The biggest mistake I ever made was giving in to my friends and going to see a psychiatrist. It was in the mid-1980s, and I had just gotten out of Betty Ford. I was feeling buoyant and saved and fantastic. But everyone said, “We’re sure you’re going to start using again. You should go to a psychiatrist.” Finally, I said, “All right!” and went. What this man said was: “In order to keep you off cocaine we should put you on the drug that we’re using a lot these days called Klonopin.” Stupidly, I said, “All right.” And the next eight years of my life were destroyed.
Klonopin is in the Valium family, but Valium is fuzzy and Klonopin is insidious because it’s so subtle that you can hardly tell you took it. I got through 1986 and 1987. Thank God I’d already written the words for my record The Other Side of the Mirror. But what started happening was that if I didn’t take it, my hands started to shake. I felt like I had a neurological disease or Parkinson’s. I started not being able to get to Lindsey Buckingham’s house on time, and I would get there and everybody was drinking, so I’d have a glass of wine. Don’t mix tranquilizers and wine. Then I’d sing horrific parts on his songs, and he would take the parts off. I was hardly on Tango of the Night, which I happen to love.
The next six years were terrible. Looking back on it, I think this therapist was basically a groupie. He loved hearing stories of rock and roll and he started upping my dose. He watched me go from a beautiful, 125-pound, newly sober woman who had the world at her feet to a 170-pound woman who had the lights go out in her eyes.
Finally, in 1993, I’d had enough. I said, “Take me to a hospital.” I went in for 47 days, and it made Betty Ford look like a cakewalk. My hair turned gray and my skin molted. I could hardly walk. You can detox off heroin in 12 days. Coke is just a mental detox. But tranquilizers — they are dangerous. I was terrified to leave, and I came away knowing that that would never happen to me again.
I learned so much in that hospital. I wrote the whole time I was there, stuff that I consider to be some of my best writing ever. I learned that I could have fun and laugh and cry with amazing people and not be on drugs. I learned that I could live my life and still be beautiful and fun and still go to parties and not even have to have a glass of wine. I never went to therapy again after that — why would I?
CAREER ARC
1974
Nicks joins Fleetwood Mac with then-boyfriend Lindsey Buckingham.
1977
Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours album rockets to the top of the charts, ultimately selling 40 million copies.
1981
Nicks begins her solo career with the critical-hit record Bella Donna.
1986
Nicks begins an eight-year struggle with addiction to Klonopin.
2011
Nicks releases In Your Dreams, including a song from the 1970s that didn’t make it onto Rumours.
By Chris Azzopardi Pride Source (Issue 1918 – Between The Lines News)
May 5, 2011
Ten years have passed since Stevie Nicks released her last solo album, but she’s still the same gay-loved goddess of earthy rock she built her legend on. The new release, In Your Dreams, is exactly how the gypsy queen left us — with that uniform sense of mystical otherworldliness that’s made Nicks a go-her-own-way virtuoso since her days with Fleetwood Mac. White horses, vampire tales and ethereal love parables all seep into this set, Nick’s first all-new studio project after reuniting with Fleetwood Mac for 2003’s Say You Will.
Nicks recently spoke with us about taking a trip to “the magical world of fairies and angels,” the dress drag queens love, and how her own music motivated her to lose a dozen pounds.
Why did it take so long to release another solo album?
Even though I haven’t made another solo record in 10 years, I’ve been making music solid since Trouble in Shangri-La. I came off the road from 135 shows in 2005 with Fleetwood Mac and was going to make a record, and the business people around me said, “We don’t think you should do it because the music business is in chaos” — you know, with Internet piracy, which was really hitting us in the face in 2005 — “and it’s just going to be a really emotional pull on you. We don’t think you should do it. Tour while you can, do big shows and sell lots of tickets, that’s what you can do.” And I just was stupid enough to kind of go, “OK.”
When did you wise up?
At the end of the Fleetwood Mac tour in 2009. We were in Australia, and I wrote the “Moonlight” song (from “In Your Dreams”) there, and when I got done with that song — I started it in Melbourne and I finished it in Brisbane — there was a piano. I stood up and I said to my assistant, “I’m ready to make a record now.”
What was it like recording “In Your Dreams”?
The whole year of recording this record was like this magical mystery tour that we did at my house. We recorded the whole thing at my house and (the Eurythmics’) Dave Stewart, and his entourage were there every day, and my girls and everybody were there every day. It was just a fantastic experience. We started in February and ended in December, and when it was over I was heartbroken. I didn’t want it to ever end.
The concept of the video for the first single, “Secret Love,” is intriguing — it merges your older self with your younger self. How do you feel now versus then?
That’s why the little girl that’s in the video, Kelly, is wearing the green outfit that was my first colored outfit made in 1976, 1977 — that’s when my designer, Margi Kent, started making my clothes. But my outfits were black, and that’s one of the only colored ones she made; it’s a kind of tie-dyed green outfit. The little girl that’s playing me, she’s 15 and she’s one of my goddaughters, she, like, fits into this and we’re looking at her going, “Oh my god, we were that tiny!”
But anyway, that’s what I wanted. I wanted Kelly to be the 25-year-old Stevie, and then there’s the older Stevie. That song was written in 1975, so I wanted the spirits to blend. That’s why you see her leaving the white horse and then you see me leaving the white horse and then we’re both together, because in my dreams as a little girl that white horse was very important.
That horse was so beautiful. (While shooting the video) we looked down out of my bedroom window and saw this horse — and there was a fog machine on and the actual sun was coming through all the evergreens in my backyard — and I was like, “That can’t possibly be real.” If that horse had a horn you would’ve thought, “OK, I’ve died and gone to fairyland,” because it was so, so mystical and so real in its magicness. This horse was like Guinevere.
Let’s talk about those fairies, because you know a lot of gays adore you.
I know. I’m glad. All these visions that I see, I love when people get them. Sometimes people don’t get it, you know, and I love when people do, because I think that everybody needs to move into that magical world sometimes. A lot of people do not ever move into the magical land of fairies and angels and they just live in the hardcore miserable world that this world is right now. It’s chaotic, horrible, there’s nothing we can do — it’s such a bummer.
