Fleetwood Mac said Lindsey Buckingham won't be joining them on their just-announced North American tour because he simply wouldn't commit to spending so long on the road.

"It became just a huge impasse, and hit a brick wall, to where we decided that we had to part company," drummer Mick Fleetwood explained on CBS This Morning.

"We just couldn't agree," Stevie Nicks concurred. "When you're in a band, it's king. I have a solo career, and I love my solo career, and I'm the boss, absolutely. But I'm not the boss in this band."

“We were supposed to go into rehearsal in June, and [Buckingham] wanted to put it off until November [2019],” Nicks told Rolling Stone in a separate interview. “That’s a long time. I just did 70 shows [on a solo tour]. As soon as I finish one thing, I dive back into another. Why would we stop? We don’t want to stop playing music. We don’t have anything else to do. This is what we do.”

Fleetwood refused to say Buckingham was fired, however, and had nothing but compliments for his longtime bandmate. "We don't use that word, because I think it's ugly," he said. "It's not a question of that. Lindsey has huge amounts of respect and kudos [for] what he's done within the ranks of Fleetwood Mac, and always will. But it's like a marriage that came to an end, and there are reasons why. As a band, we needed to move on, and we have."

That includes adding not one but two major players: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell and Crowded House frontman Neil Finn. "I had this big grin on my face, because it's a call you never expect to get," Finn said of the day he was invited to join the group.

Following the October 2017 death of Campbell's longtime musical partner Petty, "I was wondering what I was going to do," the guitarist admitted. "I had a few things, but nothing quite as big as this. It already feels like a band, and we've only played once or twice. With a little rehearsal, I think it's just going to be incredible."

Nicks noted that Petty's death "changed me and Mike, for sure. We need to take everyday that we have until we're gone, and make it the best day that we can. If that can happen to Tom, then it can happen to anybody. I'm going to have the most fun I can. I'm going to stop complaining and I'm going to throw myself into all these projects, because you just never know."

Fleetwood also indicated that the once-again reconfigured group plans to record new music at some point in the future. "This is absolutely a new band," he said. "This is the new lineup of Fleetwood Mac. Both these gentleman have a legacy of their own, they don’t need to have a calling card."

 

 

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