Fleetwood Mac's array of instruments, mike stands and amplifiers stretches across the vast Los Angeles soundstage like a miniature city, a gleaming monument to a distant era when rock was grand and this band turned its personal soap opera into arena-filling anthems.
Lindsey Buckingham, the key architect of that sound, walks past the silent stage, where in a few hours the band will rehearse for its summer tour. "I'm jazzed," he says by way of introduction - not about playing with Fleetwood Mac for the first time since 1997, not about its first album of new songs in 16 years but about being interviewed about it.
The musician's inordinate enthusiasm for this duty is a product of the release of that album, Say You Will. For Buckingham, it's not just a revival of his most prominent affiliation. It marks the liberation of his imprisoned music.
"I spent about seven years trying to get my material that's on this album placed and heard," he says. "I felt an extreme need to have it have a home and get it out so someone could hear it.
"It's a fight out there to get anything accomplished. It was difficult for me to find interest in that solo album. If it's Fleetwood Mac, that's one thing, but Lindsey Buckingham ... is it worth it? Probably not.
"So it just sort of turned into this."
Sitting on a couch in a bungalow behind the soundstage, Buckingham, 53, sips black coffee and reviews the process of Fleetwood Mac's return with meticulous detail and exhaustive analysis - just what you might expect from someone with his reputation as an intense obsessive. He looks the part too, his wavy, swept-back hair lending a mad-scientist element to his casual-aristocrat bearing.
It was Buckingham's departure in 1987 that effectively ended Fleetwood Mac's reign. The dynasty had begun in the mid-'70s when a young folk-pop duo, Buckingham and his then-girlfriend Stevie Nicks, joined the veteran English group, which had recently moved to Los Angeles.
With Buckingham emerging as a distinctive producer with a feel for the mainstream and the experimental, their first album together, Fleetwood Mac, reached No. 1. The next one, Rumours, went down like honey and bristled with a rare emotional charge - many of the songs, including "Dreams" and "Go Your Own Way," commented on the in-progress breakups of Buckingham and Nicks and the group's other couple, John and Christine McVie, and the demise of drummer Mick Fleetwood's marriage. It became a decade-defining blockbuster and put the band at the top of the pop music hierarchy.
