On the eve of her new concert film, the Fleetwood Mac singer talks new solo material, Trump’s response to COVID-19 and the chances of a ‘Rumours’-era reunion

Nothing will slow Stevie Nicks down. When Fleetwood Mac concluded their year-long world tour at the end of 2019, the 72-year-old singer songwriter decamped to her Santa Monica home with the intention of taking the year off from touring. Like the rest of us, she didn’t expect to be holed-up for quite so long. “I’ve been quarantined solid since March,” Nicks tells NME. “I figured that I’d probably do about ten gigs and then I was just going to work on a miniseries for Rhiannon but then the door slams and we have a pandemic.”

Out of these dark days, Nicks has kept a busy schedule. ‘Show Them The Way’, worked upon remotely with the help of Dave Grohl, is her first single in six years. She has also helped produce 24 Karat Gold The Concert, a spellbinding concert film from the 2016/7 tour of the same name, which in cinemas for two nights later this month featuring staples such as ‘Edge of Seventeen’ and ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’ alongside unreleased gems and deep cuts.

Whilst a viral TikTok video may have drawn headlines and pushed her song ‘Dreams’ back into the charts recently, the two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Famer had other things on her mind when we caught up with her, including her issues with Trump, the lost ‘Buckingham Nicks’ album and why she is fatalistic if ‘Rumours’–era Fleetwood Mac are to never play together again.

Your first single for six years and the 24 Karat Gold The Concert film – this is turning into a very busy time for you…

“In a million years, I never thought I’d have two projects coming out within two weeks of each other. It’s been a lot of work over the last two months, let me tell you. I’m pretty excited and really proud of everything. I think the film is the closest anyone is going to get to a real, serious concert until the pandemic is over. And I think the song is ‘right now’ with what’s going on in our country. Our country is so divisive. We have gone back so far. It is very sad and very scary.”

You have been openly critical of the US administration’s response to COVID-19. You tweeted that ‘Nobody is leading us. Nobody has a plan.’ You called it ‘a tragedy’ and ‘a real American Horror Story’.

“You know that our President and his wife contracted the virus? It’s like, ‘wear your mask’, you know? It’s a simple thing to ask. Just wear your mask. Especially if you’re the President of the United States. It’s pretty simple. We’ve been told again and again and again that it’s incredibly contagious. I don’t take any chances. Nobody in my world does. For me, as a singer, if I get it and I get that terrible cough that never goes away; if it attacks my lungs and I don’t have my lung power anymore it would kill me. It would destroy my career.”

Do you feel that Trump been irresponsible?

“I think if you don’t wear a mask you’re irresponsible. I’m very sorry that he got it – I’m not saying anything like that – but he never wears a mask. Nobody in his circle does. And now they’ve all got it. It really proves something to the people in the US who view it as some political thing. Well, guess what? It’s not political. It’s dangerous and it’s contagious. But he [Trump] had to get it to know that? He couldn’t listen to the science? He couldn’t listen to all the doctors who probably said in private, ‘you need to take care of yourself and wear your mask’?”

Why do you think he hasn’t listened to the scientists?

“I think he just thinks he knows better. But what is he going to say now? This is like telling your children to be careful when they go out and then they don’t come home one night. All you can do is tell people and whether they listen or not is up to them. But that’s not my problem. I’m very sorry that they got it. But they knew better.”

You have a reputation for being forthcoming and open in interviews. I presume this is what you’re like in all aspects of your life?

“It’s the only way I can really be. I know that comes from my mum. I just am who I am. I know that sometimes my honesty is a lot for people and that it pushes some away, but if you can’t hear the truth then I can’t really hang out with you!”

In 24 Karat Gold The Concert, you detail difficulties you had making 1983’s ‘The Wild Heart’. You say you were ‘arrogant’ and ‘less of a team player’ than you were on your solo debut, ‘Bella Donna’. Why so?

“‘Bella Donna’ took three months to make. It was the first record in a solo career and I was not stupid enough to waste time and spend too much money. No self-indulgence. Then, after ‘Bella Donna’, I made ‘Mirage’ with Fleetwood Mac. That took a year and we went on tour for about another year. ‘Mirage’ was a big record and had a tonne of singles on it and so, when I came back, I was different. I could not consider myself a cleaning lady and a waitress anymore.”

How did this affect the recording of ‘The Wild Heart’?

“When I walked into the studio I was much more confident. I can call it arrogance or I can call it confidence. It was somewhere in between the two. I was much stronger in my ideas. For example, I wanted to produce. I just wanted to be more involved than I was during the first album. When I look back on that now, that was just me growing as an artist. I didn’t want it all done for me. ‘The Wild Heart’ was different. It needed to be different. Much like how, after ‘Rumours’, we [Fleetwood Mac] made ‘Tusk’ because we didn’t want to do ‘Rumours’ over. Even though the record company said we needed to, we just said, ‘We can’t do it.’”

Was your second album a personal turning point?

“‘Bella Donna’ kicked off my solo career but as I walked away from ‘The Wild Heart’ everybody knew that I had arrived as a solo artist. I was not going to just say, ‘That was fun’ and go back to Fleetwood Mac. I was going to be able to handle being in both bands. When Fleetwood Mac took vacations, I could go and make a solo album and tour. And then go back again. It worked out great for a Gemini: I had two worlds. Never a boring moment.”

Were you ever conflicted about offering songs to Fleetwood Mac rather than keeping them for yourself?

“No, I was never selfish with the songs. If I had ten songs that I had written, I would sit at the piano and play all ten for Fleetwood Mac. I would let them choose because if they chose the songs then they were going to be good. If I tried to shove songs down their throat, they weren’t going to be good. Who they go to is fine by me. It’s never been a problem. It kinda works itself out. The songs that are supposed to be on the record that you’re doing at the time jump out. And the ones that aren’t right for that particular time don’t.”

“Lindsey and I haven’t had any communication since his heart attack. If it’s ever meant to happen, it will”

Thinking of the revelations springing from the #MeToo movement, did you ever experience any difficulties of that kind over the years?

“Honestly… in Fleetwood Mac, Christine [McVie] and I were a force of nature. In the first two months I was in the band, Chris and I made a pact that we would never be in a room full of famous English or American guitar players and be treated like second class citizens. If we weren’t respected, we would say, ‘this party’s over.’ We have stayed true to that our entire career.

In my own career, I didn’t have Christine but I had Lori Nicks and Sharon Celani. My [backing] singers and my best friends. We wanted to be Crosby, Stills and Nash! Sometime we would try not to make my voice louder than theirs, so that we could have that three-part [harmony] going on. I had my girls: the three of us. They were my sound. Together, we were also very much like, ‘don’t mess with us, because we’re really good, we’re talented and we’re really nice women. If you don’t treat us the way we feel that we should be treated we won’t work with you.’”

