Mike Campbell, most famously the lead guitarist with Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, got a new gig last year. (You may have heard about it). Fleetwood Mac, a band famous for their public spats, had another one, dropping Lindsey Buckingham and picking up Campbell and Neil Finn to replace him.
Now that they're in the middle of their 2018–2019 world tour, we wanted to ask Campbell: How has it been going?
"It's a challenge in many ways, because I respect their records and I love the band," he says. "They hired me to bring my thing to the table, but I also feel an obligation to honor those records, and there's a lot of signature guitar parts that Lindsey Buckingham produced and wrote, who I love and respect. And so my challenge was to recreate those as best as I could in his honor and, in places where I could, to bring my own personality to it."
But since we had in him the Reverb studio, we didn't just want to limit the chat just to Fleetwood Mac. In all, we asked him 21 questions, from what Heartbreakers song he'd play for somebody who had never heard them, who he'd like to play him in a movie of his life, and when we can expect the new album from his band The Dirty Knobs.
Be sure to watch the full video above, which, in addition to the Q&A, offers a brief glimpse of Joe Shadid and Mike Campbell playing "That's All Right Mama" in one of Reverb's bathrooms. And if you'd like to hear more from Campbell and learn some of his tasteful vibrato techniques, check out an earlier video he's made with us here.