I can do benefits and go to Africa, but the reason I make music — the reason I’ve always made music — was to try to just make a record of songs that makes everybody, for an hour a day, feel better. We can all stay friends and we can all be in this world and we can rise above everything else for a minute. And that’s really the only reason I wanted to make music.
When did you know you were a gay icon?
When “Night of a Thousand Stevies” (a New York City-based salute to Stevie Nicks featuring impersonators) started happening 20 years ago, it was a clue. And you know, I always felt it was because I was not a fashion statement like Madonna was. I’m very different than her; she’s very chameleon-esque. That little outfit that Kelly is wearing is exactly the same as the black outfit I have on in the video. The eye makeup she has on is the makeup that I’ve been wearing since high school. I don’t change much.
Right. You stay very true to yourself, and I think a lot of gay people can admire that because we strive for that, too.
I do, and I think that brings a little bit of comfort to my audience. I still have the two girls singing with me, because I love them and they’re my dear friends. But I could’ve been changing background singers every year, and I chose to stay with Sharon (Celani) and Lori (Nicks) because the sound of the three of us is comforting to my audience. And those clothes are comforting to my audience.
Any impersonators stand out to you?
Well, I just think it’s very fun to see. When I was wearing my beautiful white Morgane Le Fay dress and my black velvet jacket, that dress just took off. I noticed how popular that dress was from the impersonators. (Laughs) I was laughing, and Morgane Le Fay was just tickled pink. So every time I’d do a little change, like in the “Secret Love” video with the long floor-length, we’re laughing — Lori and Sharon and I are laughing going, “We’re single-handedly going to bring back the Victorian ball gown.” There’s a whole new fashion statement coming out of the three or four or more videos that will come from this record, where we really stayed very Victorian.
Drag queens will be all about that, you know.
Yeah — I love it!
“Glee” recently dedicated an entire episode to Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours album. How do you feel about having your work on a show that’s been so controversial regarding using other artists’ songs?
You know, I went down there when they were doing “Landslide” and I stayed there for six hours and watched them film the whole thing. I watched Gwyneth (Paltrow) and Brittany (Heather Morris) and Santana (Naya Rivera) sing the song 50 times, and I had such a good time. What I was very touched by was that Lea Michele, who plays Rachel, said to me, “You know, in all the big songs that we’ve done, which is many, nobody’s ever called us or come down or even written a note thanking us for doing ‘Jessie’s Girl’ or a Journey song.” They do such great versions of all these songs; the original writers cannot fault them. They’re magnificent — every one of them. And she goes, “Nobody except you has ever come down and told us that they thought we were doing a good job.” And I thought that was so sad. Very, very disrespectful.
As someone whose music has spanned many generations, how does it feel working with a new generation of performers — like the “Glee” cast or, for instance, Taylor Swift at the Grammys?
I love that. A lot of the songs they love are songs that I wrote when I was really young. “Landslide” was written in 1973; I was 27. I may sing it now at 62, but I was 27 when I wrote that song. It’s not like they love a song that was written by a 62-year-old woman. They love a song that was written by a 27-year-old girl.
So I’m thrilled, and I don’t write any differently now than I did when I was 27. I just go to the piano — inspired by something that happens to me — with a cup of tea, incense burning and the fire in the fireplace.
Was your muse for “Moonlight (A Vampire’s Dream),” which was “Twilight”-inspired, Taylor Lautner’s abs?
No. It’s nothing about him at all. The first and third verses were written about me and Lindsey (Buckingham, of Fleetwood Mac) in 1976; the second verse and the chorus were written about Bella and Edward. It really is an amazing blend — an ancient story blending Lindsey, Stevie, Bella and Edward, and everything in between. It’s my favorite. And by the way, I have listened to “Secret Love” and “A Vampire’s Dream” for the last two-and-a-half months and I’ve lost 12-and-a-half pounds just from treadmilling to “Secret Love” and “A Vampire’s Dream.”
No way. You treadmill to your own music?
Way! And I have never gotten tired of either of those songs. I’ve just been listening to those two songs for two-and-a-half solid months, and I am thinner than I’ve been since 1989. I really attribute it all to those two songs.
Stevie Nicks, In Your Dreams (Warner Bros. Records) 3 stars.
The bewitching, beguiling, mysterious, enchanting Stevie Nicks has been busy of late, touring with her band Fleetwood Mac, touring on her own with Rod Stewart and now releasing this solo album that she’s worked on for a year with Dave Stewart, formerly of Eurythmics.
It’s nevertheless Nicks’ first new solo album in a decade, one that plays to her strengths, from singing about regrets in the opener “Secret Love,” to shimmering her way through the very nostalgic “For What It’s Worth,” and embracing every bit of her 1970’s and ‘80’s mythical image in the thickly layered “Moonlight (A Vampire’s Dreams).”
It’s always interesting to hear Nicks offer reflections of her infamously tattered relationship/enduring friendship with Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham as she does in “Everybody Loves You,” but unfortunately in this case, the track is pretty drab. And that’s a problem with several cuts on “In Your Dreams,” which aims high but frequently comes up short in terms of the songwriting.
Still – and despite the fact that so many artists have written about the city lately – her tale “New Orleans” is better than most of the others, and the tougher “Soldier’s Angel,” offers a grittier side to Nicks than she typically reveals.
Musical guests on the album include Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood, Stewart, Glen Ballard, Mike Campbell and others.
Tracks to download: “Soldier’s Angel,” “New Orleans.”
NEW YORK, May 2, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — Stevie Nicks, whose highly anticipated new CD In Your Dreams — scheduled to be released tomorrow May 3rd — has had to cancel several upcoming appearances in New York due to coming down with pneumonia and the flu. Her doctor informed her over the weekend that she needed to “stay in bed and not fly” until she gets better.
Nicks was scheduled to perform at a star-studded event, thrown in her honor by her record label Reprise Records at NY’s Webster Hall on May 4th, and was also planning on appearing on the Today Show and Good Day NY on May 3rd.
“I want to apologize to all my fans and hope that we can reschedule and, of course, I hope you love the new album. It’s for you,” commented Nicks.
“The gypsy queen is in royal form on In Your Dreams — it’s not just her first album in 10 years, it’s her finest collection of songs since the Eighties,” commented Rolling Stone in its review of Nicks’ new CD.