Was the need for a pact, or strength in numbers, necessary because you witnessed mistreatment, or worse, directly?

“Sometimes I saw women treated in a way that I didn’t think was great. At 72 years old, I am totally behind MeToo. I support all those women, totally. I joined a famous band in 1975. I didn’t have to move to Los Angeles by myself and try to find a job in a band or try to find something to do with music all alone. I didn’t have to do what women who move to LA to be an actress have to do. I had a team behind me immediately. When I was with Lindsey [Buckingham], I had him. I was never out there alone having to talk to producers or men who were going to try and take advantage of me. I’m really lucky. It’s really unfortunate that most women in showbusiness do experience that, but I seem to have skated through it.”

The film features ‘Cryin’ in the Night’ from 1973’s ‘Buckingham Nicks’. This album has never been released in the CD era and beyond. Due to your fall-out are we further away than ever from a release?

“I don’t know. I think it should be released. It should just be polished up a little bit. I don’t think it should be remixed. I think it should just go out the way it was mixed when we released it. I hope it happens. Owning ‘Buckingham Nicks’ between me and Lindsey is like owning an old Mercedes. One person says, ‘let’s release it!’ and the other person goes, ‘I don’t wanna let it go.’ And then three years later it’s the other way around. That’s what’s been happening with ‘Buckingham Nicks’ since 1975!”

Have you heard back from Lindsey since you sent him a note following his heart attack last year?

“The heart attack was serious. All of us in Fleetwood Mac wrote to him and told him that he’d better get well. Being an ex-girlfriend, I wrote more than that. I said, ‘you’d better stay well and you’d take care of yourself’. The same old thing, right? But we haven’t had any communication. It’s OK. If it’s ever meant to happen, it will. If we’re meant to communicate ever again, we will. It’s not happening right now.”

Did he acknowledge the letter though?

“He’s acknowledged it, yeah. He wrote a kind of group letter to us all. None of us have had any communication with him since. You know, it lasted 43 years, so we had a really, really good run.”

Stevie Nicks 24 Karat Gold The Concert 2CD & digital/streaming releases will be available on 30 Oct.

Greg Wetherall / NME / October 15, 2020

At 72, the singer is still looking for adventure. She talks about her years with Fleetwood Mac, the abortion that made them possible, and her friendship with Harry Styles

Stevie Nicks has been taking the pandemic even more seriously than most. She has barely left her home in Los Angeles this year. “My assistant, God bless her, she puts on her hazmat suit and goes to get food, otherwise we’d starve to death,” she says. She fell seriously ill in March 2019, ending up in intensive care with double pneumonia; after that shock, she fears contracting Covid-19 could end her singing career: “My mom was on a ventilator for three weeks when she had open-heart surgery and she was hoarse for the rest of her life.”

What would it mean to her to stop singing? “It would kill me,” she says. “It isn’t just singing; it’s that I would never perform again, that I would never dance across the stages of the world again.” She pauses and sighs. “I’m not, at 72 years old, willing to give up my career.”

It is nearly midnight in LA when we speak on the phone; not a problem for Nicks, who is “totally nocturnal”. The night she fell ill last year, she had just become the first woman to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice – an honour that reflects her wild success as one of the lead singers of Fleetwood Mac and as a solo artist, as a writer and singer of raw, magical songs about love and freedom, including “Dreams,” “Rhiannon,” “Gold Dust Woman,” “Landslide” and “Edge of Seventeen.” Nicks is unabashedly funny, dry as a bone, often sidling into sarcasm.

I ask about her approach to spirituality. She says that, for all her fears about her career, “some people are really afraid of dying, but I’m not. I’ve always believed in spiritual forces. I absolutely know that my mom is around all the time.” Just after her mother died, in 2012, Nicks was standing in her kitchen with “really bad acid reflux”. “And I felt something almost tap my shoulder and this voice go: ‘It’s that Gatorade you’re drinking,’” she says. “I’d been sick and chugging down the Hawaiian Punch. Now, that’s not some romantic, gothic story of your mother coming back to you. It’s your real mother, walking into your kitchen and saying” – she puts on a rasp – “‘Don’t drink any more of that shit.’” She pauses, waiting for me to laugh, then cackles.

Nicks was close to her mother, Barbara, who pushed to get her career back after she had children. “She said to me: you will never stand in a room full of men and feel like you can’t keep up with them. And you will never depend upon a man to support you. She drummed that into me, and I’m so glad she did.”

Women’s rights have been on Nicks’ mind since the death of her “hero”, the US supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, last month. “Abortion rights, that was really my generation’s fight. If President Trump wins this election and puts the judge he wants in, she will absolutely outlaw it and push women back into back-alley abortions.”

Nicks terminated a pregnancy in 1979, when Fleetwood Mac were at their height and she was dating the Eagles singer Don Henley. What did it mean to be able to make that choice? “If I had not had that abortion, I’m pretty sure there would have been no Fleetwood Mac. There’s just no way that I could have had a child then, working as hard as we worked constantly. And there were a lot of drugs, I was doing a lot of drugs … I would have had to walk away.” She pauses. “And I knew that the music we were going to bring to the world was going to heal so many people’s hearts and make people so happy. And I thought: you know what? That’s really important. There’s not another band in the world that has two lead women singers, two lead women writers. That was my world’s mission.”

Fleetwood Mac brought out Rumours in 1977 – an album that became almost as famous for the drama that went into making it as for its songs. It has sold more than 40m copies and keeps reaching new listeners. Just last week, one of Nicks’ biggest hits, “Dreams,” became part of a viral trend on TikTok.

The band’s problems incubated as the album was made, with their cocaine use reaching industrial levels: Nicks and her then-boyfriend and musical partner, Lindsey Buckingham, broke up; John and Christine McVie, the band’s bassist and pianist/singer, got divorced; and the drummer Mick Fleetwood’s marriage broke down.

Nicks has been performing since the age of five, when her grandfather, a country singer in her native Phoenix, Arizona, dressed her in cowgirl outfits and hoisted her on to saloon bar stages to sing. She met Buckingham at the piano, in her final year of high school, when he started playing “California Dreamin’” and she walked over to harmonise with him. The pair joined Fleetwood Mac in 1975.

