Ring in 2022 with 24 Karat Gold The Concert, premiering January 1 at 8/7c, on AXS TV! In case you miss the premiere, you can catch it again at 10:30 am ET on January 2!
Watch Stevie perform some of her most timeless music, such as “Gypsy,” “Stand Back,” and “Rhiannon,” “Edge of Seventeen.”
Stevie Nicks‘ Live In Concert: The 24 Karat Gold Tour is scheduled to be released on Blu-ray on January 15, 2021. The Blu-ray version can be pre-ordered from Amazon.
The concert is airing now on PBS networks.
PRE-ORDER: Live In Concert: The 24 Karat Gold Tour [Blu-ray]
PBS networks in the U.S. will be broadcasting an edited version of Stevie Nicks ~ 24 Karat Gold: The Concert starting on Saturday, November 28. Stevie debuted the concert film in select theaters last month.
Some PBS stations are offering the exclusive “Stevie Nicks Collection” for becoming a member at different levels. The collection includes the concert CDs, DVD, double gold vinyl set, and lithograph.
Check your local PBS listings.
Grab a front-row seat for the Grammy Award-winning artist’s epic concert, captured at two sold-out arenas. Featuring smash hits from her Fleetwood Mac and solo careers, with introspective stories about her personal and professional lives.
In Bustle’s Q&A series 28, successful women describe exactly what their lives looked like when they were 28 — what they wore, where they worked, what stressed them out most, and what, if anything, they would do differently. This time, Stevie Nicks discusses joining Fleetwood Mac — and writing Rumours.
Stevie Nicks isn’t one for false modesty. “I probably have the best 28 story of anybody that you will interview,” she assures me from the landline in her Los Angeles home. Naturally, the high priestess of rock and roll is right. When Nicks was 27-and-a-half, she got the call that would change her life. She and her boyfriend at the time, guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, had been invited to meet Mick Fleetwood to discuss joining his band. “We met [the band] on January 1st, 1975 at a really great Mexican restaurant in Hollywood. We were standing out in front waiting when they drove up in these really old white Cadillacs that had those big fins in the back, so they were kind of spectacular,” she says. “They all got out and they’re very English and Lindsey and I are California hippies. So we went and had dinner and we knew it from that one night of sitting around and eating fantastic Mexican food together that everything was going to be alright.”
Nicks turned 28 five months later but in the intervening time, her world would shift cataclysmically. Fleetwood Mac recorded their eponymous album — with Nicks’ “Rhiannon” serving as one of the lead singles — in a breakneck three months. Then they shot the album’s cover, started doing press, and began rehearsing for their summer tour all in rapid succession. “It was like when you have a feeling in your bones that something is truly magical and great, and it was,” Nicks says of those first few months.
This sense of kismet colors nearly all of Nicks’ early Fleetwood Mac memories. (Her fellow bandmate Christine McVie’s mother was a psychic who told her daughter that she’d find her future on Orange Grove, which was the exact Los Angeles street Nicks lived on with Buckingham.) But for all Nicks’ belief in the band’s preordainment, she was still humbled by their immense success. “[There] are million-dollar stories about when you first join a band that becomes like a speeding bullet. You feel like you’re in a car with your head hanging out of it and your hair is just being blown back so hard that your head’s almost being blown off your body,” she says. “That’s how it was [at the beginning of my] 28th year.”
Ahead of the release of 24 Karat Gold: The Concert and Nicks’ latest single “Show Them the Way,” the 72-year-old spoke with Bustle about making more money than she could hide, splurging on a red Jaguar, and swearing on the Bible to never be more than two hours late.
Take me back to when you were 28. How were you feeling about your life and your career?
When Lindsey and I first joined Fleetwood Mac we had no money. I cleaned our producer’s house twice a week and he paid me $250 a month, which paid our rent on a really cool little Spanish apartment [in Los Angeles]. Then later that year we got back from [our first] tour and we signed serious contracts, making Lindsey and I each one-fifth of the band. Together we were almost a millionaire. So we went from never having to file taxes — because we didn’t make enough money to file taxes — to having to hire a business firm because we had way too much money. Thank you to my mother who said to me, “Honey, you guys need to find out who’s the best business management firm in Los Angeles and hire them.” Because we were just taking the money and putting it under a mattress. We had so much money we didn’t know where to hide it.
