My center is not really my singing so much as my guitar playing.
My foundation is acoustic guitar, and it is finger-picking and all of that and sort of an orchestral style of playing. Lead guitar came later, more out of the necessity to do so because of expectations in a particular situation.
The most disappointing thing to me after 'Tusk' was the politics in the band. 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.
You work in a band, and it tends to be more like moviemaking, I think. It tends to be more of a conscious, verbalized and, to some degree, political process.
You can look at 'Rumours' and say, 'Well, the album is bright, and it's clean, and it's sunny.' But everything underneath is so dark and murky. What was going on between us created a resonance that goes beyond the music itself.
I guess you can look at Fleetwood Mac as the 'Pirates Of The Caribbean' movies and my solo career as indie films.
I'm trying to break down preconceptions about what pop music is.
You're not going to reinvent the wheel every time you go out, because that would disappoint the audience.
What happens with artists, or people who start off doing things for the right reasons, is that you slowly start to paint yourself into a corner by doing what people outside of the creative world are asking you to do, and I think that's antithetical to being an artist.
Ironically, that was quite a bit of the appeal of Rumours. It's equally interesting on a musical level and as a soap opera.
As autobiographical as say the stuff on 'Rumours' was, I don't think we thought of it as such when we were writing it.
We really were poised to make 'Rumours 2,' and that could've been the beginning of kind of painting yourself into a corner in terms of living up to the labels that were being placed on you as a band.
Lyrically, you know, most of the things on 'Rumours' were very autobiographical and very much conversations the three writers were having with other members of the band.
I honestly think part of the appeal of 'Rumours' was that it was sort of heroic. We managed to push through in the face of so much personal adversity.
After the success of 'Rumours,' we were in this zone with this certain scale of success. By that point, the success detaches from the music, and the success becomes about the success. The phenomenon becomes about the phenomenon.
When I was a kid, and Elvis Presley broke through to a middle class, white audience, it was a sociological phenomenon that lasted through the Beatles and even a bit through Fleetwood Mac.
I put out an album once every four or five years and it's kind of like starting over every time.
There's a certain kind of idealism attached to 'Tusk' as a subtext to the music, and I think people now can respond not only to how colorful and experimental it is, but also why it was made.
Studio D has a lot of symbolism for me.
Even though I had pushed through the Tango album, it was just not a very good environment to be in on a daily basis. In many ways, this is the best time of my life.
