Fleetwood Mac’s extended tour won’t halt new album plans: ‘It’s too profound’

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News that Fleetwood Mac has extended its reunion tour with Christine McVie naturally pushed back plans for a new studio album, but Lindsey Buckingham says the project won’t be derailed.

“There’s no danger that it will slip between the tracks,” he tells the Wall Street Journal. “It’s too profound to.”

This forthcoming record will be the first to include all new music from the 1975-87 lineup since Tango in the Night. The group later convened to add a few songs to 1997’s The Dance, but otherwise Fleetwood Mac has been operating without either Buckingham (who was absent for 1990’s Behind the Mask and 1995’s Time) or McVie (who wasn’t there for 2003’s Say You Will) ever since.

McVie retired in 1998, after a run with Fleetwood Mac that included every album dating back 1971’s Future Games, only to return just before the start of a new tour. Buckingham and McVie even returned to the studio — rekindling a creative spark. “It’s a very interesting thing when someone who helped to define the interaction leaves for that amount of time,” Buckingham says. “You don’t know how it’s going to play out. But this something that feels really good. It feels really circular.”

Still, with fan interest sky rocketing, the group has now scheduled concert dates into 2015. And the album? “We never envisioned finishing the album in the short term,” Buckingham said. “We set it aside.”

As such, the on-going tour focuses exclusively on earlier music, with plans to begin including new songs likewise placed on hold. “Once we finish it,” Buckingham said of the forthcoming album, “we can think about going out and trying something new.”

Something Else!