Creativity Quote by Lindsey Buckingham

Buckingham is describing the ugly, workmanlike kind of professionalism pop mythology usually edits out. The romance is still in the room, but he’s talking like a foreman: seal it off, show up, do the job. That phrase "seal off" isn’t poetic; it’s industrial. Feelings aren’t processed, they’re contained, quarantined, treated like a leak that could ruin the whole operation. And then the blunt gearshift: "But you get on with it". No therapy-speak, no grand confession. Just the survival mantra of anyone trapped in a high-functioning pressure cooker.

The real subtext lands in the last line: "much bigger than any of that". It’s an appeal to scale, and it’s also a defense. Fleetwood Mac’s soap opera has always been sold as a twisted source of creative magic, but Buckingham frames it as a crisis of governance. The band is a machine with payrolls, schedules, and an audience; personal pain becomes, in his telling, an operational risk. That’s not romance, that’s triage.

Context matters because this isn’t a private breakup; it’s a breakup conducted under stage lights, mic’d up, monetized. "Seeing her every day and having to help her" hints at an ongoing caretaking dynamic that complicates any clean villain-hero reading. He’s staking a claim to discipline and sacrifice, but also to control: if he can "seal off" his feelings, he can keep the narrative on the band’s mission, not the mess that made it famous.