"Those 12 years, they were ambiguous at best"
About this Quote
The phrase "ambiguous at best" is the key tell. It’s legalistic, almost managerial, the language of someone trying to summarize chaos without reopening the case file. "At best" implies a harsher version he’s choosing not to say. That restraint is the point: it signals maturity, fatigue, and a refusal to hand over fresh quotes for the gossip economy. It’s a musician’s version of boundary-setting.
There’s also a quiet inversion here. Fans want the clean story: were those years tragic or transcendent? Buckingham answers with a category that denies closure. Ambiguity becomes not a failure of memory but a truth claim: that long relationships, especially ones lived under tour lights and public projection, don’t resolve into a single moral. The subtext is that nostalgia is selective, and mythology is profitable.
In a pop landscape that rewards oversharing, Buckingham’s understatement reads as both defense mechanism and critique: you can turn emotion into art, but you don’t get to turn it into certainty.
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APA Style (7th ed.)
Buckingham, Lindsey. (2026, January 15). Those 12 years, they were ambiguous at best. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/those-12-years-they-were-ambiguous-at-best-167999/
Chicago Style
Buckingham, Lindsey. "Those 12 years, they were ambiguous at best." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/those-12-years-they-were-ambiguous-at-best-167999/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Those 12 years, they were ambiguous at best." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/those-12-years-they-were-ambiguous-at-best-167999/. Accessed 22 Feb. 2026.





