STEVIE NICKS INFO

Tag: Fleetwood Mac

Stevie Nicks: ‘Lindsey left Fleetwood because he thought I was going to die’

Lindsey Buckingham left Fleetwood Mac in 1987 to work on his solo career and to distance himself from Stevie Nicks. (Photo: Neal Preston)

Singer reveals the impact of drug addiction

Stevie Nicks has revealed that her addiction to tranquilizers played a part in her former boyfriend Lindsey Buckingham’s decision to quit Fleetwood Mac.

This year sees the band heading out on tour again, with their seminal album Rumours already having been re-released. The original lineup surprised some when they reunited in 1997, but apparently it was guitarist Lindsey Buckingham who had been reluctant before then.

Buckingham left the band after they released the relatively successful Tango In The Night, and says himself it was down to his desire to work on solo albums.

But Stevie Nicks suggests his departure had something to do with her addiction and Buckingham’s concern for her health.

“I went into rehab on December 12th, 1993 and came out on the 27th of January – 47 days to come off Klonopin. I nearly died,” she tells Rolling Stone.

“And I think one of the reasons that Lindsey left is because I was very, very high on this horrific tranquilizer. I didn’t even make it to most of the recording sessions for Tango In The Night. I was sick.

“And I think he was horribly worried that I was going to die.”

After her stint in rehab Nicks went on to complete a three month tour and says that after that she felt the people around her were reassured that she was going to be OK.

“I was going to be OK, and everyone knew I was going to be OK. And I think that’s when Lindsey thought Fleetwood Mac could go on, because his beloved ex-girlfriend was not going to die. She was going to make it.”

There had been speculation that Fleetwood Mac would be performing at this year’s Glastonbury Festival as the dates had been left conspicuously clear at the end of their North American tour.

But it apparently is not to be, with new dates announced which rule out the possibility.

The band will, however, be visiting the UK in the autumn — in either September or October — to play a series of shows.

Their seminal album Rumours is also on course to re-enter the UK Albums Chart this weekend, nearly 36 years after its initial release in February 1977.

Adam Tait / Gigwise / Wednesday, January 30, 2013

January 30, 2013
Fleetwood Mac’s strangely savage 'Tusk' was the band’s weirdest hit

In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well—some inspired by a weekly theme and some not, but always songs worth hearing.

For most of Fleetwood Mac’s life, the band has been a hits machine, and it used that reputation to propel a singularly weird song—one vastly different from its usual output—into the Billboard top 10 in 1979. “Tusk,” which is featured prominently and often in the première of FX’s The Americans tonight, is a work of strange savagery, overlaid with jungle sounds and a thudding, endlessly repetitive drum riff that drives everything that happens in the song. The lyrics are simple enough to be a Dr. Seuss exploration of a relationship that’s crumbling, Lindsey Buckingham softly crooning “Why don’t you ask him if he going to stay? / Why don’t you ask him if he’s going away?” over the horrors building up beneath him.

It all explodes in the chorus, when Buckingham and backing vocalists Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie hiss “Don’t say that you love me!” to the unseen addressee, while the USC Trojan Marching Band’s urgent backing music heads off in another direction entirely. It’s a song at odds with itself, the various voices all tugging at the tune in different directions until everything unites when the vocalists scream the song’s title, an enigmatic moment that means… what, exactly? This relationship was doomed to begin with? These people are going to kill each other eventually? All love has violence inside of it somewhere? That “Tusk” is able to suggest all three of these things—and also have elements of wounded tenderness inside of it—makes it one of Fleetwood Mac’s very best, yet also easily its strangest song to hit on the charts.

Todd VanDerWerff / A.V. Club / Thursday, January 30, 2013

January 30, 2013
Fleetwood Mac: Rumours 35th anniversary reissue

Rumours Expanded Edition (2013)

Besides squeezing out endless cash wads from the wallets of music buyers (an ever-diminishing breed), what’s the point of a fancy-ass remastered deluxe box-set reissue? In the case of Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 pop masterstroke Rumours, it’s a question especially worth asking.

It’s almost impossible to improve, sonically, on one of the warmest, richest recordings in the history of pop music. As a studio document — in terms of engineering, production and performance — Rumours is in the elite company of Dark Side of the Moon and Aja: albums with fidelity as high-class as the songs themselves. This new remaster gives each instrument a more crisp, modern definition, particularly on headphones: Check out Mick Fleetwood’s punchy hi-hat and snare on “Second Hand News,” Lindsey Buckingham’s punchier acoustic strums in the left channel of “Dreams,” the more prominent vocal echo during “Go Your Own Way.” But are these “improvements” necessary? Probably not.

This 35th anniversary package (It’s actually been 36 years) is stuffed to the brim with extras, most of which already showed up on the 2004 double-disc reissue. But they’re still marvelous: Stevie Nicks ballad “Silver Springs” is the most transcendent b-side ever recorded; Fleetwood Mac were so on fire during this fertile stretch that they didn’t even bother tacking it on to the actual album. The early run-throughs and demos are illuminating—proof that some of the greatest pop songs start off as silly doodles with gibberish melodies: On “Second Hand News,” Buckingham mumbles his way through about 20 percent of the lyrics (“Let me do my stuff” was the focal point, even in this unfinished version), as the band pitter-patters unobtrusively behind him. On an early version of “I Don’t Want to Know,” Buckingham and company are figuring out the track in real time, with Buckingham giving transitional cues (“Verse!”).

