Fleetwood Mac was never a band that wanted to rest on their laurels. They went through many amalgamations across their tenure, rarely repeating what had come before. The band always followed their creative intuition, no matter the cost. For Lindsey Buckingham, that creative intuition was characterized by a need to impress listeners with his guitar work. He operated on a basis of one-upping himself, and it largely always paid off.
One of his favorite songs to play live was born out of that idea. Find out which Fleetwood Mac song Buckingham treasured on stage, below.
[RELATED: Stevie Nicks Did What Lindsey Buckingham Considered “Selling Out” in Their Pre-Fleetwood Mac Days]
Lindsey Buckingham’s Favorite Fleetwood Mac Song to Play Live
Looking out for love
In the night so still
Oh, I’ll build you a kingdom
In that house on the hill
“Big Love” is a very unique song in Fleetwood Mac’s discography. It feels like a haunting call one would hear out in the woods late at night. It’s mystic and almost undefinable. It is also, much to Buckingham’s credit, impressive. The guitar work he manages to pluck out here is among his most mind-blowing. According to the guitarist, that was the plan all along.
“Having one guitar do the work of a whole track, and wanting to include that as one approach in the making of an album,” Buckingham once said of creating “Big Love.” “I don’t think it ever got more rigorous than ‘Big Love’ with the actual demands of the part required. It’s a finger-hurter, for sure.”
“‘Big Love’ is the one that most people seem to want to get nerdy with in that way,” Buckingham continued. “Like, How do you do that? How did you make all that sound? I’ve had young kids who’ve figured it out and will show me that they know how to play it perfectly, which is great, and then there are other people who just don’t seem to know how to get inside it. You have to start with the basics and get the grips of a fingerpicking style, which is having some facility with a folk pick or Travis folk pattern and then building it into something more classical from there.”
You said that you love me
And that you always will
Oh, you begged me to keep you
In that house on the hill
If this song seems difficult for guitarists to grasp, for non-guitarists it’s even more indescribable. That level of expertise excited Buckingham. He had fulfilled his goal in impressing audiences with his work. And, despite how difficult to play the song sounds in the recorded version, it became his favorite track to play in a live setting.
“I enjoy [playing] ‘Big Love’ because it is very much a presentation of a song that is in line with what I am interested in working on now, which is one or two instruments and doing the whole work of the song,” Buckingham once said. “And it really gets me back to the roots of my finger picking, so that’s one of my most favorites I think.”
See Buckingham play “Big Love” live, below.
I wake up
Alone with it all
I wake up
But only to fall
Lookin’ out for love
Big, big love
Just lookin’ out for love
Big, big love
(Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
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