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TL;DR:

  • One Fleetwood Mac album was recorded entirely in Lindsey Buckingham’s home.
  • Buckingham said the album was supposed to be more synthesizer-heavy like his solo work.
  • The album produced four top 20 hits in the United States.
Fleetwood Mac in black-and-white
Fleetwood Mac | Michael Ochs Archives / Stringer

Fleetwood Mac‘s Lindsey Buckingham said his band recorded their most “dysfunctional” album ever entirely in his house. Subsequently, he explained he was the only member of the band not partying all the time while they made the album. Notably, the record in question included many hits.

Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham said he was the reason the band ‘got things done’ at 1 point

During a 2021 interview with Vulture, Buckingham was asked to name the most dysfunctional album he ever recorded. He named Fleetwood Mac’s 1987 album Tango in the Night. “We recorded that album entirely at my house, in my home studio,” he said. 

“On one level, it was sort of empowering, because everyone else was in party mode 24/7,” he recalled. “I wasn’t so much, or at least comparatively I wasn’t. So we got things done.” 

Lindsey Buckingham said ‘Tango in the Night’ sounded like 1 of his solo albums

Buckingham explained why Tango in the Night sounded the way it did. “In many ways, I was able to apply back a lot of what I’d learned to my solo albums,” he said. “Go Insane, which was my second album, had a lot more keyboard and synth-y and drum-machine kind of stuff going on. I was able to reapply a lot of the learning I’d done during the making of that album back to Tango in the Night. 

“So it was almost empowering in a way, because as the guy who was producing the album, I was a little bit more left to my own devices because everyone wasn’t paying attention as much and wasn’t contributing as much — at least with clarity on a creative level,” he said.

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How Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Tango in the Night’ performed on the pop charts in the United States and the United Kingdom

Tango in the Night became a massive hit. It reached No. 7 on the Billboard 200, staying on the chart for 58 weeks. Four of the songs from the album reached the top 20 of the Billboard Hot 100: “Big Love,” “Seven Wonders,” “Little Lies,” and “Everywhere.”

According to The Official Charts Company, Tango in the Dark became an even bigger hit in the United Kingdom. There, it was No. 1 for five of its 123 weeks on the chart. It lasted longer at the top than any of the band’s other albums. In the U.K., “Big Love,” “Little Lies,” and “Everywhere” each reached the top 10.

The creation of Tango in the Dark was “dysfunctional,” but the album became a commercial triumph for Fleetwood Mac.

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