Lindsey Buckingham talks about songwriting the way most people talk about installing hardwood floors: with an odd blend of craft, intensity, and mild disbelief that anyone still cares. “In many ways it’s gotten easier,” he told me, leaning into the idea that songwriting isn’t what it used to be — but not in a “get off my lawn” kind of way. More like a guy who now builds the whole house himself.
“When I was younger, it was more like making a movie — you’d come in with an idea and delegate to your bandmates,” he explained. “Now, it’s more like painting. I discover the song as I go. It’s all part of the recording.”
That shift — from cinematic to painterly — feels like a tidy metaphor for Lindsey Buckingham Christine McVie, the not-Fleetwood Mac album that managed to sneak in 10 songs with Mick Fleetwood and John McVie on most of them and still dodge the band name entirely.
“You’d think after 15 years apart we’d have lost the chemistry,” he said of working with Christine McVie again. “But our rapport was better than ever. I think it’s because she’d taken that time away, and I’d spent those years doing solo work and starting a family. When we came back together, it felt different — in the best way.”
McVie had started sending him scraps of songs from England, hoping to reawaken her writing muscle. Buckingham, holed up in Los Angeles, began fleshing them out. “We didn’t even think, ‘let’s do an album,’” he said. “It just became one.”
And then, the surprising part: even when it started to resemble a Fleetwood Mac album — in personnel, if not politics — they pushed back. “If anyone was thinking it would turn into a Mac record, Christine and I got protective. It wanted to be a duet album. That was the life it had.”
Still, Fleetwood and McVie (the other one) play on most of the record. So why not call it what it looked like? “There was no agenda,” he insisted. “We weren’t trying to make anything in particular. We just wanted to welcome her back — not just into the rehearsal space, but into the studio.”
The result was a strange little miracle: a low-key, late-career collaboration that didn’t lean on the Fleetwood Mac brand, and in doing so, probably captured more of its essence than anything the actual band had done in years.
And yet, the songs are pop. Big, shapely, undentable pop. “At the root of it, a good song is a good song,” Buckingham said. “I don’t think that’s changed. Even if hip-hop has shifted things, subverted melody, or turned people’s ears toward texture, I still think people crave structure. They might not realize it. But it’s still there.”
Asked whether some of the lyrics felt like they were about McVie’s return — her long hiatus, her homecoming — he smiled at the coincidence. “On her songs, sure, there’s a karmic full-circle thing going on,” he said. “Mine were just about my own life — my family, what I’d been doing. But those themes do seem to intersect.”
The album closes with a track that he’d described in press as “a new beginning,” a neat bit of framing that sounded suspiciously like a farewell. Not quite, he clarified. “We didn’t see this album coming until it told us what it wanted to be. Same thing happened with the tour. And Christine didn’t know if she’d like doing it — it was smaller, more personal. But she loved it. She got the art of it.”
That response led to more dates. More songs. More momentum. “We probably want to do this whole thing again,” he said. “I’ve got a solo record coming, and there’s talk of another Fleetwood Mac tour in 2018. But yeah, Christine and I have more to do. This wasn’t just a one-off.”
For a guy known for studio obsession and band drama, Buckingham sounded relaxed. Reflective, even. “If you just stay engaged with what moves you,” he said, “the rest takes care of itself.”
Listen to the interview above and then check out "In My World" below!