Nicks brought glamour, stage swagger and tragic love songs to the band, her contribution complementing that of her fellow songwriter, Christine McVie. The band survived for 44 years – through Nicks’ affair with Fleetwood, Christine McVie’s 15-year hiatus and Buckingham’s departure in 1987. He came back, but was fired in 2018 (he filed a lawsuit, but later settled with the band). He was replaced by Neil Finn of Crowded House and Mike Campbell of Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers.

Has she spoken to Buckingham since he left? “No.” Do you really think you’ll never appear on stage with him again? “Probably never.” Really? “Uh-uh,” she says, indicating a firm no.

She says people always ask the band: “‘Do you get along?’ We’d go: ‘Not really.’ They’d say: ‘Are you friends?’ and we’d go: ‘Not really.’ ‘Do you see each other when you’re not on tour?’ ‘Er, no.’ It has been like that since 1976.”

Nicks has a new live-concert film coming out, 24 Karat Gold, which was recorded in 2017. The show is a hoot: four decades of greatest hits, some never-released songs and anecdotes that veer from hilarious to heartfelt. She has a new single out, too, about a dream she had about Martin Luther King and John F Kennedy. “Let me tell you, honey, the rock’n’roll version will just knock your socks off,” she says. “But the acoustic version will break your heart.” Both were recorded remotely, with Dave Grohl on drums and Dave Stewart on guitar.

Nicks has been described by male colleagues as an “ego” who parades her heartbreak on stage. When her first solo album, the brilliant Bella Donna, topped the charts in 1981, she gave Buckingham a copy. He left it on the studio floor and never listened to it. “They were full-on jealous. And you know what? I should have cared less.” “They” as in the band members or the producers? “Oh, all of them. They hated that kind of confidence in a woman. People would say to me: ‘It would be very hard to be Mr Stevie Nicks.’ And I’m going: well, yeah, probably, unless you were just a really nice guy that was really confident in himself, not jealous of me, liked my friends, enjoyed my crazy life and had fun with it. And, of course, there are very few men like that. I’m an independent woman and am able to take care of myself, and that is not attractive to men.”

She remembers a discussion with her father in her family home, just after Bella Donna came out, when she was 35. “And just out of nowhere, my dad goes: ‘Stevie, you’ll never get married.’ If Christine was in this room with me right now, she’d tell you that we both made the decision not to have kids and instead follow our musical muse around the world. It’s not my job, it’s who I am.”

But Nicks did get married once, in 1982, to the former husband of her high school best friend, Robin Anderson. Robin was diagnosed with leukaemia while she was pregnant with her first child and died shortly after his birth. Nicks’ marriage to Robin’s widower, Kim, lasted three months. “That wasn’t really a marriage,” says Nicks. “We did it to take care of her son. And, three weeks later, we realised that that wasn’t going to work.”

Robin and Kim’s son, Matthew, now has a daughter, named after his late mother. “Little Robin is five years old,” says Nicks. “Last Christmas, she was at my house and she comes into the kitchen, grabs my hand and goes: ‘Come with me, Grandma Stevie,’ and I’m going: ‘Did this child just call me Grandma Stevie?’ She did. And on that day I wrote in my journal and it said: ‘I promise you, Robin, that I will be Grandma Stevie until death do us part.’ Life has these weird turnarounds, you know. I say to my friend Robin, who died so long ago: ‘Look through my eyes at your granddaughter.’ She was yours and now she is mine.”

Looking back, Nicks’ only regret is her eight years of addiction to the tranquilliser clonazepam (sold as Klonopin). It started in 1986 when a psychiatrist prescribed her the drug to help her sleep after she came out of rehab for cocaine addiction. “It’s a very subtle drug; you just don’t feel it much, or so you think. On the bottle, it says: ‘Take as needed.’ That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. So you think: ‘Well, I need it every two hours.’ It’s addiction in a bottle.”

It was not a dreadful or traumatic time, she says. She sat at home, watched films, ate good food, saw friends. But she stopped creating. “It was a totally non-time. I just existed. It took away all my wonderful drama, my tempestuousness, my compassion, my empathy – all those things that drove me to my piano. I say to myself now: ‘How did you survive eight years without your wonderful drama?’

“I always look back and think: what could I have done during that time? Made a Fleetwood Mac album or a solo record. I could have gotten married or had a baby or adopted one. Let me tell you, if anybody ever tries to put you on Klonopin, run screaming out of the room.”

She says it is “annoying” that so many of the men of her generation were able to pair up with younger women and start families later in life (Buckingham, for example, had his third child in his mid-50s; Ronnie Wood and Mick Jagger fathered children at 69 and 73 respectively).

‘I knew that the music we were going to bring to the world was going to heal so many people’s hearts’ … Nicks in 24 Karat Gold: The Concert.
“Men are not having families with younger women because they want to have families, they’re doing it because they need to have a younger wife so they can feel that rush of romance again,” she says. “I did it once, though, you know. I had a relationship with a man when I was 50 and he was 30.” He was not famous, she says. “He was just a really lovely man. And I realised that I’d already lived 30 to 50; I didn’t want to live it again.” One day, he asked her to go to a talkshow taping with him on the back of his motorbike. “And I said: ‘Are you out of your mind? I’m going to arrive at a famous talkshow on the back of your motorcycle. And people are going to say, wait, is that Stevie Nicks? Hahahaha.’ Finally, I just had to say to him: ‘I’m not good for you.’”

Is she dating now? “I’m not going out with anyone. And I haven’t gone out with anyone in a long, long time. But I will say, I am always a romantic and I’m never averse to the fact that it is possible that you might turn a street corner and walk into somebody that just catches your eye, because it’s happened to me a million times. So, could I fall in love and run away with somebody at 72 years old? Yeah. It’s probably not gonna happen, but it’s possible.”

I ask about her friendship with Harry Styles. “Can I just say that Harry Styles is not my younger boyfriend,” she says – deadpan, but with a smile in her voice. “He is my friend. My very good friend.”

Like Styles, Nicks is a fashion muse: the top hat, billowing sleeves, draped silk and shawls she popularised in the 70s and 80s is still a beloved silhouette. She was always feted for her beauty, but did she know that she was beautiful? “Of course I thought that I was very pretty,” she says. “You know, I once wrote a song called ‘Prettiest Girl in the World,’ but it never came out. It started with the line: ‘She was the prettiest girl in the world / But that was a long time ago.’ And that’s something that I have said to a lot of my younger friends: no matter how beautiful you are, you’re going to get older and you’re not going to look like you did when you were 25. So roll with the punches.”

We talk about what it is like for women to age in the public eye. “Oh God, the Botox,” she says. “Let me tell you, Botox only makes you look like you’re in a satanic cult. I only had it once and it destroyed my face for four months. I would look in the mirror and try and lift my eyebrow and go: ‘Oh, there you are, Satan’s angry daughter.’ Never again. I watch a lot of news and I see all the lady newscasters looking like Satan’s angry daughters, too.”