“There was nothing not fun about being a rock star.”
What was your biggest splurge that year?
Me, my designer Margi Kent, and two of my best friends were walking down Sunset Boulevard, and we walked past the Jaguar [dealership]. There was this red Jaguar in the window and I looked at everybody and I said, “I think that we should get that Jaguar.” They were like, “You hardly ever drive!” I said, “I don’t care! Let’s get it!”
In our world, we were dressed really beautifully. But in the people that owned the Jaguar store’s world, we looked like either hookers or some sort of cultish hippies. We walked in and I said, “I would like to buy that red Jaguar.” And they said, “Oh madam, I don’t really think you can afford that. They’re expensive.” Margi, who is one of those people that would just jump down your throat said, “You don’t know who she is right now, but you’re going to know who she is really soon, and she could buy every car in this entire building. She wants that Jaguar and she wants it now.” And I got it.
What did a typical Friday night look like for you?
There was nothing not fun about being a rock star. It was pretty darn cool the entire time. We would have crazy photo sessions where we would wear all these amazing costumes. Long Victorian black outfits with hats or just beautiful 1920s beaded gowns. We had our friend [photographer] Herbie Worthington — who did the Rumours cover and the Fleetwood Mac [album] cover — set up a black-and-white checked floor and we would [put on] all these costumes. We weren’t really doing photo sessions to necessarily have pictures to give to magazines, we just did it because it was like playing dress-up.
We would also travel. We would get on an airplane and go to a fantastic hotel somewhere and stay for three or four nights. I liked going on the road and having a really nice suite to stay in — with a nice living room and hopefully a fireplace — if I had three days off to just hang in there and write and watch television.
“Everybody put their hand on the Bible and swore that we wouldn’t ever bring our rotten personal lives into the studio.”
You were still 28 when you started working on the album Rumours, too.
We went up to The Record Plant in Sausalito, which is across the bay from San Francisco. We wanted to go somewhere that was really vibe-y. We rented two small little apartments right next to each other that were about 10 minutes away [from the studio] and that’s where we lived for the whole three months that we were recording. We did 12 demos and they were really good.
I [remember] walking into the studio up in Sausalito with “Dreams.” I said, “I have something I think you guys are going to want to hear.” Everybody was like, “What is it now? Have you written another song out of your millions of songs?” And I was like, “Yes I have, but listen to this.” So they put it on and it was just me playing a little Fender Rhodes electric piano and singing on a cassette player, but they put it on the big speakers and the song started playing. We ended up recording it that night.
Then we went back home and we probably recorded in every studio in LA. It took us 10 months [to record the album] and we were continually moving around because that’s just the nomad in all of us. When we finally finished Rumours we knew. Warner Bros., all our managers, agents and friends that hung around during the making of it knew that Rumours was magical. It was unfortunate that it was magically written about some very sad things that were happening [like fighting with Lindsey], but at the same time I think if you asked everybody now, “Well, we know that the fame and fortune got in the way of all of your relationships, but would you change a thing now?” And you actually have to say, “No, I wouldn’t change a thing.”
It seems like you all really found a way to put the music first.
We did. We took an oath. Everybody put their hand on the Bible and swore that we wouldn’t ever bring our rotten personal lives into the studio. It was like, “I, Stevie Nicks, swear to be focused, to be on board always, and to try to not be more than two hours late. To pay attention, to write the best songs I can, and to always have my heart in the right place when it comes to this band.” That’s really how we did it. Because we could have let all of our mundane, stupid problems completely wreck everything, but nobody was going to quit.
“We figured as the women — and as we know, women are always the ones that are going to keep things together anyway — we [wouldn’t] let this break up this band.”
There were so many highs that year, what was your lowest moment?
It was in the era that Lindsey and I were breaking up. We weren’t really breaking up, but I mean, we knew it. So that was really hard for both of us. We had been together a long time by then. It wasn’t like we had only been going out for three years; we had been going out since 1970 and that was 1976. We had lived together. I felt more-or-less married.
