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.

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.

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

I just find things that work and embellish them.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Arcade Fire seems to be doing very well; certainly, Phoenix is doing very well.

That really was a lot of the appeal of 'Rumours.' The music was wonderful, but the music was also authentic because it was two couples breaking up and writing dialogue to each other. It was also appealing because we were rising to the occasion to follow our destiny.

All of my style came from listening to records.

There is nothing like this extended family that is Fleetwood Mac. And I think you have to say, for all the perceived and real dysfunction that there has been, underneath that, there is and always has been a great deal of love. And that keeps pulling us back together.

I was playing a Fender Telecaster when I first joined.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There were a number of false starts where I was trying to make solo albums. They would get constantly folded into group efforts. In retrospect, I can say fair enough, that you call yourself a band member, and you've got to step up to the plate when the need arises.

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

I put out an album once every four or five years and it's kind of like starting over every time.