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Rock goddess Stevie Nicks opens up about unexpected inspiration, a fruitful new partnership and the future of Fleetwood Mac
It is December 2009, and Stevie Nicks is sitting in a movie theater in Melbourne, Australia, watching The Twilight Saga: New Moon, the second in the popular gothic romance series. The movie’s protagonist, teenaged Bella, is feeling lost and alone without her paramour, a vampire named Edward — and something about her reminds Nicks of a song she began writing, but did not quite complete, in 1976. “I started reciting these words during the movie,” she recalls. “I was spellbound. It was almost like I’d written these words about what was going on in this movie.” Nicks’ original song fragment had been inspired by the alienation she felt after moving from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 1972 with then-boyfriend Lindsey Buckingham, two years before both of them joined legendary rock band Fleetwood Mac. After the movie she returned to her hotel room and, after 33 years, finally completed the song that would inspire her to make her first solo album in a decade. When she finished writing “Moonlight (A Vampire’s Dream),” Nicks stood up and announced to her assistant, Karen Johnston: “I’m ready to do a record now.
And she knew just who she wanted to help her. Nicks had performed with musician, songwriter and producer Dave Stewart (formerly half of the Eurythmics) on a pilot for a planned TV interview series. The show didn’t fly, but the collaboration did — Nicks says she knew on the spot that she wanted to work with him. She gave him a call. The two met up at Nicks’ home in the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles and set about doing something the singer had never done before: writing a song with a partner who was actually in the same room. While Nicks has shared many co-writing credits in the past, she and her collaborators always worked separately — Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell, one of her most frequent songwriting partners, has for three decades sent her instrumental demos to which she adds lyrics. She and Stewart used a set of 40 typewritten Nicks’ poems as a basis, eventually spinning out seven new songs in quick succession. “We sat down with an acoustic guitar, which I’m used to doing and she’s not,” says Stewart. “We had a song in 10 minutes. We did that a few times, and eventually this album started to appear.”
Nicks, Stewart and Glen Ballard (noted producer and Stewart’s longtime production partner) set up recording equipment in her home to capture the songs that now make up In Your Dreams, Nicks’ first solo album since 2001’s Trouble in Shangri-La. They assembled a set of musicians that included longtime Nicks’ guitarist and bandleader Waddy Wachtel and backup singers Sharon Celani and former sister-in-law Lori Nicks —all of whom she has worked with since kicking off her solo career with 1981’s classic Bella Donna. Other familiar faces were present as well: Buckingham played guitar and sang on “Soldier’s Angel,” and Fleetwood Mac co-founder Mick Fleetwood played drums on several songs.
Recording continued for several months at Nicks’ home, followed by 10 days of overdubbing at the Village’s Studio D — the very room in which Fleetwood Mac famously spent two tumultuous years and a million dollars recording 1979’s Tusk. The making of the most recent Mac effort, 2004’s Say You Will, was also difficult — which is why Nicks insists that she wants Stewart and Ballard behind the board for the group’s next studio effort. She reports that Buckingham, who has typically held sway over the group’s productions, has already endorsed the idea. “Lindsey doesn’t want to produce the next Fleetwood Mac record,” she says. “He is absolutely not into that. I think it would be a pleasure for him to be able to sit back, play his parts, write his songs, have fun and not be worried all the time.”
But for now Nicks’ focus is on In Your Dreams. Like “Moonlight,” the first single, “Secret Love,” was also rescued from Nicks’ vaults — she made a demo of the song in 1975, but didn’t present it to Fleetwood Mac because she deemed it too personal. “My songwriting never changes,” she says with a chuckle. “Waddy laughingly says, ‘She just writes one long song.’” That song now stretches back more than three and a half decades, and its influence on at least two generations of female singer-songwriters has been profound. “And I love that,” says the Arizona native. “I love that all these young women who are really good are interested and feel I have created a world for them to come into.”
Nicks, 62, isn’t finished building that world just yet. She’s eager to collaborate with Stewart again, whether on a solo project or with Fleetwood Mac, and she has plans to exhibit her drawings and to write a screenplay based on her 1975 Mac classic “Rhiannon.” “I can’t wait to rent a castle somewhere in Wales, lock myself away for two months and write this whole story,” she says. Nicks spoke to us at her L.A. home about her new songs, her astounding history, her views on the modern music industry and her still vital creativity. “I’m forever inspired and tickled about what’s to come,” she says. “I’m just going to keep doing this, because this is what I love.”
Why so long since the last solo record?
I came off the road in 2005 after doing 135 shows and a record with Fleetwood Mac, and I was completely prepared to do a solo album. But I was told by the powers that be in the industry that doing a record would be a mistake — because of piracy. For somebody who loves their records as much as I do and puts as much work into them as I do, it was such a horrible scenario to put a record out and have 300,000 of your diehard fans buy it — and then those 300,000 people send it out to another 10 million people. I wasn’t a computer person and I’m still not today. I don’t follow all that, so I don’t have all that knowledge. But I do understand that the piracy thing has cut our publishing royalties down to a fourth of what they used to be, which is devastating and violating.
Yet you made the new album.
Because I’m not really making it for anybody else. I don’t care who says what about it. The fact was I’d written a song [“Moonlight”] that I thought was great and that the world would love. So I said, “I don’t care, I’m making a record.”
How did you and Dave get started?
He sent me a song — he’d written the chorus and asked me to write the verses, so I did. Then right after the Grammys he came to the house. We sat and listened to what I had written on his song [“Everybody Loves You”], and he liked it. Before the Grammys I had already sent him a binder with 40 poems in it. I had never actually expected him to read them — who would? But he did, and he said, “You know what, I like this poem, let’s do something with it.”
Were you nervous?
I was like, “Uh, OK … ” Because I’ve never written a song with anybody in my life. We’re in my living room, we have a Pro Tools unit, we have a microphone hanging down over the coffee table, he’s on the chair next to the fi replace, I’m on the couch and we’re looking at each other. He’s playing his guitar, he gives me the “Let’s go” signal, and in an hour we had written a good song from one of my ancient poems. At that moment the golden doors opened. I realized why Lennon and McCartney wrote together, or why Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote together. Dave knows thousands of chords and I don’t. I had all these long poems and he didn’t. What we gave to each other was an amazing trade-off. So we wrote seven songs. If I wanted to write seven songs by myself it would take me a year and a half. I know about five chords, so I would just sit at my piano and grieve and cry.