When we joined Fleetwood Mac, we had a really good foundation. We weren’t children, we were singers and songwriters who were determined to make it, and to do whatever we had to do within reason to make it. So even when we broke up at the end of 1976, it didn’t change what we had. It made it harder for us. We weren’t as friendly and as loving to each other, but we were cool.
But it wasn’t fun. It was not a good time. Christine and John [McVie] also broke up. That was not good, either. Christine and I spent a lot of time together when that happened. We would go and hide out in one of our rooms and play cards and watch movies and hang out. Just sitting on the floor in our bell bottom jeans, our high-heeled Corkys, our really pretty, sweet little blouses that we wore, and our crazy hair. We would talk about how we weren’t going to let this whole thing implode and break up the band. So we figured as the women — and as we know, women are always the ones that are going to keep things together anyway — we [wouldn’t] let this break up this band.
What would you tell your 28-year-old self?
I would just say, “Follow your heart.” Because that’s exactly what I did. I followed my heart and I had amazing love affairs — maybe that I shouldn’t have had — but my heart said, “Do it,” and I did. I’m not sorry for anything. Everything that was done was meant to be done in order for us to be sitting here today with the life that we have. So that I can be sitting here talking to you at 72 years old, praying that the pandemic will go away so that we can all go back out and I can have the last 10 to 15 years of my rock-and-roll life. That’s really it.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Samantha Leach / Bustle / Wednesday, November 11, 2020
At any hour of any day, somewhere on the radio dial, chances are you can find the voice of Stevie Nicks. This fall, decades after her 1970s breakthrough with Fleetwood Mac, she even became a chart sensation again, after a skateboarding TikTok star gave one of the band’s classic songs a boost.
Nicks has so many monster hits that what she did on her 24 Karat Gold Tour a few years ago was kind of radical: She opened up her gothic trunk of lost songs and pulled out a bunch that don’t often get played on the radio. That live show is now available as a concert film and an album — and Nicks says it took her until now, at age 72, to feel comfortable doing the songs she wants to do, instead of the ones other people expect of her.
“In the Fleetwood Mac world … it’s like you’re on a basketball team. You have to be a team player when you’re in a band. You’re never going to be able to be like that freewheeling, roller-skating witch that I am in my own world,” she explains. Performing her lesser-known songs, then, was a revelation: “When that tour was over, I went, ‘Well, I will never let management, agents, friends, acquaintances, my dog, anybody, tell me what I’m going to do on my stage, in my world.”
Nicks spoke with NPR’s Ari Shapiro; hear the radio version at the audio link above, and read on for an edited transcript.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You talk a lot in the show about Tom Petty, who was a close friend of yours. You do a couple of songs that you and he worked on together, including the first single from your debut solo album, “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around.” I think he was alive when you performed this set later that year, was that right?
He was, he was. Even when I talk about him now onstage, I talk about him like he is not dead — because I don’t want him to be dead. So I talk to him like he’s still down the street and I can, like, pick up the phone and call him. I’m really glad that this show was recorded before he died, because I think if he had already died, it would’ve definitely changed the way I spoke about everything. There would’ve been more of a sad pang to it. And as it was, it was all joyful.
You have always been recognized as a cultural icon and entertainer. Do you feel like you’re finally getting the recognition you deserve as a songwriter? I mean, you’re the only woman to be inducted to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame twice, as both a member of a band and a solo artist. And it feels like people are finally appreciating you on a level of some of these legends that we’ve been talking about.
Yes. I feel really great about it. I’ve heard, many times, from different people that aren’t in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame yet, “I don’t care. I don’t care if I’m ever going to get into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. It means nothing.” Until they get nominated. And then all of a sudden, it’s the greatest thing that’s ever happened to them.
It was just last year, 2019, that you were inducted.
It was just last year. I will always remember it like it was yesterday: I got to open the show and then do my, really, too-long speech. [But] I was like, hey — 22 men are in twice, and me. It’s 22 to one. So I’m going to say everything in this speech that I have to say and that I’ve been waiting to say. And I hope that it broke some kind of a ceiling that will let more women in. It was my greatest honor.
