Stevie Nicks Returns with Her First Album in a Decade
She has inspired musicians from Courtney Love and Tori Amos to Sheryl Crow and Mary J. Blige. The Dixie Chicks had a #1 hit with her 1975 classic “Landslide,” as did alt-rockers The Smashing Pumpkins with their acoustic version of the song. Country music sensation Taylor Swift calls Stevie Nicks one of her childhood heroes and says it was a dream come true to perform with her at the 2010 Grammy Awards. With her pouty allure, boho glamour, and songs that are swirling tales of romance and mysticism, Nicks has been idolized by many. Why, I once chased her speeding limo clear to the airport after a concert, only to have my hopes of making the acquaintance of the lovely Ms. Nicks dashed when her car pulled into a private area of the airport and I was turned away at the gate. Yes, I’ll cop to that.
Stevie Nicks, the multi-Grammy Award winner and Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Famer, is probably best known as the ethereal frontwoman for Fleetwood Mac, whose 1977 release Rumours remains one of the best-selling albums of all time. In addition to "Landslide," she penned the gems “Dreams,” “Gold Dust Woman,” and “Rhiannon” for the band. Nicks has also enjoyed much solo success since first leaving the Mac fold and striking out on her own back in 1981, beginning with her 5X Platinum debut album, Bella Donna. Through the years, her solo efforts have collectively produced over forty Top 50 hits—including the chart-toppers “Edge of Seventeen,” “Leather and Lace,” and “Stand Back”—and have sold some 140 million albums.
But Stevie Nicks dropped off the charts a decade ago after the release in 2001 of her Grammy-nominated album, Trouble in Shangri-La. That album had marked a triumphant return for Nicks, who'd suffered through a particularly unhappy period in her life during the '90s including the 1994 release of the flop, Street Angel, the lowest selling album of her career. Last week, on May 3rd, nearly ten years to the day Trouble in Shangri-La first hit record stores, Stevie at last resurfaced with a new album called In Your Dreams. The singer-songwriter says it wasn’t her intention to take a decade off between albums. She was ready to start work on a solo set in 2005 after touring with Fleetwood Mac, but the powers that be and the people surrounding her all dissuaded Nicks, citing the lousy climate of the music business at time.
In Your Dreams, her seventh studio album, is vintage Nicks. Just weeks shy of her 63rd birthday, Stevie's raspy vocals and eternal tremor are intact on the new record, which includes songs that are a mix of Bob Dylan-inspired folk, Italian love ballads, and rock anthems. Written and recorded at her Los Angeles home, the album was co-produced with Eurythmics' Dave Stewart and Glen Ballard (Alanis Morissette, Michael Jackson). Seven of the album’s thirteen songs were co-written by Nicks and Stewart. Though she has mostly written alone in the past, she had an epiphany while collaborating on the song "You May be the One" with Stewart. “I understood why Paul McCartney and John Lennon wrote together,” she says, “because they each had something the other didn’t.” She adds that, “With Dave and me, he had thousands of chords and this amazing musical knowledge, and I had thousands of pages of poetry—and I know six chords. It was like an amazing little meeting of the minds."
Some of the songs on the record grew out of poems that Nicks had written years ago and finally set to music, like “Annabel Lee,” which was inspired by her favorite Edgar Allen Poe poem and was written on the guitar when Stevie was a young girl. Other songs date back to the mid-'70s, including the first single, "Secret Love," which Nicks wrote in 1975 about one of her rockstar beaus, though Nicks maintains she can't remember which one. The song was put in a box in her mother's garage when Fleetwood Mac were first taking off and forgotten about until just recently. In Your Dreams also includes a number called "Moonlight," which Nicks began writing in the '70s but only finished after viewing the Twilight films, of which she is a fan, as well as "Italian Summer," a ballad Rolling Stone calls Nicks' answer to the Stones' "Wild Horses."
Aside from Stewart, other collaborators on the album include guitarist Waddy Wachtel, Mike Campbell of Tom Petty's Heartbreakers, and Mick Fleetwood. Nicks called upon Lindsey Buckingham to perform on and help her finish "Soldiers Angel," which she calls her most sacred and revered song. "We recorded it live and did some harmonies, and then he [Buckingham] did some little lead guitar things and it was perfect," she says. "There are no other players, just me and him. Not only did we create something that's probably as Buckingham-Nicks as we have been since 1973, but ... I think that song really brought Lindsey and I back together. He said to me as he was leaving on that second day, 'I feel like we're closer than we've been in 30 years.'"