What’s Dave like as a producer?
He loves it — and when somebody loves what they do, you can’t help but be drawn in. He doesn’t have an ego. He can tell if you don’t like something or if a song is going in a way that you’re not crazy about, and he’ll say, “Let’s stop, let’s go another way.” You never have to worry with Dave that you’re going to get talked into using something you hate.
How was the atmosphere?
Everybody was very funny — when you put 10 people like that together every day for five days a week, it was an amazing experience. My goddaughter Kellianne [Murphy] catered for 10 to 12 people every night. We broke at 7:30 and sat down for an hour and a half and talked about the world and politics. It reminded me of Paris in the ’20s, when all the famous artists would gather on Sunday nights and talk about the world. And we did that for nine months.
How have you kept so many long-term collaborations intact?
I think it’s very comforting to my audience to know that we as friends have hung together. I could have changed background singers every other year, but I’d rather have Lori and Sharon, who I started working with in 1980. I love the way these girls sound and love the way the three of us sound together. I don’t want generic background singers, I want girls with specific, unique voices—and they have them. And there’s nobody better than Waddy when it comes to jamming guitar onstage and being a kick-ass musical director. So I brought those people in, and Dave brought a lot of other people in. It was a really great grouping, and even the people I didn’t know I got to know very fast. Everybody had a great amount of respect for each other. You know, making an album with Fleetwood Mac is angst-ridden. This was not angst-ridden. This was a lot of fun, and if it ever started to roll off into that angst-ridden place, we all went, “Oh no, not going there.” Life is too short.
Fleetwood Mac, 1978: Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, Christine McVie, Lindsey Buckingham, Nicks (Photo: Sam Emerson / Warner Bros. Records)
It doesn’t discourage me from it, because I have already told Lindsey, “I am never making another record that isn’t as much fun as the record I just made with Dave and Glen Ballard.” He came in and worked with us on “Soldier’s Angel,” and he was fantastic. He saw the relationship between Dave and me, and the relationship between Glen and me. I’m more like Dave, and Glen is more like Lindsey, so that seems like a great combination. Dave and Glen would be the perfect guys to help us make a record.
Has Lindsey’s production involvement thrown off the balance before?
It makes him be a player, a writer and also the producer. That’s hard — sometimes all the weight of the world is on your shoulders. It’s more fun to not have to do that. I mean, I could produce a record, and I feel I produced a lot of this record we just did. But I’m not getting producer points for it, because I didn’t want to be the producer.
How did you rediscover “Secret Love”?
It just came into my head. I asked Lori to go to Phoenix [where Nicks also has a home] to look through all our vaults and she couldn’t find it. Then we found the demo on YouTube! Can you believe it? A lot of my cassettes got lost in those days. I apparently put that cassette away because I didn’t want anybody to know what it was about.
Why not?
I don’t remember exactly, but it sounds to me like it’s a song about something that happened between me and somebody. Was that guy married? Did he have children? For whatever reason, I didn’t want anybody to find out about it. Even the people in my life who were around in 1975 can’t seem to remember exactly what that song was about. I obviously never played it for Fleetwood Mac, because had I offered that up to them they absolutely would have recorded it and put it on a record. It’s Lindsey’s kind of song: It’s simple, it’s precise and he would have loved it. But clearly I didn’t want to bring that song out. I think it’s timeless, because we’re all capable of doing secret things that we don’t tell anybody about. That is the beauty in that song.
How has your songwriting process changed?
My process is not different than it was when I was 15, when I wrote my first song. I just get an idea. I’ll meet somebody, then write a song about them. Or I’ll go somewhere — I went to Italy for four weeks and wrote “Italian Summer.” All I need is one magical, sparkly moment — and at 25 or at 62, the things that inspire me are still the same. Just because I’m an old lady now doesn’t mean that I’m not inspired by all the youthful, beautiful things around me. My new favorite song is Katy Perry’s “E.T.” I’m inspired by that, I’m inspired by her — and when I was 25 I was inspired by people who were much older than me. It all balances out.
How do you imagine your future?
It’s a never-ending road of creativity and fun that goes on forever, as long as you want to stay on it. I’m never going to want to get off the road and hole up in some house by myself for the rest of my life. This is the reason I didn’t get married or have children: so that I could be free and I could be a real artist in the true sense of the word. So that I could follow it and never have to explain to anybody, “I’m going to New York on Friday, then I’m going to Paris on Sunday and I’m going to Brussels on Wednesday,” and have somebody say to me, “When are you coming home?” I’d have to say, “I don’t know when I’m coming home, actually,” and then they’d be mad at me. I made that choice a long time ago, that I was not going to have somebody be mad at me because I was following my art. If that was selfish, I figured there are already lots of moms and lots of children. I figured that down the road if I absolutely had to have kids I could always adopt. I just said, “For now, I want to be an artist.”
Yet you’re a mother figure to so many young singers.
I love that. That I have said, “You can do it — and you don’t have to follow any guidelines, you can just do whatever you want.” It’s not as easy now, but if you want it and you work hard at it, hopefully you’ll come out the other end of it somewhat successful.
What do you hope people get out of this album?
I hope it takes them to a magical kingdom of feelings. I hope they treadmill to it and dance to it and drive their cars to it. I always wanted to write because I wanted to affect people, and that’s still the main thing. I want to make people feel better. In this world of chaotic turmoil, if you can give people an hour a day listening to something, that’s going to make them feel, then you’ve done your part. That’s all I can ask for ▪
WAITING GAME
Stevie Nicks won’t give up on a good song. She has a knack for rescuing years-old tunes from her vault when they’re right for a new project — witness these great songs that she wrote well before the public got to hear them.