Can I ask you about something completely unrelated that you might be totally tired of talking about by now, but I just feel like I have to mention it? So there was this viral TikTok video …
Here, let me run and get my skates.
The video shows a guy cruising down the street on a skateboard, drinking cranberry juice, singing along with Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams.” That song was released in 1977, and because of this video, it was back in the top 10 this [fall]. Can you tell us about the first time you saw it?
Well, it totally just cracked me up. Am I touched by it? Absolutely. Does it just make me laugh, like I can’t even believe how funny it is? Yes.
You know, between the live concert film, the viral video and the new music that you’re releasing, it feels like, at the age of 72, you’re entering a new chapter in your career.
It kind of does, doesn’t it? I’m going to have to call him and thank him.
Oh, you mean the TikTok guy?
The TikTok guy. You have to understand: I’m not on TikTok, I’m not on Instagram, I’m not on Facebook, I don’t have a computer. But I have to call him and tell him, “Thank you so much, because you know what you did? You brought this music back to the world, all by yourself.”
Ari Shapiro / NPR / Wednesday, November 4, 2020
Premium video streaming access for Stevie Nicks 24 Karat Gold The Concert will begin October 29 at 9:00am PST / 12:00pm EST, with purchase available through November 5, 2020 at 11:59 PM PST. The event will be available for replay for 48 hours following purchase and is not available for download.
The 48-hour viewing period will begin as soon as it is made available on October 29.
Stevie Nicks talked to CBS Sunday Morning correspondent Tracy Smith about her long career upon releasing 24 Karat Gold The Concert.
24 Karat Gold The Concert will start streaming through video-on-demand from October 29 to November 5.
https://youtu.be/6wtsfT1UwaA
In another life, Stevie Nicks would have been a music-film editor. “I think I’m really good at it,” she says one Friday evening, calling from her home in Los Angeles. Her canine companion Lily is begging for her attention with a toy as Nicks reflects on her second life. “I can only say this about a few things.”
She’s had plenty of experience, working closely with director Joe Thomas on concert films for Fleetwood Mac (2004’s Live in Boston), her late friend Tom Petty (2006’s Live From Gainesville), and most recently, Stevie Nicks 24 Karat Gold Concert Film. Recorded during her 2017 tour stops in Indianapolis and Pittsburgh, the film is getting a special release this month and being screened at select drive-ins, theaters, and exhibition spaces on October 21st through 25th. The set lists featured classic solo and Nicks-led Fleetwood Mac songs along with tracks off her 2014 album, 24 Karat Gold: Songs From the Vault. For the music fans desperately missing live shows in the time of Covid-19, the film perfectly encapsulates the tambourine-banging, shawl-twirling, story-spinning magic that only Nicks can deliver.
Putting the project together with Thomas became one of two pandemic projects for the rock goddess (the other being her new song “Show Them the Way”). She flew out to Chicago in May with her assistant on a “full-on, fogged-out, Covid-free private plane” and lived in a house on a golf course that no one had been in since before lockdown had begun. Nicks would go to Thomas’ studio, masked up alongside everyone else (“I felt imprisoned by the mask, but I love the mask — I felt safe”), and got to work, diligently assessing the footage captured by all 12 cameras from shows in the two cities.
“I’m really the second editor,” she says of her uncredited job. “The fact is that if I don’t like a shot, it’s not going in.” She learned, as she had in past editing-room experiences, that men see women differently.
“We would rather see ourselves the way we see ourselves,” she says. “They kind of like us to be messy and a little bit like, ‘Oh, I just got here.’ And you’re like, ‘No, uh-uh. That is a terrible shot.’” That realization is part of what makes her think that working on concert documentaries for other bands could’ve been her other calling:
“Had I not been a singer and had the accidental grace to have been thrown into a situation where I was watching somebody else edit a rock & roll film of another band that had girls in it, I would’ve said, ‘I love this.’ Because you know why? I could’ve made it better.”
