Lindsey should have long since understood and embraced the fact that he works in a popular art form in which commerce plays the biggest role with respect to an audience. But his dream was probably to make commerce and personal voice live side by side and even to strengthen each other. It’s potentially devastating when an artist realizes how difficult it is—moviemakers have been grappling with the same devastation in their own art.

If you make an album like Law and Order, which doesn’t do anything the way you’d expect it to be done within the context of everything else on the radio at the time, you can’t expect a huge audience to join you in the concert hall. If you do expect it, you’re a bit of an idiot. The trick is to take smaller steps and somehow develop your more personal voice within a broader context of pleasing the (intelligent) audience, so that they accompany you. I think Lindsey has tried to do that (in many ways, he isn’t more sonically oddball than Todd Rundgren or Brian Wilson or the Talking Heads—he just sounds a lot weirder when his song immediately follows a Christine McVie or Stevie Nicks hit). But he’s been disappointed countless times, usually because he’s in a band that’s a much bigger commercial force and he must be comparing commercial success in his mind even when he says he isn’t. That goes for us, too. We see Lindsey’s solo albums and performances on a scale which puts “Fleetwood Mac” or “Stevie Nicks” at one end. It skews everyone’s perspective.

The fact that Seeds We Sow hit #6 on the Billboard Rock Album chart and Gift of Screws hit #15 on the same chart indicates that, somehow or other, he has built a small but devoted audience and they’re coming along with him. There are thousands of acts in the business (I would guess) that would kill to put an album in the top 50 on Billboard.

Lindsey’s music sounds like a guy making music for the artsy intellectual crowd, as if they’re going to forget he’s they guy who wrote GYOW and was in Fleetwood Mac with the witch lady. He distances himself from “Rumours” as much as possible, until it serves his needs. He’ll never be considered a Lou Reed.

Well, I suppose that some of it sounds that way to me, as well, but a great deal of it does not. I think he wants to appeal to intelligent listeners who think like him: people who are burned out on mass-audience formulas and want to hear a personal voice. I would say that he wants to make accessible music - but only if it's on his terms rather than the terms set by multimedia conglomerates and their pop radio stations. He wants to remain independent in voice and spirit, and his solo albums demonstrate that he manages to do that a lot of the time. But he also obviously wants at least some people to listen to his work.

He distances himself from Rumours because Rumours has already been recorded, and he sensibly sees that there's no reason to keep trying to recapture its appeal or plasticity, especially when the work itself keeps getting re-released every few years in some new format. The cynical view that it sometimes serves his needs to recapture something about Rumours is, of course, partly true. Artists are people, too. They get tired of various types of failure and sometimes fall back on past glories out of laziness or cowardice or the need for a paycheck. But I heavily doubt that Lindsey wants to give up on his creativity completely just to drown contemporary audiences in Rumours. And he's been very honest, at least, for many years about using the big machine to do his own thing on the side. Which should be fine, shouldn't it? He isn't making political statements with his own music, disavowing any and all connection to Fleetwood Mac's mass market. He's just seeing it for what it is. I think he's got a pretty healthy and mature and even responsible perspective as a pop musician, actually.

Perfect assessment. The fact that Lindsey isn't lauded within the Fleetwood Mac community for his sheer determination to continually push boundaries sonically into his 70's blows me away. You may not like his solo material, but there is no denying that he continues to create and is a working artist. Something that can't be said for all members of Fleetwood Mac. Hence why Lindsey has the respect of musicians, not pop stars.