“Rose Garden”
Written: Mid-1960s
Recorded and released: 1994
“Candlebright”
Written: 1970
Recorded and released: 2001
“Destiny”
Written: Early 1970s
Recorded and released: 1994
“Sorcerer”
Written: 1974
Recorded and released: 2003
“That’s Alright”
Written: 1974
Recorded and released: 1982
“Planets of the Universe”
Written: 1976
Recorded and released: 2001
“I Sing for the Things”
Written: Late 1970s
Recorded and released: 1985
“Greta” “Love is Like a River” “Listen to the Rain” “Thousand Days” “Mirror Mirror”
Written: Mid-1980s
Recorded and released: 1994
“Running Through the Garden”
Written: Mid-1980s
Recorded and released: 2003
“Thrown Down”
Written: 1997
Recorded and released: 2003
CRYSTAL VISIONS
When in your dreams producer Dave Stewart proposed filming the recording sessions, Stevie Nicks was skeptical. “My first answer to that was, ‘I don’t think so,’” she recalls. “That would mean I have to wear makeup every day, I have to dress up every day. But he said, ‘Darling, if you don’t like it we don’t have to use it.’ That made it all easy.” Stewart’s enthusiasm for documenting the process spread quickly. “We made music videos as we went, we had a fi lm crew here and we filmed each other with Flip cameras,” she says. The resulting footage will be released as a documentary at some point. “That means that it doesn’t become just memories and fade away,” Nicks says. “It’s going to exist for all time, and that’s what I wanted. I knew from the first week that this was going to be so magical the world would want to see how it was done.” The singer says she was comforted by Stewart’s experience filming female subjects, from his own daughters to the Eurythmics’ Annie Lennox. “He and the people who work with him are very aware of how to film women,” she says. “He knows how to make you look good.
During my time stationed at Walter Reed working as a nurse with wounded soldiers, many visitors passed through the doorways of Ward 57. One visitor, in particular, that impressed me the most was Stevie Nicks.
Stevie Nicks’ visits were lengthy and were never rushed. She genuinely took the time out of her day to spend it with our nation’s wounded soldiers. During her visits, she would distribute iPods filled with music she personally helped to pick out for our troops along with other items to help entertain and increase the morale of the patients during their lengthy recovery and rehabilitation time. The visits were very personal and did not involve the entourage of photographers and press personnel some other celebrities have accompanied them on their visits. They were more one-on-one visitations as if she was an old friend stopping by, saying hello.
Recently Stevie Nicks released the song titled “Soldiers Angel” on her latest album In Your Dreams. Stevie Nicks states it started when one Sunday in 2005. She spent eight hours in the Bethesda Naval hospital with wounded soldiers when medical crews suddenly began rushing in a group of seriously wounded troops.
“There were 20 beds down on side and doctors and nurses everywhere, and tanks and family members,” she recalled. “I realized that I had walked in a hospital a rock ‘n’ roll star with not a care in the world, and I was driving away from this hospital a soldier’s mother.
“I went back to my motel and wrote the poem…. it took me four years to put it to music,” she said. “I’ve now given that poem out to hundreds and hundreds of soldiers and their families, their sisters, brothers, moms, dads, grandmothers, nieces, godchildren, everybody. I always told them one day it would be a song.”
We would like to take a moment to recognize Stevie Nicks and her continuous dedication to our wounded soldiers.
Thank you, Stevie Nicks.
SSG (RET) Scott Cameron
Co-Founder, Operation Ward 57
Special thank you goes out to AP Press for quotes from an interview with Stevie Nicks discussing her experiences and album release.
Scott Cameron / Co-Founder, Operation Ward 57 / 2011
Stevie Nicks wild at heart: as the legendary singer-songwriter releases her first studio album in a decade, she opens up about her iconic fashion moments and rock-star life.
STEVIE NICKS is Team Edward all the way. Honestly, is it any surprise that the now-62-year-old gypsy queen of ’70s rock, singer for the epic band Fleetwood Mac, arbiter of romantic, Gothic style, and writer of magical songs about devastating heartbreak is a Twilight fan?
“I saw New Moon when I was on tour with Fleetwood Mac,” Nicks says, curled up under a white fur throw on an armchair in the Santa Monica condo she shares with her 12-year-old Yorkie, Sulamith. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows, the sun is setting over the Pacific, and with the room’s soft lighting–all chandeliers and crystals–and her elbow-length blonde hair cascading over her shoulders, it’s as if she’s been beamed down from classic-rock heaven. Nicks is an ageless creature, wearing a handful of gold chains with charms dangling over a navy silk dolman-sleeved top and black pants. Only when she puts on her glasses, an ombre-tinted pair of aviators, does she look her age. “When Bella just sat there in the window, crying for months because she thought she’d never see him again,” Nicks trails off, looking wistful about their vampire love. She’s had a Bella moment or two herself. “Its happened to me twice, when there was no explanation. It was just over.”
Nicks was so moved that she wrote a song about it, “Moonlight (a Vampire’s Dream).” And when she got home, she recorded her first studio album in 10 years, In Your Dreams, out this month. She worked on it with friend and producer Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics at her other L.A. home, a 1930s mansion, which became a sort of rock sorority house. “We’d have dinners for 12 every night. It was the best time of my life.” New friend Reese Witherspoon came over for a session and ended up naming a song, “Cheaper than Free.”
What is surprising, given Nicks’s deep and complicated history–an infamous struggle with drugs, several torrid affairs, and a unique style that’s inspired designers for almost 40 years now–is that she is so firmly rooted in the present. She’s as likely to mention Rihanna (she’s a fan) as her own song “Rhiannon.”
Fritz, circa 1970
As the Fleetwood Mac story goes, Stephanie Lynn Nicks met Lindsey Buckingham at a high school party in 1966, joining him in a spontaneous duet of “California Dreamin’.” Two years later, Buckingham called her to see if she’d consider singing in his band, Fritz. They opened for legends like Jimi Hendrix and eventually became a couple. By the time Nicks was 23, they had broken off to become Buckingham Nicks. Then came a call from Mick Fleetwood.
Suddenly, Nicks was part of the main event, the frontwoman of a world-famous band, and she knew she needed to look the part. “I didn’t want to look like anyone else–like Janis Joplin or Grace Slick. That’s why I never went to any of the big designers. I drew a stick figure of what I dreamed up and gave it to my costume designer, Margi Kent, who I still work with. It was a handkerchief dress with a jacket, long, droopy chiffon sleeves, and velvet platform boots. I didn’t want to wear high heels,” she says. “That’s when it started.”
At the time, she also cut her own locks: “I’d take the top, measure it with my fin-gets, and chop it off. I did it pretty well.”