The process was a tedious one that paid off; there were tiny moments only Nicks could see that made the film all the more special. “I find shots that nobody else would look for,” she explains, citing one in particular where the camera was pointed over her drummer’s shoulder. “Nobody else would’ve thought to look at it, and it’s this amazing picture of me and Waddy [Wachtel, her longtime musical director and guitarist] standing and looking straight at each other. Waddy just slowly smiles at me, and you see the relationship that he and I have had since I first met him 1971.”
The less-fun tedium was when she had to sift through 46 minutes of storytelling, most of which served to contextualize the then-new songs she was debuting on the tour while also tributing her longtime friend Prince, who worked with her on “Stand Back.” Nicks admits that she slips “into [her] Valley Girl-ness” when she is in the throes of telling a really good story. “I talk to the audience as if you were seriously in my living room and I’ve known you for 50 years,” she explains. “So as I’m watching all these stories, I’m going, ‘Well, we have to take all the “likes” out because that’s dorky.’”
There were so many stories she had to self-edit even during the tour, ones that would’ve been too tangential even by Stevie Nicks standards. She laughs recalling another favorite Prince story of hers, one she left out of her tour monologues. In this tale, he picked her up after a Fleetwood Mac show in Minneapolis in his purple Camaro and drove an hour to his home.
“We finally got there and then we work on a song all night, and he barely gets me back, exactly on time, on the tarmac, at 20 minutes after 2 o’clock the next afternoon,” she says. The song itself has never been recorded or released, not yet at least.
“But if you tell that story and then everybody out in the audience says, ‘Well that’s amazing. So play us the song,’ which is exactly what would happen if you were sitting in your living room with your guitar or at the piano and had a couple of your best friends there that you’re running stuff by.”
Nicks’ stories got a little bit longer every night, she says, mostly because the response remained so enthusiastic. No one was upset that some of her many big hits were taken out of the set list to make room for her 24 Karat Gold tracks, all of which were written between 1969 and 1987. “I do have the right, at 72 years old, to play some of the songs that were written exactly at the same time all the other songs were written,” she says. “Everybody was really behind me on it.”
Of course, the performances themselves were the easiest to edit. Nicks compliments the direction of Wachtel, who “runs that band like a finely tuned Maserati,” and the singing of Nicks in tandem with her girl singers Sharon Celani and Marilyn Martin was flawless. Even with a few hiccups in the Indianapolis show, all was rectified by the time the band got to Pittsburgh.
“We knew on the second night that it’s going to be great,” she says. “Just everybody take a deep breath and understand that we don’t make mistakes. We play like we’ve been playing a thousand years because we have been playing a thousand years.”
Returning to her 2017 live shows proved to be a godsend for the star in the midst of staying home. She was already planning on taking the year off after back-to-back solo and Fleetwood Mac treks to finally work on a miniseries based on her song “Rhiannon,” which is inspired by the mythological Welsh witch of the same name. After a conversation with her friend and fan Harry Styles in February, the heaviness of not knowing when she can safely return to touring really hit her:
“He said to me, ‘I don’t think we will walk onstage again, Stevie, until the end of 2021, if then.’ And I’m going, ‘Oh, my God, this very, very young man is telling me this sage idea he has in his head.’ It was that phone call between a really fantastic artist in his twenties and me, in my seventies, going, ‘We as a music community of entertainers are screwed. Our lives as we know it is over.’”
Nicks is a realistic person, and she knows there is no chance she will step onstage and put her fans in danger until the coronavirus pandemic is fully under control. “The problem is we’re all hoping that some magical thing comes down and just cures all, like the president thinks is going to happen, but it’s not going to,” she says. “We know that. We have to dance around it and figure out what to do in the meantime.”
