We did want to make an album far more recently, around 2012. I was shocked to realise that the last Fleetwood Mac studio album, Say You Will, came out in 2003. ItвЂ™s telling too that as a solo artist since Tusk youвЂ™ve been more prolific than the band. Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham onstage in 2013 in Los Angeles, California (Image credit: Chelsea Lauren/WireImage) So I had this sort of schizophrenic tightrope thing I was walking between the big machine and the small machine, if you will. So at that point I realised the only way for me to sort of continue to explore the more left side of my talent вЂ“ which I was pretty sure was where the growth was going to lie for me as an artist вЂ“ was that I was going to have to do it on solo albums. But then when it didnвЂ™t sell sixteen million albums like Rumours there was a kind of a rethink about whether that was what we wanted to do. Mick and everyone else was initially sort of skeptical about what I wanted to do on Tusk, and then got drawn into it. I probably wouldвЂ™ve been quite happy to go on making more esoteric albums like that in Fleetwood Mac, but the politics dictated otherwise within the band.

Forty years on, do you see it as a fork in the road, for both Fleetwood Mac and you personally? After Rumours, I think because I wanted to make an album like Tusk and undermine the external expectations that were about to take hold of us as a band had we made something like Rumours 2, I started down a path where I worked on my own. I was basically taking the lead from how Les Paul had bounced tracks back and forth, and playing everything myself. It really began before Fleetwood Mac, when I was making the demos for the Buckingham Nicks album. I find that to be very exciting and very inspirational. I think working on my own has become a strength вЂ“ that process of sitting alone with a machine and being able to discover things just as youвЂ™d slap paint on a canvas. Is it fun for you to make records completely by yourself? I think there has been a subtext that has emerged around the subject matter of this new album that I didnвЂ™t necessarily foresee. Obviously there was a great appeal to the fact that we were laying bare our personal lives through the songs, but also that we were co-existing in a band together having been two couples who broke up. Much like Rumours had this subtext, and there was a point where the appeal and the popularity of that album started becoming less about the music and more about the success. Songs having a subtext about intra-band relationships have always been part of your work. There was perhaps kind of a subconscious sense that crept into the writing of a lot of these songs. There are songs about my relationship with my wife too. ThatвЂ™s not the only song that has that prescient thing. But weirdly, it was written before my departure from Fleetwood Mac. ItвЂ™s sort of a comment on the challenges of being in a band where the machinery is so great that you have to keep fighting to rise above it. Was On the Wrong Side written as a pointed comment on your life in Fleetwood Mac? ItвЂ™s all about the style and the architecture and the bigger picture of it. I donвЂ™t necessarily think of myself as a writer as much as a stylist. Songs like Dreams or Gypsy needed so much architecture around them to set off their potential. Take songs of StevieвЂ™s, where she had the absolute centre of the song, which was the lyric and the melody but nothing around it. ThatвЂ™s always been in many ways what I contributed to Fleetwood Mac. But the вЂarchitectureвЂ™ on top of that makes the songs remarkable and distinct.

I can hear how you circled back to more concise pop songs with simpler structures. It encompasses all that IвЂ™ve learned by having taken that route, but it also comes together with the earlier parts of myself as they existed in Fleetwood Mac. There was kind of a conscious interest when I was making this to circle back on earlier reference points that were less about defining myself as that counterpoint to the band. I think much of my solo work collectively is a little more off to the left than what was generally offered in Fleetwood Mac.

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