When the band went to London, Nicks scoured the flea markets in Chelsea and on Portobello Road for Victorian lace–“the real deal,” she says. At five foot one, Nicks likes anything with volume that gives her more stage presence, like the endless shawls and scarves she spreads wide into wings. (Among the boxes packed for her spring tour, there’s a giant bin marked STEVIE’s SARIS.) And, along with the platforms, that iconic top hat added height. “I found a top hat at a thrift store in Buffalo, New York, on our first tour, and I loved it,” she says. “Now I have several. It really became part of my look.”
Over the years, Nicks’s singular style has inspired designers from Ralph Lauren to Anna Sui. “No one had done this look before,” explains Kent, her costume designer. “I remember I went on the road with them, and there were hundreds of Stevie look-alikes. Everyone wanted to look like her.”
(Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
Fleetwood Mac’s escapades with drugs and sex and the ever-present feuding that went along with them were as outrageous as everyone’s wardrobes. While the band was recording its Grammy-winning 1977 album, Rumours, Nicks broke up with Buckingham. She went on to sleep with two of the Eagles (first Don Henley, then Joe Walsh, in the ’80s) and have an affair with the then-married Fleetwood–who broke her heart when he ran off with her best friend, model Sara Recor. But while one would think that Nicks has her share of party stories, the way she tells it, the lives of female rock stars at the time were “very cloistered” compared with the dudes in the band. “Christine [McVie] and I didn’t go out. We didn’t pick up guys,” remembers Nicks. “We’d hang out, play cards, and watch movies. It wasn’t that much fun.”
Back at home, it was a different story. Even while she was touring, recording, and launching a solo career, Nicks got heavily involved with drugs. “I watch interviews from the early years of Fleetwood Mac and I’m so, like, out there,” she says. “I think, ‘God, could you have just laid off the blow for an hour? Because this is not attractive. You sound like an idiot.”‘
Bill Clinton Inaugural Ball, January 1993
Despite her escalating addiction, Nicks managed to record three solo albums and several Top 10 hits, including a duet with Tom Petty and a collaboration with Prince. “I saved the dress I wore to the Purple Rain premiere. a vintage white beaded dress,” says Nicks, who keeps all her costumes archived in a temperature-controlled room. “Prince and I were just friends. I think he would have been happy to have had a relationship. But I really wanted a musical relationship, and I had smartened up, even then. You’ll break up and never speak again. But he wasn’t interested in just that.”
In 1986, she found herself too strung out to keep up with her busy schedule. She checked herself into the Betty Fold Center to kick her cocaine addiction. But in the process of beating one drug, a doctor prescribed another; Klonopin. “It took my soul,” she says. “It was worse than brandy, coke, pot, and cigarettes combined. I had no energy. I lost my fire. I’d perform now and then, but mostly I sat on the couch, watched TV, and ordered Jerry’s Deli.”
By the time president-elect Bill Clinton called to ask Fleetwood Mac to perform “Don’t Stop” at the 1993 inauguration, she was fully addicted and 175 pounds. But she couldn’t say no. Finally, in 1994, she’d had enough and entered rehab again. “My hair turned gray. My skin molted, just fell off,” she says. “But I did it.”
Lately, Nicks has been spending time with a cleaner-cut group. She sang a duet with Taylor Swift at the 2010 Grammys. “I didn’t want to do it,” she says. “I didn’t want to stand next to her, at 5 foot 11 and 100 pounds, and be broadcast to 50 million people. But she wouldn’t hear it. She had a plan.” And recently, Nicks showed up on the set of Fox’s Glee to see Gwyneth Paltrow perform “Landslide.”
“Lea Michele told me I was the only one, out of all the big, old songs they’d performed, who’d come to the studio or even called to say they liked it,” says Nicks. “Those kids are spectacular.”
Stevie Nicks and Rod Stewart (Donald Kravitz/Ethan Miller)
The night after this interview, at her last rehearsal before her tour with Rod Stewart, Nicks is in her element, standing in front of a microphone draped with scarves and rhinestones. “The Glee album with Gwyneth’s ‘Landslide’ just hit number one,” she announces to the friends who have gathered. There are a few grumbles. “Ka-ching, ka-ching” she says. “I don’t care who sings it. As long as they keep singing it.”
Nicks is still a commanding presence, belting out “Stand Back” better than women half her age. And despite the hard living, she looks nothing like some other rickety relics of rock’s golden age. She attributes this to one of the better decisions she made in her drama-fueled life: “Smoking is what destroys your skin. I didn’t smoke,” she says, flashing a sly grin. “I did everything else.”
Christine Lennon / Harper’s Bazaar (p. 151) / May 2011
The Florence and the Machine singer pays tribute to her hero
THE FIRST TIME I HEARD Stevie Nicks, I had just fallen in love with a boy in a band. I was on a family holiday in Italy. Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours was one of the only CDs at the house where we stayed, and I was like, “Oh, OK. What’s this?” I listened to the whole thing nonstop. There’s something about Stevie that’s really pure. When she sings, she sounds angelic but also wild and free, like she’s getting completely lost in the song. Her new album, In Your Dreams, is just classic, classic songwriting. With the big, expansive guitar sounds, it’s moving in a more modern direction, but it still sounds like Stevie Nicks. She’s very much a storyteller, and she has a fantastic ability to make songs that you feel immediately connected to. Creating that intimacy while also retaining a mystique is something I learned from her. She also definitely influenced me to wear a cape. I love a cape onstage.
Florence Welch / Rolling Stone / Thursday, April 28, 2011
Stevie appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s “Rock Goddesses” episode (101). Stevie and her band performed “Secret Love” and “Landslide”.
Stevie told the audience, “I’ve been waiting my whole life to sing this to you, Oprah. This is ‘Landslide’.” Sheryl Crow joined Stevie during the song, providing harmony vocals.