Nicks has a habit of making lots of things better, whether she realizes or not. For what can only be chalked up to cosmic reasons and her own crystal visions, her song “Dreams” for Fleetwood Mac has been given a second life during the pandemic. The song has been all over TikTok since the spring, helping Rumours get a major boost on the Rolling Stone 200 albums chart. As we were on the phone, the song reached a new apex when TikToker Nathan Apodaca (@Doggface208) went viral for the supremely chill video of him skateboarding, drinking cranberry juice, and singing along to “Dreams.” Everyone from Nicks’ bandmate Mick Fleetwood to Shakira have re-created it, and Nicks even joined TikTok to do her own spin on the clip, lacing up some roller skates as she sings over Rumours on vinyl. As she prepares to release a concert film built around her desire to tell and celebrate the stories of her past, a 43-year-old song of hers has taken on a life of its own. Outside of her music, her cursive-print love letters to fans that she has shared on social media every so often have spread far and wide, another glimmer of delight and hope as only she can provide.
“This is about the closest to a big, full-on concert that’s not 25 years old that you can see,” she says of her film. “You can feel the magic. Knowing that some day, when this is under control, the magic will come back. Because we’ll all come back.”
Brittany Spanos / Rolling Stone / Wednesday, October 21, 2020
Stevie Nicks bought her first copy of Vogue when she was 25 years old. It was 1973, around the time of Buckingham Nicks, the first and only album she and ex-boyfriend Lindsey Buckingham ever released as a duo. Still a few years removed from the fame and fortune that would follow their recruitment into Fleetwood Mac, Nicks was earning just a buck fifty an hour waiting tables in a flapper girl uniform.
“I only had enough money for one magazine at that point, and Vogue was the first one I ever bought,” Nicks recalls. “I would scrape my money together and buy it every month.”
Five decades later, Nicks—who prefers using a landline and doesn’t own a computer—still finds comfort in her lo-fi rituals. “To this day my favorite thing is getting into bed at five o’clock in the morning with a cup of decaf coffee, playing some soft, groovy music, and reading my Vogue,” she tells me. “Me and my little dog Lily pore over every single page for hours, and it’s been that way since 1973.”
Nicks has spent most of the pandemic in her Pacific Palisades home with two close friends and the aforementioned Lily—a Chinese crested who sits dutifully on her owner’s lap during our call. “She has her back turned to me because she doesn’t really wanna be here. I just know she’s plotting her escape,” Nicks says with a raspy giggle. “It’s fine. My feelings aren’t too hurt…well, they are, but I’ll be okay.”
As Fleetwood Mac’s lovelorn frontwoman, Nicks crafted masterworks out of the sex-and-drug-fueled dalliances that almost destroyed the group (documented in real time on their 1977 breakup opus Rumours). Still one of the 10 best-selling albums of all time, Rumours made stars out of its new lineup, but it was always clear from the outset who the breakout was. With three songwriters fighting for space on each record, it wasn’t long before Nicks needed her own outlet.
“They said, ‘You can make your solo album and have a solo trip, but if we go into work, we’re gonna call you,’” she remembers. “‘Terrific, I’ll be there.’ That was always my promise to them.” 1981’s shimmery Bella Donna set the stage for a second career that made Nicks the first woman to ever be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice (once with the group in 1998 and by herself just last year).
2020 was originally meant to be a year off from the grueling lifestyle that comes with back-to-back arena tours as both Fleetwood Mac frontwoman and solo enchantress. With just one festival show a month, Nicks would slow down. Then the shows—her headlining slots at Jazz Fest and Governors Ball were early casualties—began to be canceled.
Music venues aren’t predicted to return to full capacity until summer 2021 at the earliest, but this month, Nicks is releasing two projects: 24 Karat Gold: The Concert, a filmed version of her 2017 solo tour, and “Show Them the Way,” her anthemic new single and first piece of original music in six years.
24 Karat Gold: The Concert begins with Nicks sauntering onstage in what’s become her signature all-black uniform: a chiffon wrap blouse, peasant-style skirt, layers of billowy caped jackets, and velvet platform boots. The look may be familiar, but she assures the crowd that nothing else will be: “It’s not the same Stevie Nicks show you’ve seen a million times, because I’m not the same Stevie Nicks you’ve seen a million times.”
Playing at theaters and drive-ins October 21 and 25 (streaming plans TBD; a live CD version is out October 30), the concert film was shot during Nicks’s 2017 24 Karat Gold tour and edited this past May. “At first I didn’t understand why I had to edit any of it. But then I’d listen and there’s always a thing here, a thing there, and a lot of likes,” she laughs. “That’s the Valley Girl in me!”
