Lindsey Buckingham has accomplished almost everything that can be done in rock ‘n’ roll, earning a spot in the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame with Fleetwood Mac, winning countless awards, selling out venues around the world, and helping define the sound of rock for the last 3 decades. He’s the predominant musical force behind such Mac albums as Rumours and the innovative Tusk, and has created a critically acclaimed body of solo work that yielded the hits, “Trouble,” “Go Insane,” and “Holiday Road.”

But one thing was missing as Buckingham and his band mates were dominating music. “The irony of the bulk of the Fleetwood Mac experience was that none of us were comfortable,” Buckingham confesses. “We had this external success going, which was not matched by any kind of internal success. It didn’t make any of us whole people or contented people in that sense.”

Now married and with three kids Buckingham has found that internal success as he puts it. “It really does feel like the best time of my life,” he says.

That contentment and peace are evident throughout his sixth solo album, Seeds We Sow. From the soft melodic pop/rock tinge of “End Of Time” and the album’s most rocking track, “One Take,” to the touching “When She Comes Down” and the almost lullaby-esque hushed tones of the gorgeous closing number, “She Smiles Sweetly,” the album showcases Buckingham’s full arsenal of skills.

He attributes his peace to two things. The first is his personal life, “To finally meet someone and to have the family thing happen, that’s been a real gift,” he says. The other is musical. “If there is a level of contentedness that I’ve arrived at, part of it is because I think in the last three or four years what I experienced during the solo albums and then what I experienced on the last Fleetwood Mac tour I felt like I had come to a point where there was so much foundation that I had built for myself making incremental steps forward as a musician and as an artist,” he says.

Those solo albums, 2006’s Under The Skin and 2008’s Gift Of Screws, as well as the last Fleetwood Mac tour, in 2009, led directly to Seeds We Sow, an album Buckingham didn’t even plan on making. So where did it come from?  “I think it came from a certain residue of momentum that was left over from the three years I did those two solo albums back to back and toured a lot behind both of them. That was such a great experience, just finally allowing myself to do that,” he says. “So I grew a lot during those three years and then of course we went on the road with Fleetwood Mac and did just the opposite, which was to go out and tour without any album at all. And that was sort of freeing because you come to terms with the fact that at a certain point people don’t necessarily want to hear anything too new from Fleetwood Mac. All the energy that I took from those three years and the confidence I took out of that three-year experience with those two albums got reapplied to Fleetwood Mac and it helped me to infuse a higher level into that music.”

How coming to terms with the band that made him a superstar, that success, and the tremendous Mac catalog influenced Seeds We Sow is evidenced from the gentle guitar intro of the opening title track, which Mac fans might recognize as being similar to the classic “Never Going Back Again.” But rather than just retread his past he utilized the full scope of his touring experience to mold the guitar sound. “Over a period of years when I was touring by myself, the song ‘Big Love’ got retooled as a single guitar piece and that was a real breakthrough. The energy I