Stephanie Lynn “Stevie” Nicks was born on May 26, 1948, in Phoenix, Arizona. Her father was a corporate executive and her mother, a homemaker. Nicks’ grandfather, a struggling country music singer, taught Stevie to sing and had her performing duets with him at a local tavern owned by her parents by the time she was four years old.
Growing up with an overprotective mother, Stevie says she was kept home more than her peers. In that time, her mother fostered a love of fairy tales in Nicks, themes of which would one day surface in her romantic lyrics and Welsh witch stage persona.
The Nicks family made frequent moves that were necessitated by her father’s job. In her youth, Stevie lived in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Utah, and ultimately California. She received a Goya guitar for her sixteenth birthday and began writing songs in her mid-teens, including her very first, which was called “I’ve Loved and I’ve Lost, and I’m Sad but Not Blue.”
Nicks joined a band while still in high school, and met her future musical partner and love interest, Lindsey Buckingham, at a Young Life Christian gathering, where Buckingham was the entertainment. A few years after that meeting, Buckingham invited Nicks to join him in a band called Fritz. The group was a popular live act in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, and opened shows for Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Creedence Clearwater Revival in the San Francisco Bay area. After Fritz disbanded amid internal tensions that arose over the amount of attention paid Nicks by fans, she and Buckingham dropped out of college and moved together to Los Angeles to pursue a career in music.
Stevie and Lindsey, who were lovers by this time, recorded their 1973 debut LP, Buckingham Nicks. The album flopped. However, it did catch the attention of the members of Fleetwood Mac, who invited the duo to join their ranks in 1974. In no time flat, with the injection of Nicks and Buckingham, a revitalized Fleetwood Mac put out their monster records Fleetwood Mac (1975) and Rumours (1977).
With three songwriters in the group, however, Nicks soon found herself with an overabundance of material. She decided to take some time off from Mac after their Tusk world tour of 1979-80 to record her solo debut, Bella Donna. The album included duets with some of her musical friends including Tom Petty (“Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around”) and Don Henley of the Eagles (“Leather and Lace”).
Nicks returned to Fleetwood Mac after an abbreviated tour in support of Bella Donna in order for the band to begin recording their 1982 album, Mirage, which featured Stevie’s hit "Gypsy." She would flip-flop between the band that made her a household name and a burgeoning solo career over the coming years, before drug addiction brought everything to a screeching halt.
After a decade spent addicted to cocaine during Fleetwood Mac's heyday, Nicks checked herself into the Betty Ford Clinic when a plastic surgeon advised her that if she wanted her nose to remain on her face she should stop snorting coke immediately. Nicks unknowingly traded one addiction for another when a psychiatrist put her on the tranquilizer Klonopin to help wean her from the coke and "calm her nerves." A year later, after having her dosage repeatedly upped, she began to pack on the pounds (at 5'1" she had ballooned to 175) and lose interest in her work. She entered a treatment facility and underwent an intense 47-day detox for prescription drugs. "I molted. My hair turned grey. My skin started to completely peel off. I was in terrible pain," she says. Newly clean and still a bit fragile, Nicks released her fifth album, the ill-fated Street Angel.
Stevie eventually pulled out of her tailspin and rejoined the reunited Fleetwood Mac in 1997 on tour and on the album The Dance. Nicks then returned to the studio in 2001 with friends Macy Gray, Sarah McLachlan, Sheryl Crow, and Dixie Chick Natalie Maines for the highly-acclaimed Trouble in Shangri-La, a record that earned raves and restored some much needed lustre to her fabled career.
Although In Your Dreams was a long time coming, fans are welcoming Stevie Nicks back with open arms. The album debuted at #6 on the Billboard 200 and is generating a lot of positive buzz. Rolling Stone says that, "The gypsy queen is in royal form," and calls the record "her finest collection of songs since the Eighties," while a review in The New Yorker says, "Nicks' mode of songwriting is as concrete as her outfits are diaphanous." Nicks says the period of making In Your Dreams was one of the best times in her life and calls the album her very own Rumours.
As for the future of the band that started it all, Nicks predicts Fleetwood Mac isn't done, though the group will have to wait for her and In Your Dreams, as well as for Buckingham with his forthcoming album Seeds We Sow, which is due in September. "When [the record] runs out of gas, as all records eventually do, then possibly Fleetwood Mac will regroup and do another thing—whether it's a record or a tour, I don't know," Nicks says. "Or maybe Lindsey and I will go off and rent a house in Wales and do a Buckingham Nicks album. I have no idea, but I do know the music will continue."