24 Karat Gold was a new album composed of old material pulled from Nicks’s “gothic trunk of lost songs,” with some dating all the way back to 1969. The tour marked the live debut of those songs and many others from her solo catalogue, including the Wild Heart title track, performed in the same key as a rare live demo that’s become a fan favorite. “I couldn’t have been more thrilled to walk onstage every night and be able to do all these other songs I love, but of course I’ll never get tired of doing ‘Edge of Seventeen’ or ‘Stand Back,’” she says. “Those songs were a part of my life for so long that I would never take that away from people.”
Nicks’s favorite performance in the film is “If You Were My Love,” a ballad written for her solo debut that she cut at the 11th hour. “It’s such a beautiful song and sometimes I just wonder, ‘Where did this come from?’ It breaks my heart when I sing it. You have to sing it in a way where you know people are feeling it,” Nicks says. “I know someone has a tear in their eye because it reminds them of someone they always loved or wanted to be in a relationship with who never knew. I feel that onstage and I see it.”
When I saw the tour the night before Halloween nearly four years ago, the fervor of the attending crowd rivaled that of a Pentecostal gathering. Many were dressed in their own form of Nicks-ian drag: layers of vintage leather, frilly lace, and drapey shawls. A few fortune tellers here, a handful of white winged doves there. A woman I spotted near the stage had even teased her hair to the gods, re-creating the cover look from 1989’s Other Side of the Mirror.
But Nicks had underestimated her own appeal. “We didn’t really have any plans to film anything, because in the beginning we didn’t think it would go beyond 25 shows,” she says. After the first leg sold out, the tour went on to book a total of 67 shows. Filming became a logical business decision. “It kicked me up into the next echelon for my solo career, which is amazing that it would be a tour with all those unfamiliar songs.”
Had Nicks gotten the chance to take the stage at Governors Ball this year, she would’ve shared headlining duties with a slate of artists who weren’t even born when Rumours debuted: Solange, Miley Cyrus, Vampire Weekend, and Tame Impala, who once participated in a Fleetwood Mac tribute album. Chances are one of your favorite artists has covered Nicks or cited her as an influence.
“Our parents would play her records for us in the house constantly, so we’ve been listening to Stevie’s music since we were born,” the Haim sisters shared via email. When Nicks invited the band to her home in 2014 for a T magazine interview, Nicks gifted the trio with gold moon pendants modeled after her own. “We’d heard about them from other friends who’d received them saying that they hold the power of the moon. Stevie said when we meet someone who is in need of healing, it’s our job to give it to them.”
A new single, “Show Them the Way,” is a different kind of gift to her devotees. The single, out now, began life as a dream that occurred while she was in Chicago editing a concert special in 2008. After spending all day in the studio, Nicks would go home and watch the Democratic primaries or marathon documentaries about the civil rights movement. “I was like a student of history,” she recalls.
One night, Nicks had a crystalline vision: She was invited to a political benefit attended by the civil rights luminaries; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led her down a hallway to a ballroom where John Lewis and John F. Kennedy awaited her. “I saw myself walking with Martin Luther King from the back, like I was standing on the other side of myself, and for the rest of my life I will have that burned across my heart,” she says now. “I walked down the hallway with him into that room with the Kennedys, and all the people surrounding the piano said, ‘Play for us.’”
Nicks wrote a poem about her dream and eventually set it to music. Over the years she’d stumble across her handwritten poem and consider tacking it onto a release like 2011’s In Your Dreams. It was just never the right time, she says, until now. Nicks considers “Show Them the Way” a “record unto itself.” One that needed to simmer for 12 years before she felt comfortable sharing it with the world in two versions: the original rock anthem and an acoustic piano ballad.
“When you hear the acoustic version and really know the words it’ll break your heart. At least that’s how it affects me,” she says. “Then I listen to the rock version and think it’s my best song since ‘Edge of Seventeen.’”
