When I work alone, my process is like painting. With Fleetwood Mac, it’s more like movie making.

That’s one strength that Stevie has. She’s really not a strong instrumentalist in any way. Her instrument is her voice and her words. And it keeps her focused on the very center of that.

You know, I was never totally thrilled with being a Fleetwood Mac member, but surprisingly, I was having such a good time reuniting with John, Mick, and Stevie.

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.

I’m also married for the first time, and I have two kids. So there’s some kind of good karma right now.

They tried to get me to use a pick when I first joined the band. They had certain things they thought were appropriate. I tried to adapt as much as I could.

When I work alone, my process is like painting. With Fleetwood Mac, it’s more like movie making.

I had to seal off my feelings about Stevie while seeing her every day and having to help her, too. But you get on with it. What was happening to the band was much bigger than any of that.

All of my style came from listening to records.

Those 12 years, they were ambiguous at best.

When you become successful on the level that Fleetwood Mac did, it gives you financial freedom, which should allow you to follow your impulses. But oddly enough, they become much harder to follow.

Ironically, that was quite a bit of the appeal of Rumours. It’s equally interesting on a musical level and as a soap opera.

I didn’t take lessons, and I don’t know my scales.

That’s basically what’s going on now: Everything is propaganda.

When Stevie and I joined the band, we were in the midst of breaking up, as were John and Christine. By the time Rumours was being recorded, things got worse in terms of psychology and drug use. It was a large exercise in denial – in order for me to get work done.

The writing is all done, so it’s all about verbalizing everything from point A to point B, and certainly there’s a bit of politics involved, so it’s a different thing.

But by taking the time away, getting myself off the treadmill, and just slowing down and learning, I felt I had so much more to give back. And maybe that was something that needed to happen for all of us.

Confounding people’s expectations was a way to maintain integrity.

Some days I would be there at ten in the morning and wouldn’t leave till ten at night, and the others would waltz in for a couple of hours and then leave, because I was doing that painting thing. And they were happy to see that being done.

I just find things that work and embellish them.

It’s really touching that we can come back after so long and care about making an album that says as much as this one does. And after all this time, we really do care about each other.

The 12 years I was in Fleetwood Mac before were not particularly happy years. I was not in a very good place, psychologically, when I left. I didn’t have a lot of confidence in what I was doing.

I was playing a Fender Telecaster when I first joined.

I also learned to be more confident, to trust my instincts more.

When I work alone, it can be like dabbling with a canvas. Maybe you paint over bits, and it starts to form its own life and lead you off in a direction. It becomes an intuitive, subconscious process.

After a couple of failed attempts, I came up with a weird tuning where I was dropping the G string down a step so that it became a seventh, and it got me to a place where I could play all these figures fairly easily. It was not an easy thing to work out.

Another thing that was unique about working on this stuff was that I was engineering it. I used many of the things I had learned while I was away from the band. It sort of vindicated my decision to leave in ’87.

Years on, Christine and John still have a deep love for each other, as do Stevie and I – we’ve been working together since I was 17.

This time, there were no drugs involved. The hours were completely normal daytime hours. I think we were able to appreciate the interplay, where before we had taken it for granted.

That’s the only way to do it. Just like an actor. You can get a great performance if you do a bunch of takes and edit it. You find the moments and string them together.