It is almost time for Nicks to go. She plans to spend the rest of the night in bed with her dog, Lily, reading Vogue and watching the sunrise, drinking tea. “I’m very sober now,” she says. Before she goes, I ask about my favourite song of hers, Storms, in which she describes falling out of love with a man and surrendering herself to her destiny: “Never have I been a blue calm sea / I have always been a storm.”

“Oh, that one was a – excuse my language – fuck-you to Mick,” she says, referring to her affair with Fleetwood. “I sat at my piano, a feminist woman, and I wrote it, to say that nothing you or anybody else can do to me can change the fact that, as the opening line goes: ‘Every night that goes between / I feel a little less.’” A song about independence, I say. “Freedom,” she says. “I am a totally free woman, and I am independent, and that’s exactly what I always wanted to be.”

Stevie Nicks’ 24 Karat Gold: The Concert will be in cinemas 21-25 October. Find a screening at stevienicksfilm.com. The accompanying album is released on 30 October.

Jenny Stevens / The Guardian (UK) / Wednesday, October 14, 2020

Two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Stevie Nicks chatted with Digital Journal‘s Markos Papadatos about her 24 Karat Gold concert film, her live album, upcoming single on October 9, and she shared the key to longevity in the music industry.

Track and field legend Wilma Rudolph once said: “Never underestimate the power of dreams and the influence of the human spirit. We are all the same in this notion: The potential for greatness lives within each of us.” Stevie Nicks is a woman that embodies this wise quotation.

Nicks has been hailed by this music aficionado as the perennial “Empress of Rock and Roll,” and rightfully so. She possesses one of the most significant and powerful voices in the music business; moreover, she has had an illustrious music career that has spanned well over five decades. She scored six Top 10 albums, eight Grammy nominations for her solo work, and she has sold in excess of 140 million albums collectively as a solo recording artist and as part of the iconic rock group Fleetwood Mac.

She earned several Grammy Awards as a member of the Fleetwood Mac: their seminal studio album Rumours won the Grammy for “Album of the Year” in 1978, and two Fleetwood Mac albums have been inducted into the coveted Grammy Hall of Fame: Rumours in 2003 and Fleetwood Mac in 2016 respectively. Last year, she made music history because she was the first woman inducted into the coveted Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice.

This interview delves into the conscience of Stevie Nicks as a prolific songwriter, vocalist, poet, storyteller, and a song stylist.

Stevie Nicks — 24 Karat Gold The Concert

She will be debuting the Stevie Nicks 24 Karat Gold The Concert, via Trafalgar Releasing, on two nights only: October 21 and 25 respectively. This concert film was directed and produced by Joe Thomas. Acclaimed guitar player Waddy Wachtel served as the musical director of this tour. It was filmed in Indianapolis and Pittsburgh back in 2017. It showcases her intimate storytelling and her inspirations for some of her most famous and timeless recordings. “Who knew four years ago when I went out on that tour?” she said. “This was one of the most important records that I’ve ever done, in my opinion. I wanted to go back and pick them up. It had 16 songs that I always planned to re-do because they were all recorded at some point and I wasn’t happy with how they originally came out.”

“The song ‘If You Were My Love’ is a ballad that I love to sing so much, and I wanted to make sure that it was perfect. It’s the song that I love to sing most on stage with the girls,” she said.

Stevie Nicks 24 Karat Gold The Concert will be available at select cinemas, drive-ins and exhibition spaces all over the world. With this concert film, Nicks will be taking her fans and listeners on a trip down memory lane, where she will provide them with a virtual front-row seat to her live shows. “The film is coming out soon and this tour that we filmed was the most fun that I’ve ever had on a tour,” she acknowledged. “When you can add six or seven new songs into a setlist, it changes the whole show, and it makes it seem like the whole show was brand new.”

Concert setlist: An eclectic program of classic and newer songs

Her setlist for this concert film includes such fan-favorite songs as “Rhiannon,” “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,” “Edge of Seventeen,” “Stand Back,” and “Landslide,” among many other classics from her extensive musical catalog. “Even the older songs that weren’t on the 24 Karat Gold album become new again because of the six or seven new songs that nobody has ever heard before. When I walked off stage, that whole show felt new to me, and when you watch the film, you can really see that,” Nicks said.

“It’s always a risk when you add new songs to a show. I hope that my intuition said ‘people will love this because I am going to tell them a good story’ but my risk factor is definitely there, so when we left the stage that very first night, I was able to look at the audience, and I realized that it worked very well. We had all the confidence in the world to continue on from that moment then,” she added.

“When I recorded the 24 Karat Gold album, we were on a break from Fleetwood Mac. I went to Nashville for only two weeks, and then I came home and we finished it at my house. The album was done in five weeks, and I gave it to Warner Bros. and that was it. It was amazing that I actually pulled it off and it actually happened, and I was so excited about it,” she said.

Her brand new ethereal live version of “Gypsy” may be seen in the YouTube video below.

“In May of 2020, I went to Chicago to edit the stories of this film,” she recalled. “I was a little scared to do it because of COVID, but we took precautions and went to Chicago. We stayed at a house by a golf course where nobody had been since the previous October and we went to a studio where nobody had been for months and I was there for a month and that’s where we edited the 46 minutes of stories. That’s when I actually started working again.

“Getting this film all done was not easy especially since you couldn’t get in your car and go to a studio,” she acknowledged. “Everything that we have been doing was done pretty much from home except for the short trip to Chicago. I actually am being creative now, and I am really happy about that.”

Chrissie Hynde and The Pretenders served as her opening act for the majority of the “24 Karat Gold Tour.” “It was so fun to be o the road with Chrissie Hynde. She and I became really good friends, and Chrissie does not like everybody. She’s a badass chick,” she said.
For more information on the highly-anticipated “24 Karat Gold” concert film, check out its official homepage.

In addition, Nicks will be releasing a two-CD and digital edition on October 30 via BMG, and it will be available exclusively at Target. It will feature live versions of 17 of her greatest hits.

“I am super careful and I refuse to get COVID because if I get this virus, I will never sing again. I am absolutely sure of that because you get this cough that never goes away and your lungs get compromised so you won’t be able to sing a whole show anymore. I am determined above all else that I will never catch this thing. The way I am treating it is still super careful,” she said.

