten anything close to closure. And to still kind of have to move forward. And in order to do that you had to kind of compartmentalize your emotions a little bit. You had to seal one thing off here and get on with the rest of it there. It was probably an exercise in denial."