The release of the single coincides with Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” charting on the Hot 100 for the first time since 1977 thanks to a recent viral boost from TikToker Nathan Apodaca. A 22-second video of Apodaca gliding down a highway while lip-synching the song in between gulps of cranberry juice provided a feel-good balm for the quarantined masses, with “Dreams” streamed more than 36 million times in the past two weeks alone. Nicks paid homage to the TikTok for her debut post on the platform, spinning the track on vinyl while swapping Apodaca’s skateboard for roller skates.
“I’m not really on the internet. I hate it,” she clarifies. “Taylor Swift talks about all the haters and it’s too much for me. I’m afraid anything I say people will take wrong and I just can’t deal with that.”
Nicks would just rather listen to music anyway. Harry Styles’s Fine Line is a recent favorite, and she loves the new Haim record “to death.” She sings every night, and says dancing around the house to “Show Them the Way” is her “favorite exercise” right now. Nicks takes days to curate cassette mixtapes filled with her favorite songs she hears across the radio, name-checking everyone from Halsey to “the 1978” (sic) as current favorites. “I’ll listen to Ariana Grande and Miley Cyrus, then mix generations and put in someone like Mariah Carey,” she elaborates. “Then I’ll throw Harry Styles right into the middle with ‘Watermelon Sugar!’”
Nicks has all but adopted Styles, who knows a thing or two about transitioning from supergroup to solo career. The former One Direction member first met his idol in London at a Fleetwood Mac show that happened to fall on her birthday. Styles piped her name onto a carrot cake and hand-delivered it to Nicks backstage, kicking off an unexpected May December friendship that now seems preordained.
“Stevie means so much more to people than their favorite song, or a concert they went to once,” shares Styles, whom Nicks personally selected to induct her at last year’s Rock Hall ceremony. “Her strength, fearlessness, and openness to feeling is something that leaves you feeling lucky to be on the planet at the same time as her. She inspires you to be bolder, in work, life, and love.”
Nicks can’t wait to perform with Styles again when this is all through. She wants to sing “Show Them the Way” in front of a crowd who’ll hopefully glean some strength from her vulnerability. “There’s a lyric from Mick Jagger that goes, ‘I have my freedom but I don’t have much time,’ and I’ve been saying that to people over the past two or three years,” Nicks says. “I know everybody just thinks I’m the Energizer Bunny, but I’ll be 80 in eight years.”
The state of the world has made music’s most romantic optimist question whether she’ll ever get to twirl across a stage again. “I wanna order this pretty little necklace and I told my assistant, ‘It could go with my stage jewelry…if I ever go onstage again.’ And I’m saying that all the time,” she groans. “Or how something would be perfect for my stage outfit…if we ever travel again.”
Nicks has been taking the pandemic seriously. Her biggest fear is what contracting the virus could do to her overall health but particularly her singing voice. She battled a case of Epstein-Barr virus in pre-lockdown 2020 and was hospitalized with double pneumonia the year before. “I really feel if the country doesn’t come together, we are never going to get rid of this,” she goes on. Nicks has also been posting on Instagram more frequently in recent months, urging her fans to stay inside and wear a mask. “Unlike other people who are continually having rallies and saying it’s fine to go indoors now without masks, we—the music community—give a you-know-what about the future of our industry and would never put anybody in danger.”
In the meantime, she’s hard at work on a multimedia project based on the character of Rhiannon, the “old Welsh witch” who inspired one of Nicks’s most indelible hits. She also wants to turn more of her poetry into music and, eventually, a new solo record. Fleetwood Mac isn’t recording new music anytime soon, but you can count on baby boomers and Gen Z to show up in equal measure for their next tour (whenever that is).
“There’s so many layers to each moment in life,” she says toward the end of our conversation. “I always climb into the next layer of my stories and have to pull it back when I see somebody on the side of the stage waving their hands yelling, ‘No! No! Stop!’” Nicks laughs.
“I’ll just have to tell all my other stories next time.”
Keaton Bell / Vogue / Tuesday, October 20, 2020
This is the official video for “Crying in the Night” (24 Karat Gold Tour) by Stevie Nicks, released on October 20, 2020.