Music and Songwriting Inspirations

She shared that “everything” inspires her music and songwriting. “A movie can inspire you to write a formal poem, and for me, that’s all I need,” she said. “Also, meeting somebody and running into something that you haven’t seen in a long time and talking about something that happened a long time ago can also inspire you. Reading something in a book, just one sentence can inspire you.”

“If you are a songwriter, the reason that you continue to be a songwriter, is because you are continually inspired just by the world around you and your inspiration never really runs out. You don’t have to continually be having love affairs to continually write songs. You have all your memories of your love affairs and you can bring them all in with one snap of your fingers. You can bring everything back and you can add things that are happening to you in the present and come up with new things continually. I’m sure you love to write because you are an interviewer and I love to write because I’m a songwriter. If you love to write, you are always looking for something cool to write about so you are open to the world,” she elaborated.

“When I write, I gather all my poetry together,” she said. “When I am getting ready to write songs and I am getting ready to go to the piano, then I am going to go through my last 10 journals. I am going to look to the left side of the page and I am going to pick out any poems that are pretty much done. I will type them up and then I will put them all in a book, and then I will go to the piano. I don’t bring the musical part in unless I actually have a real reason, only then I will make a record,” she said.

Digital age and social media

On being an artist in the digital age, Nicks said, “It’s the world that we live in. Even though I don’t have a computer and I have an iPhone that is not plugged in, it’s just a camera, which I love. I don’t go on social media and I only use my website for really important things such as September 11, 2001, Hurricane Katrina and the Coronavirus.”

“If I went on social media and I became a member of that whole club, it would change everything I do,” she said. “It would change the way that I write and it would change the way that I deal with the world. Social media is just not my world, I like my world.”

“My world is old-fashioned, and I would like to keep it that way,” she added. “I think people are desperately grasping to go back to the old ways.”

Career-defining moments

An iconic rock singer-songwriter, Nicks opened up about some of her career-defining moments. “In the beginning, in 1968, as part of Fritz, we opened for every big band because we lived in San Francisco. We opened for Janis Joplin several times, Jimi Hendrix for 75,000 people, and we opened for Buffalo Springfield, Chicago, and Santana,” she said.

“The perk of being the eighth person on a bill is that you get to stand on stage and watch all the other bands,” she said. “I got to sit on the side of the stage, somewhere in the shadows, and I got to watch Janis Joplin and I did the same thing for Jimi Hendrix. Janis could just hold that audience in her hands and she was pretty hardcore and a badass. I got a lot of little moments from her. Jimi Hendrix was very humble and super graceful, he was just magical and you just wanted some of that Jimi Hendrix magic.”

“Also, Grace Slick was beautiful, she had that voice, and was just awesome. She would just open her mouth and out came this effortless, massive voice. I was able to take a few little things from Grace Slick. These moments in the first three years that I was in a rock band were super important to me because it formed who I was on stage,” she said.

“Then again, there was Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne, who inspired me how to write songs and how to phrase my poetry. I also loved Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. As a songwriter, these are the people that really touched my heart,” she added.

‘Show Them The Way’

Nicks also spoke about her forthcoming single “Show Them The Way,” which will be released on October 9. This song was inspired by a dream that she had one night in 2008, at the time of the Democratic primaries, where Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were fighting over who would become the presidential candidate that year.

She started watching documentaries that pertained to the fight for the civil rights movement. It involved the dreams of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Bobby Kennedy, and John Lewis. As a result, she was immersed and hypnotized.

“It was written in 2008 about all those amazing documentaries I was watching during that two-month period when I was back in Chicago editing another music film. I wrote it and I made it into a song from the prose, and then I made a little piano demo of it and I just put it away,” she said.

“While it was too complicated to come out in 2010 with the In Your Dreams album, it was supposed to come out now,” she said. “I am super glad that the gods were with me on that one.”

“I hope that people understand what this is. This poem that I made into this song is a prayer,” she added.

This dream was a cinematic story with a beginning, a middle and an end. She started writing the story the moment that her eyes opened. “I feel that this dream was so real,” she admitted.

“In this dream, I saw Martin Luther King Jr. took my arm and walked me down the hallway into this big room where the Kennedys were and all these people. They were all there and I could so feel it,” she said.

“While dreams are ridiculous in their own way, this dream stayed with me long enough for me to get up and grab some paper and a pencil to write it down in prose, and then be able to actually write it into a poem, and then put it into music. Then, I just put it away, and just let it stay in a Gothic trunk of lost songs until now. I never recorded it until now. It was meant to be,” she said.

“This is a bipartisan work. It’s a song and a poem that is meant to bring people together,” she underscored. “This is a prayer for people that are freaked out about the world today about politics, the virus, and everything. There are two versions that are being released together: an acoustic version, which was the first one that I did, and a rock and roll version, which will blow your mind and it make you dance around your house.”

She expressed her love for reading and writing poetry. “I love to stand up and read poetry to people. When you write poetry, you try to create that world for somebody else, when you are reading it. I’ve read this poem so many times now that I am almost able to look away from the words, and I almost have it memorized now.”

“I almost compare that to being a ballet dancer,” she said. “If you are a ballerina, you have to practice, practice, and practice until you are absolutely sure that when you take that leap on stage that you are going to land in the arms of the person that is catching you. Only then, when you get to that point, you can really perform as a ballerina because you are not worried about making a mistake, you know it so well and you are so ready and you are so rehearsed that you can walk on stage and really perform.”

On the title of the current chapter of her life, she responded, “Show Them The Way.” “That is it. That is our prayer,” she exclaimed.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame history

Last year, Nicks made music history because she was the first woman inducted into the prestigious Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice. “It’s a big honor and an unexpected one,” she admitted. “It did change the numbers a little bit: one woman who has gone in twice, and 22 men who have gone in twice. I think that says something for the power of women and I hope that it will impact the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and they will induct a few more women into the Hall of Fame because there should be more women.”

“That night when I got inducted, I think I spoke too long. When I run into The Cure, I will totally apologize to them for talking so much in my speech. I didn’t know much about them but I had so much fun watching The Cure on stage and I started listening to their music. I really enjoyed their stage performance, so not only will I apologize for taking up their extra 10 minutes but I will also tell them that I am now listening to their music,” she said.

Key to Longevity in the Music Business

On the key to longevity in the music industry, Nicks shared, “Even if your music doesn’t remain incredibly current, you remain current. I listen to current music and all the current artists on radio. I make mixtapes and they are all in it. I would have a Joni Mitchell song and a song from Haim. Right now, I’ve been listening to Crosby, Stills & Nash since their music is very comforting to me.”

“I am also listening to Harry Styles these days. I think his Fine Line album is one of the best albums of all time. He was ready to go into rehearsal before this pandemic started. It’s okay though because Fine Line is such a ‘fine’ album,” she said with a sweet laugh.