Episode: 101 Description: It’s an “Oprah-palooza!” Rock goddesses Stevie Nicks, Joan Jett, Pat Benatar, hip-hop legends Salt-N-Pepa and more are here to rock your world with their biggest hits. Aired: April 13, 2011
Secret Love
(video courtesy of Lady from the Mountain)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrFXAhLvvE8
Landslide
(video courtesy of StevieNicksHD)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6qIbVj7YxU
Band
Lead Vocals: Stevie Nicks Lead Guitar: Waddy Wachtel Bass: Al Ortiz Drums: Jimmy Paxson Guitar: Carlos Rios Keyboards: Ricky Peterson Percussion: Lenny Castro Background Vocals (“Landslide”): Sheryl Crow Background Vocals: Sharon Celani Background Vocals: Lori Nicks
Stevie Nicks: ‘You gotta remember I am 62. So you got to have those cameras up, and the best lighting in the world.’ (Photo by Kristen Burns)
Fleetwood Mac’s frontwoman is one of the last old-school rock stars left – and she’s still walking the walk, finds Craig McLean
By Craig McLean The Guardian (UK)
Friday March 25, 2011 6:31 p.m. EDT
Stevie Nicks, legendary singer-songwriter and hard-living Fleetwood Mac frontwoman, is considering her greatest regret. It is not her “huge cocaine period”, the 10 years that elapsed between the making of Fleetwood Mac’s 40m-selling 1977 album Rumours and the moment, in 1986, when she finally entered the Betty Ford Center. Nor is it her complicated history with band members: she joined Fleetwood Mac in 1974 with guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, subsequently detailing their split in the hit song “Dreams,” and went on to have an affair with drummer Mick Fleetwood, which inspired the 1983 solo song “Beauty and the Beast.”
It is not even the eight years she lost to Klonopin, a prescription tranquilliser to which she became addicted in the late 80s and early 90s, when she was “just a sad girl, sitting in a big, beautiful house, going, ‘What the f- hell happened?’“
The regret that has really stayed with her is her marriage, in 1983, to Kim Anderson, widower of her best friend Robin Snyder. Snyder’s baby Matthew had been born two days before she died of leukaemia. Three months later, Nicks and Anderson were married.
“It was insanity,” the 62-year-old says now. “Everybody was furious. It was a completely ridiculous thing. And it was just because I had this crazy, insane thought that Robin would want me to take care of Matthew. But the fact is, Robin would not have wanted me to be married to a guy I didn’t love. And therefore accidentally break that guy’s heart, too.”
Nicks, now a multimillionaire, may have remarkable recall for details and dates from her four decades in music, but she also betrays the hallmarks of 70s cosmic thinking. She describes how she became aware of Snyder’s displeasure: “One day when I walked into Matthew’s room, the cradle was not rocking,” she says. “I know that sounds crazy, but it was always rocking whenever I’d walk in, and I knew Robin was there. And one day it wasn’t rocking and it was very dark and the baby was very quiet. And I said, ‘Robin wants this to end – now.’ I felt it as strongly as if she’d put her hand on my shoulder.”
So it was a sign from beyond the grave?
“It was absolutely a sign.”
Nicks had visited Snyder during her cancer treatment. “I was so high on coke. I’d drink half a bottle of brandy on the way there, ‘cause I couldn’t stand it. She was so sick. And she said to me, ‘Don’t come back until you’re not high – don’t come back into this place where everybody is dying.’“
Nicks shrugs. “So that was the Robin who would have said [of the marriage], ‘You’ve lost your mind. What were you thinking?’“
Nicks and Anderson divorced after three months.
Stevie Nicks is holding court in a hotel suite with spectacular views of the ocean off Miami, as her tiny terrier, Sulamith, yaps about in a blue sweater. She is here for the Heart & Soul tour, a month-long series of concerts with Rod Stewart. The tour, billed as “Two legends – one stage”, starts three days from now, but Nicks and Stewart have yet to rehearse together.
Stewart has been in the UK playing the proud, new, 66-year-old father to his eighth child. Nicks has been at her LA home, putting the finishing touches to her seventh solo album, In Your Dreams. It’s her first new record in a decade. She and her producer/collaborator, former Eurythmic Dave Stewart, have spent a year in the mansion, writing, recording and filming vampire-themed promotional videos.
This afternoon, Nicks – 5ft 1in (“and a half”), blond and well-preserved – is agitated at the prospect of driving to Fort Lauderdale for her first practice with Rod the Mod. “Two hours it takes to get to! For probably 15 minutes of rehearsal!”
Only 15 minutes?
“Yeah, he’s not a rehearser. He. Is. Not.”
Because he doesn’t need to?
“He doesn’t care. He’s just not like me. I’m like [I’m in] sixth grade: totally prepared, meticulous.”
She is also relatively concert-ready: in 2009, Fleetwood Mac undertook a reunion tour of 83 shows around the world. Nonetheless, she says, “I’m scared, that’s what I am. Rod’s not scared. I have fear, he has no fear. And some people – me, Mick – we get panic attacks. Christine [McVie], too. That’s why she quit.” McVie, singer and ex-wife of bass player John McVie, left Fleetwood Mac in 1998 and now lives in the Kent countryside.
Since the tour, Fleetwood Mac’s 1975 song “Landslide” – written by Nicks – has appeared in the US charts, though not in its original incarnation. “It’s on Glee: Gwyneth Paltrow’s done it,” she says. “And it’s number one!”
Nicks loves Glee, and American Idol (“My friend Steven Tyler’s a judge now. I tell people, ‘Two hours, don’t call me, I’m watching Idol’“). She visited the Glee set during filming of the episode featuring “Landslide,” and creator Ryan Murphy has claimed Nicks asked him to write her a role in the series. “I did not,” she says. “I don’t really like to be filmed. But if I was ever going to do anything like that on TV, it would be Glee.”
Nicks has strict rules about appearing on film. “I say, ‘You gotta remember I’m 62 years old. So you’ve got to have those cameras up, and I have to have the best lighting in the world.’ I’m not asking to look 16, I’m asking to look 40.”
In the past, she has described the menopause as “horrible… rock and the menopause do not mix”. Is that behind her now? “Well, kind of. My mom is 83 and she still has hot flushes. She just starts to sweat from the very top of her head. So there’s parts of it that I feel don’t ever go away. It’s a way of life and you learn to live with it.”
Does that make it harder to go on stage?
“No,” she replies briskly, “because when you’re on stage you have to forget about it. There is no dizzies, there is no cramps, there is no menopause. All there is, is the audience and what you do. So you feel great for those two hours. And when I come offstage, then I can burst into tears.”
The new album opens with a song called “Secret Love”: “The ode to the rock star,” as Nicks calls it.
Which one, though? Lindsey, Mick, Don Henley, his Eagles bandmate Joe Walsh? She shakes her head. “I’m not sure who I wrote it about. I wrote it in 1976. It’s so old, I honestly cannot remember. In ‘75, ‘76, we were beautiful, fast, sexy, love was everywhere and we were moving from person to person. That’s it. Love was around every corner.”