Advice for Aspiring Musicians

For young and aspiring musicians, Nicks encouraged them to persevere. “Don’t give up. I never gave up,” she said, prior to noting that her mother inspired her to go to college, and that experience helped turn Nicks into an independent woman. “That’s who I am and that’s who Christine McVie is, and that’s the promise her and I made together in the first six months that we both joined Fleetwood Mac,” she said.
“I told Christine that we will never stand in a room of famous guitar players who will not treat us right. We will just get up say ‘this party is over,’ and we will walk out,” Nicks said.

Message for Loyal Fans

For her dedicated and longtime fans, she remarked about her three upcoming musical projects, “I hope that I am able to throw out these three things right now at a time when everybody can really use some new material, especially new important things. This concert film is about as close as to going to to a real live concert as you are going to get for a while.”

“The venue, PPG Paints Arena, where the concert film was shot in Pittsburgh was huge, it reminded me of a mini Wembley Stadium. I knew it was going to be a great audience before we even got there. It was a courageous audience, so of course, thank you God for giving me that outrageous audience since that just makes you 100 percent better on stage. I get a lot of magic from the cosmos, I always have, and I am always really appreciative of it,” she elaborated.

Success in the Eyes of Stevie Nicks

Regarding her definition of the word success, Nicks said, “Being able to still book a year tour is pretty much the meaning of success because that means that you are still getting to take your work to the people around the world. If you are not ‘successful,’ then you are not going to be able to do that as well.”

“For me, all those years that we put in the beginning, to create what we have now, is fantastic because it allows us, just like the ballerina, to be able to do new things and write new music such as ‘Show Me The Way.’ How happy am I to have this right now and hopefully, the next time that I go on the road, once this virus is under control, I will be able to play this new song on stage and take this song all over the world.

That is really exciting because who knew that this would all happen the way that it has happened,” she exclaimed.

“I can’t wait until I can go into rehearsal and put the song ‘Show Me The Way’ into rotation. My girl singers did such amazing singing on it that I am so proud of them. Wait until you hear it. This song is right up there with ‘Edge of Seventeen’ and ‘Stand Back.’ This song is as strong as any of those songs,” she added.

Overall, her highly-anticipated concert film, Stevie Nicks — 24 Karat Gold The Concert, her live album, as well as her soon-to-be-released single “Show Them The Way” are a must for all fans of Stevie Nicks, Fleetwood Mac, rock music, as well as for anybody that appreciates good, quality music. Her life story and music career are an inspiration for us all. Stevie Nicks is a woman that has found the means to go beyond the ordinary, and she has expanded and redefined rock and roll and contemporary storytelling; moreover, she has molded the musical landscape into what it is today. Long live, the reigning “Empress of Rock and Roll.”

To learn more about global music star and Grammy award-winning singer-songwriter Stevie Nicks, check out her Facebook page, Instagram page, and her official website.

Markos Papadatos / Digital Journal / Saturday, October 3, 2020

Stevie Nicks chats up a storm with Los Angeles Times — commenting on RBG, Lindsey Buckingham, Harry Styles, trolls on social media, and her upcoming new single ‘Show Them the Way’ and film 24 Karat Gold: The Concert

“It makes me very, very sad,” says Nicks of the split with her former romantic partner and bandmate Lindsey Buckingham.(Christopher Buzelli / For The Times)

Stevie Nicks was in her early 30s when her father told her she’d never get married.

She had just released her solo album, 1981’s “Bella Donna,” embarking on a second career that would fill any time she wasn’t spending with Fleetwood Mac. Her music, Nicks’ dad said, would always consume her.

She considered the possibility. She certainly was not a woman who liked to be told what to do. Still, the words stung: “No man would be happy being Mr. Stevie Nicks for very long.” Had he doomed her to a life of solitude simply by speaking the thought into existence?

“Nobody,” she laughs now, decades later, “dooms me to anything but myself.”

At 72, Nicks has had a few great loves. Some we know about — Lindsey Buckingham, Don Henley, JD Souther — and many we don’t. She did get married once, back in 1983, an ill-fated three-month relationship with the husband of her best friend, who had just died of leukemia. She would have considered taking another spouse, had she met the right person — someone who wasn’t jealous of her, who got a kick out of her crazy girlfriends. But ultimately, her father pretty much got it right: She has yet to feel more devoted toward a man than her muse.

Which is why, in part, this pandemic has hit her so hard. Two projects due out this month have, she says, offered a vestige of normalcy: “24 Karat Gold: The Concert,” a cinematic version of her 2017 solo show, and a politically minded new single, “Show Them the Way,” which will be accompanied by a Cameron Crowe-directed music video. She’s also decided that she wants to make another solo album and plans to spend the rest of quarantine turning the poetry from her journals into lyrics.

But with touring on hold, she’s bored and depressed, conditions she’s claimed to never before suffer from. She’s cripplingly afraid of catching the coronavirus, fearing that going on a ventilator would leave her hoarse and ruin her voice.

“I have put a magical shield around me, because I am not going to give up the last eight years — what I call my last youthful years — of doing this,” she vows. “I want to be able to pull up those black velvet platform boots and put on my black chiffon outfit and twirl onto a stage again.”

It’s 9 p.m. on a Saturday when Nicks first calls from her home in the Pacific Palisades, where she has been sequestered with a close friend, her assistant and her housekeeper.

She has always been a night owl, but has recently become nocturnal, typically going to bed around 8 a.m. She attributes the change in her sleep pattern to the news, which she says she watches constantly. Usually, she likes to open the French doors to her bedroom, but tonight it’s dark outside because of the wildfires — “and not like, foggy, romantic dark. It’s just weird dark.” The smoke and ash in the air triggers her asthma, so she is not even venturing into her backyard.

Nicks is speaking from a landline. She has a personal line that she dances around when it rings, wondering “Who could it be? Is this a two-hour call? Is this going to be a tragedy?” and an emergency line to which her assistant attends. She does not have a computer. She does have an iPhone, but it doesn’t have cellular service and she uses it only as a camera.

Despite her distaste for social media, Nicks has gone viral a few times in recent months. Earlier this week, the internet discovered a TikTok video in which “doggface208″ skateboards while singing along to Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams,” swigging from a container of cran-raspberry juice and generally living his best life.

After the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Nicks paid tribute to the Supreme Court justice, admitting her into the “Rock and Roll Hall of Fame of Life.” (Nicks is the only woman to be inducted twice into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, first with Fleetwood Mac in 1998 and then on her own in 2019.) The reactions to the RBG post were largely positive, but she saw one comment that ignored her sentiment entirely and instead lambasted her for her band’s interpersonal drama.

“They didn’t even care about what I had written about Ruth and went right to the breakup of Fleetwood Mac and Lindsey Buckingham,” she says. “I was like, ‘We’re talking about the death of a great Supreme Court judge, and you are yelling at me about something that happened two-and-a-half years ago? What are you, insane?’ I’m reeling from it. But I’m also like, OK: I can never be on social media.”

Nicks’ troll was referring to the highly publicized 2018 firing of Buckingham, who joined Fleetwood Mac as a lead guitarist and vocalist alongside then-girlfriend Nicks in 1974. The group’s tumult is the stuff of music legend: After ending her on-off again relationship with Buckingham, in 1977 Nicks had a brief affair with then-married drummer Mick Fleetwood. Singer Christine McVie, meanwhile, was in the midst of her own clandestine relationship with the band’s lighting director, ultimately leading to her divorce from bassist John McVie.

With the exception of a decade-long hiatus to focus on his solo career in the ‘90s, however, Buckingham remained with Fleetwood Mac until January 2018, when he claims he was unceremoniously let go. Together, they’d made an indelible mark on music history. Hits like “Dreams,” “Rhiannon,” “Landslide,” “The Chain” and “Gypsy” are now rock canon. 1977’s “Rumours” was No. 1 in the U.S. for 31 weeks, and subsequent tours over the decades showcased not just an incomparable baby-boomer songbook but the scars left from the band’s never-ending soap operas — Buckingham and Nicks frequently shot eye daggers at each other in front of packed stadiums during renditions of breakup anthems like “Go Your Own Way” and “Silver Springs.”

When Buckingham was axed from the group, he sued for lost wages — claiming he would have collected between $12 million and $14 million in two months of touring with Fleetwood Mac. (He was replaced by Mike Campbell of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Crowded House’s Neil Finn.) In legal documents, Buckingham says his firing came days after the band’s appearance at the January 2018 MusiCares Person of the Year ceremony. He alleges that he was later told that Nicks thought he’d mocked her on stage at the event while she was delivering a speech; she was apparently so upset that she told the rest of Fleetwood Mac she’d walk if he wasn’t cut from the band.

Nicks is reluctant to discuss the details of that night, though she admits it was the “straw that broke the camel’s back.”

“I never planned for that to happen,” she says hesitantly. “Any time we re-formed to do a tour or a record, I always walked in with hope in my heart. And I just was so disappointed. I felt like all the wind had gone out of my sails.”

There’s melancholy in her voice when she discusses the split, which she describes as a “long time coming.” She was always hopeful that “things would get better” but found herself noticing she was increasingly sad with Fleetwood Mac and more at peace in the “good, creative happy world” with her solo band.

“I just felt like a dying flower all the time,” she says. “I stayed with him from 1968 until that night. It’s a long time. And I really could hear my parents — I could hear my mom saying, ‘Are you really gonna do this for the rest of your life?’ And I could hear my dad saying in his very pragmatic way — because my dad really liked Lindsey —‘I think it’s time for you and Lindsey to get a divorce.’ It’s a very unfortunate thing. It makes me very, very sad.”

She says she hasn’t spoken to Buckingham in a couple of years, though she did write him a note after his February 2019 heart attack: “You better take care of yourself. You better take it easy and you better do everything they tell you and get your voice back and feel the grace that you have made it through this.”

Nicks has cataloged the ups and downs of her life in journals — she estimates she has roughly one per year of her life — and she plans to leave many of them to her goddaughters, of whom she has 11 or 12; she can’t be certain. She chose most of her goddaughters at birth — asking their parents if she could fulfill the role — and relishes the way they keep her “totally young and up on everything.” She loves to spoil them all with gifts imbued with meaning, like a pair of pink strappy heels she found at a store in Australia and deemed “Cinderella slippers.”

Tokens are important to Nicks. In 1977, she began having gold moon necklaces made to give as gifts to those she felt needed them. Over the years, she’s bestowed them to celebrities (the Haim sisters, Taylor Swift, Tavi Gevinson), soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Make-a-Wish recipients. Members of the coven — her “Sisters of the Moon” — are told the moons are lucky charms and to pass them along to another in need, should the moment arise.

Nicks is wearing the signature necklace in “24 Karat Gold,” the concert special slated to play in theaters for two nights only, Oct. 21 and 25. (A CD version comes out Oct. 30; streaming plans for the film have yet to be determined.)

In May, Nicks flew to Chicago, where Joe Thomas, the film’s director, was finessing a cut of it. The final version features 17 songs, only four of which are Fleetwood Mac hits. The show emphasizes Nicks’ solo career — MTV standards like “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,” “Stand Back” and “Edge of Seventeen.” Performing music from her “dark, gothic trunk of lost songs,” she tells the audience, makes her feel like she’s a 20-year-old embarking on a new career. “This is not the same Stevie Nicks show you’ve seen a million times,” she explains, “because I am different.”

“This is the show where you get to meet this girl, finally,” says guitarist Waddy Wachtel, who served as the tour’s musical director and has known Nicks since 1970. “She can relax and work her own rhythm. It’s a joy to see her get into her own songs instead of fighting to get her due in a band where there are three really strong songwriters.”

On the road, Wachtel says, Nicks travels via private plane because she has declared herself too old for tour buses. She loves lavish hotel rooms with pianos, a perk Wachtel thinks she’s earned: “She doesn’t have a husband. She doesn’t have a boyfriend. She wants a good room to be able to play her music as loud as she wants.”

Nicks was just as specific when it came to editing the concert film. In the editing suite with Thomas, she insisted that “dorky” overusage of the phrase “like” be excised and was exacting when it came to the way she looked.

“He’d show me something and I’m, like, ‘Are you serious? You’re actually thinking about using that horrifically bad shot of me?’” she recalls, describing how she’d proceed to pace the room, popping breath mints into her mouth. “If you’re a woman and you’re not 30, you want to look as good as you can. You start to realize that men see women completely differently than we see ourselves.”

“She is so particular — and God bless her for that,” says Thomas. “I mean, Stevie has the best skin I’ve ever seen — she should have her own cosmetic line. You sit there and you go, ‘People over 65 would love to look this good.’ And then she gives you a look that could fry your eyeballs.”

Nicks cares about her appearance and has been on Weight Watchers since 2005. She’s never considered being a spokeswoman for the brand because she prefers to follow one of the company’s now-defunct plans from 15 years ago. One of the biggest reasons she wants to stay in shape is because her stage clothes are custom-made, and she says it would be too costly and annoying to have them remade.