In “For What It’s Worth,” Nicks sings about a “forbidden romance that saved my life”. It’s not about Mick Fleetwood, she says. Rather, it refers to someone who stood by her in 1995, before the release of Fleetwood Mac’s live album The Dance and after her stint in rehab for Klonopin.
It was “not a good time… I was freaked out. In rehab, when you’re leaving, the last thing they say to you is, ‘Don’t get married, don’t sign contracts, don’t buy a house, don’t sell a house. Nothing heavy.’ Because your judgment is impaired. You’re a shell. And you need to go out there and find out who you are, not on tranquillisers.
“So you walk out into the world and you are a different person. And we were going on a tour and I was terrified. Terrified. And this person just sort of hung with me through that tour and buffered me from the world. And he did save my life.”
The Klonopin was prescribed by a psychiatrist to wean her off cocaine. While on it, her skin peeled off and her hair turned grey. “If someone ever says to you, ‘I think you should take some Klonopin’, you should get a gun and shoot yourself,” she says.
As for the song “Everybody Loves You” (“We cause each other such pain… at home or on stage”), the music and chorus were written by Dave Stewart. He based it on one of 40 poems in Nicks’s journal that she concedes is about Fleetwood Mac’s guitarist. “And the reason Dave wrote the chorus the way he did was because of his relationship with Annie Lennox. So we had two duos. Dave understood. He’s the same way with Annie – ‘Everybody loves you… no one really knows you, I’m the only one’ – I’m the only one that knew you before you were famous. So I let the song go ahead and be about Lindsey, and he let the song be about Annie.”
Nicks and Buckingham met at high school in California and started out as a duo. Had Fleetwood Mac, fame and drugs not entered the picture, she believes, the couple would have stayed in San Francisco and had success anyway. “And we would have married and had children, ‘cause we were headed that way. We didn’t really mess up till we moved to Los Angeles. And that was when the whole world just ripped us apart.”
Still, she says, “Fleetwood Mac was our destiny.” But Buckingham doesn’t feel the same way. “I think he regrets it totally. I think he wishes we hadn’t ever joined Fleetwood Mac and had just stayed together. Even though his life has now wound around to where he’s married to a lovely girl and he’s got three absolutely beautiful kids.”
Nicks, meanwhile, is happily single. “It’s a decision I made, to not get married and have children,” she says, “because I want to always be free to follow my art wherever it takes me.”
She has no plans to retire, and thinks there will be another Fleetwood Mac album next year. She spends the rest of her time drawing, writing poetry and reading; her current obsession is the Twilight series.
One of her best friends, Sheryl Crow, recently adopted two boys, but Nicks isn’t tempted by family life. “I want to have complete freedom. Sheryl does not have complete freedom now. She doesn’t! But that’s what she wanted. She wanted a baby. And I have a Yorkie Chinese crested dog. I’m happy with that.”
In Your Dreams is out on Warner Music on 27 June. Stevie Nicks will be at London’s Hard Rock Calling on Sunday 26 June.
It is December 2009, and Stevie Nicks is sitting in a movie theater in Melbourne, Australia, watching The Twilight Saga: New Moon, the second in the popular gothic romance series. The movie’s protagonist, teenaged Bella, is feeling lost and alone without her paramour, a vampire named Edward — and something about her reminds Nicks of a song she began writing, but did not quite complete, in 1976. “I started reciting these words during the movie,” she recalls. “I was spellbound. It was almost like I’d written these words about what was going on in this movie.” Nicks’ original song fragment had been inspired by the alienation she felt after moving from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 1972 with then-boyfriend Lindsey Buckingham, two years before both of them joined legendary rock band Fleetwood Mac. After the movie she returned to her hotel room and, after 33 years, finally completed the song that would inspire her to make her first solo album in a decade. When she finished writing “Moonlight (A Vampire’s Dream),” Nicks stood up and announced to her assistant, Karen Johnston: “I’m ready to do a record now.
Recording continued for several months at Nicks’ home, followed by 10 days of overdubbing at the Village’s Studio D — the very room in which Fleetwood Mac famously spent two tumultuous years and a million dollars recording 1979’s Tusk. The making of the most recent Mac effort, 2004’s Say You Will, was also difficult — which is why Nicks insists that she wants Stewart and Ballard behind the board for the group’s next studio effort. She reports that Buckingham, who has typically held sway over the group’s productions, has already endorsed the idea. “Lindsey doesn’t want to produce the next Fleetwood Mac record,” she says. “He is absolutely not into that. I think it would be a pleasure for him to be able to sit back, play his parts, write his songs, have fun and not be worried all the time.”
Yet you made the new album.
What’s Dave like as a producer?
Stevie Nicks wild at heart: as the legendary singer-songwriter releases her first studio album in a decade, she opens up about her iconic fashion moments and rock-star life.
Nicks was so moved that she wrote a song about it, “Moonlight (a Vampire’s Dream).” And when she got home, she recorded her first studio album in 10 years, In Your Dreams, out this month. She worked on it with friend and producer Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics at her other L.A. home, a 1930s mansion, which became a sort of rock sorority house. “We’d have dinners for 12 every night. It was the best time of my life.” New friend Reese Witherspoon came over for a session and ended up naming a song, “Cheaper than Free.”
When the band went to London, Nicks scoured the flea markets in Chelsea and on Portobello Road for Victorian lace–“the real deal,” she says. At five foot one, Nicks likes anything with volume that gives her more stage presence, like the endless shawls and scarves she spreads wide into wings. (Among the boxes packed for her spring tour, there’s a giant bin marked STEVIE’s SARIS.) And, along with the platforms, that iconic top hat added height. “I found a top hat at a thrift store in Buffalo, New York, on our first tour, and I loved it,” she says. “Now I have several. It really became part of my look.”
Lately, Nicks has been spending time with a cleaner-cut group. She sang a duet with Taylor Swift at the 2010 Grammys. “I didn’t want to do it,” she says. “I didn’t want to stand next to her, at 5 foot 11 and 100 pounds, and be broadcast to 50 million people. But she wouldn’t hear it. She had a plan.” And recently, Nicks showed up on the set of Fox’s Glee to see Gwyneth Paltrow perform “Landslide.”