She traces the origin of her style — an amalgam of goth hippie, bohemian Californian girl and Victorian priestess — to 1970, when she and Buckingham were still an eponymous duo. Before their show at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, Nicks saw a woman walk by on the street. She was a vision in mauve and pink, with an edged-out layered skirt, riding jacket and cream-colored platform boots. Her hair was done like a Gibson Girl. And Nicks wanted to be her.

“This girl obviously had some money, because this was not a cheap outfit. It was beautiful, and I went, ‘Oh, that’s exactly how I want to look,’” she remembers. Still, she wore her street clothes on stage for another year until a friend introduced her to a designer who helped her bring her vision to life. On paper, Nicks sketched a stick girl with bell sleeves and a top hat. She has never gone on stage without some version of this uniform since — save for a stint in the early 2000s, when she hurt her hip and was forced to wear tennis shoes.

She put on some of these clothes for the first time a few nights ago, filming the music video for her new song inside her home. Without her makeup artist on hand, it took her three hours to put on her face. The eyeliner, she says, was the most difficult part, because she had to redo it “about 50 times.” But the experience made her feel like herself again: “It was like, ‘Oh, I’m still alive.’”

“Show Them the Way,” due Oct. 9, was born out of a dream Nicks had in the run-up to the 2008 presidential election. In it, she was invited to perform at a political benefit for icons of history. Martin Luther King Jr. led her by the arm into a ballroom where John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and John Lewis were seated, awaiting her. The dream was so vivid that the instant she awoke, she wrote it down and within days, put it to music.

But it was only this year that she decided to record it for release — viewing it as a hopeful balm during this “very strange and dangerous time.” And though she expresses displeasure with the current political landscape, she stops short of endorsing any candidate.

“As we get closer to the election, I probably will state who I am for,” she says. “But not now. Well — I’m not for Trump, so that’s that.”

She says she has been “brokenhearted” since the death of Ginsburg. Nicks believes that people like Ginsburg go to heaven, where they continue to look down on us. After the death of her mother in 2012, Nicks started to believe that the dead send signs to the living. Five months after her mom passed, Nicks contracted a head infection. Her doctor instructed her to drink electrolytes, so she began “pounding” Diet Gatorade. Before long, she was also suffering from acid reflux.

“It was burning up my chest and my throat,” she says. “And all of a sudden, I felt this little tap on my shoulder and heard my mom go: ‘It’s the Gatorade.’”

There have been countless other moments like this since. If she can’t find something — an errant earring, a pack of matches, a book of poetry — she voices the item aloud and her mom helps her find it.

“It’s so real and creepy, and I always just go ‘Thank you, Barbara.’ I sometimes feel I have more of a relationship with my mom since she’s been dead than I did before she died.”

Nicks has long felt a connection to the spiritual world. For years, one of her goals has been to make a movie about the mythological Celtic deity Rhiannon. When she wrote the song “Rhiannon” in 1973, she had little knowledge of the folklore behind the name. But five years later, a fan sent her four paperback novels in a Manila envelope — author Evangeline Walton’s adaptation of the ancient British Mabinogion. Nicks was so transfixed by the literature that she eventually bought the rights to Walton’s work in the hopes of bringing the epic to the big screen.

Because of the scope of the story, it was later decided that the movie should be a television miniseries, and earlier this year Nicks says she finally signed a deal with a studio to make it. She has 10 songs that she’s never released, still on cassette tapes in a suitcase, set aside specifically for the project.

Despite her 2014 turn on “American Horror Story,” Nicks has no plans to play a major role in the miniseries, though she’s not opposed to the idea of “riding by on a white horse or something.” She won’t dish on her dream cast but says that Harry Styles “is definitely in the running.”

“I’m going, ‘Harry, you cannot age one day. You have to stay exactly as you are,’” she says with a laugh. “I’ve already sold him on it.”

Styles is one of the many young artists who counts Nicks as both a mentor and an inspiration. Before he finished his latest record, “Fine Line,” he invited Nicks and five of her friends to his home to listen to it. They sat in his living room and listened to the whole album three times, sharing opinions until sunrise. When the 26-year-old debuted the record at the Forum late last year, he invited Nicks to join him on stage for a rendition of “Landslide” — “a huge thrill, because he made a choice to be a rock ‘n’ roll star and not a pop star,” she says. “That was a risk for a guy from a boy band. That was like Fleetwood Mac doing ‘Tusk’ after ‘Rumours.’ I was very proud of him.”

Asked if an older version of Styles would be her type, Nicks chuckles.

“Well, that would be a good thing,” she says. She hasn’t been in love since the early 2000s but has no plans to “sit in a bar with a bunch of my friends and wait for some weirdo guys to come over and buy us drinks” once the pandemic ends.

“Now, if I was even, like, 30 or 40 or 50, I would never use a dating app. I find that to be totally desperate,” Nicks says. “I watch all those crime shows. Are you setting yourself up with an ax murderer or something?

There’s a big part of her that believes you’ll never find something if you’re looking for it. But at her core, Nicks is a romantic — a woman who says she’s fallen in love at first sight four times and thinks her next paramour might always be around the next corner. “It’s not ever out of the realm of possibility. It’s just not very probable,” she sighs.

For now, love lives on in her music.

“I can sit down at the piano and take out a poem that I wrote right in the middle of a really great relationship and make it into a song. Right now, at 72 years old. So when people say, ‘Can you still write romantic songs?’ I absolutely can.”

Amy Kaufman  / Los Angeles Times / Wednesday, September 30

Tickets for Stevie Nicks 24 Karat Gold The Concert go on sale Wednesday morning at 10:00 a.m. ET. The film will be shown at select theaters on October 21 and 25.

Rock & Roll Hall of Fame icon Stevie Nicks brings her legendary music to the big screen when Stevie Nicks 24 Karat Gold The Concert comes to select cinemas for two nights only on October 21 & 25. Recorded over two nights during her sold-out 24 Karat Gold Tour, the film features a set-list of fan favorites and rare gems from Stevie’s multi-platinum selling catalog. The film also highlights Stevie’s intuitive and intimate storytelling abilities, captivating audiences with personal stories behind some of the most famous songs in music history.

Widely considered one of the most important female voices in rock music with an unparalleled career, Stevie Nicks has had six Top Ten albums, 8 Grammy nominations and is the first woman to be twice inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame – with Fleetwood Mac in 1998 and as a solo artist in 2019.

Stevie Nicks 24 Karat Gold The Concert is full of the magic that Stevie Nicks brings to her live performances and is an unforgettable experience that demands to be seen on the big screen!