The most revelatory moment is the “acoustic duet” version of “Never Going Back Again,” which is hardly a “duet” since it features brushed drums, congas, piano, a delayed lead guitar figure and three-part vocal harmonies. It’s the maximalist flip-side to the original’s stripped-down simplicity. On the other side of the “essential” coin is “Mic the Screecher,” in which Fleetwood conjures nails-on-chalkboard screeches over aimless piano chords.

Live tracks from the ‘77 Rumours World Tour are worth seeking out for dedicated fans (especially a ripping take on “Monday Morning,” which harnesses more primal energy in its folky strut), even if none approach the quality of their studio counterparts: “Dreams” is played far too fast, losing its sexy, mystical voodoo; Buckingham’s blaring, out-of-tune guitar on “The Chain” is a distracting deal-breaker. A better live document is the “Rosebud Film,” a previously unreleased mixture of concert footage and chatty interviews. It captures the band in all their late ’70s glory: Buckingham, the afro-glam prince; Nicks, the witchy heartthrob; McVie, the elegant shadow-lurker; Fleetwood, the bearded class clown; McVie, the groove monster in awkwardly short jean-shorts.

In one particularly great scene, Nicks describes the band’s hodge-podge fashion: “I know sometimes we look like—you know, Lindsey’s all Chinese’d-out in his kimona, and I look like I’m going to a Halloween party, and Christine looks like she’s going to be confirmed in the Catholic church, and Mick looks like he’s going to a Renaissance fair, and John looks like he’s going to the beach.”

That unique blend of heavy and playful, mystical and muscular—it was never as potent as it was on Rumours. If there’s ever been an album that deserves the lavish, borderline-unnecessary reissue treatment, it’s this pop behemoth.

© Ryan Reed / Paste Magazine / January 29, 2013

January 29, 2013
Stevie Nicks recalls Rumours sessions as 35th anniversary reissue hits stores

The 35th anniversary reissues of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours hit stores today. The band’s historic 1977 album is available as a six-disc Deluxe Edition and a three-CD Expanded Edition. The deluxe package offers a remastered version of the original record plus the B-side “Silver Springs,” along with a variety of demos and outtakes, a CD of a ’77 concert performances, a DVD boasting a making-of documentary and a high-quality vinyl LP.

As fans familiar with the history of Fleetwood Mac know, at the time Rumours was being recorded, all five members of the band were going through major personal turmoil. Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, who were a couple when they joined the group in 1975, were in the process of breaking up. In addition, John McVie and Christine McVie had just divorced, while Mick Fleetwood‘s own marriage was on the rocks. This upheaval was reflected in, and inspired, many of the tunes that wound up on the album, including such hits as “Dreams,” “Go Your Own Way” and “Don’t Stop.”

Speaking with ABC News Radio about the Rumours sessions, Nicks admitted that as hard as that time may have been emotionally for the band members, it also was a very positive period for the group, in part because of the quality of the music being made.

“We were all writing little movies around what was really happening and we were digging it,” she explained. “We were having a lot of fun recording those songs, even though we were falling apart…If anything was keeping us from falling apart it was going into the studio every day. And we were totally having a great time.”

The singer also maintains that although she and her band mates may have been experiencing a lot of hurt with regard to the state of their relationships, on the whole, they had little to complain about.

“We were rich. We were young,” said Nicks. “We were falling out of love with each other but, hey, there was a lot of other…men and women in the world. [And] we were all movin’ on and we had these great jobs. So, as bad as it was, it was still great.”

Following its release in February 1977, Rumours went on to top the Billboard 200 chart en route to winning the Grammy for Album of the Year. It has sold more than 19 million copies in the U.S. alone, making it the ninth-best-selling album ever released in the States. Fleetwood Mac fans can expect to hear plenty of tunes from the record if they check out a show on the band’s upcoming North American tour, which kicks off April 4 in Columbus, Ohio.

ABC News Radio / Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Copyright 2013 ABC News Radio

January 29, 2013
Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours spills secrets of love, chaos

Fleetwood Mac’s nightly recording sessions in a cramped, windowless studio were fueled by booze and cocaine. The band’s complex romances left every member heartbroken. Shouting matches lasted longer than the songs.

Today, 35 years on, an anniversary box set of Rumours shows how the musical cocktail of two women and three men was shaken and stirred by their romantic splits. Newly released material shows the tracks getting endlessly reworked and improved as they squabbled.

It was a “crucifyingly difficult” process, drummer Mick Fleetwood notes. He was going through a divorce, with his wife dating his best friend. He never imagined the chaos would lead to a 40-million-selling LP: the best of 1977, according to the Grammy judges, and one of the finest efforts of the 1970s, maybe even of all time.

The American couple in the band added a pop edge to British blues. Californian Lindsey Buckingham had been inseparable from his singer girlfriend Stevie Nicks for five years. When Fleetwood asked him to join, Buckingham insisted she be included too. Now they were all arguing, and the frustrated guitarist started writing a bitter rant called “Strummer.”

On the box set, we hear how this evolved from a simple acoustic demo into a Celtic rag and finally a sleek piece of disco with hints of the Bee Gees, retitled “Second Hand News.” There’s a percussive roll which, it now turns out, was made by bashing an old Naughahyde chair near the mixing desk.

Romantic Links

Buckingham throws the opening words at his ex: “I know there’s nothing to say, someone has taken my place.” (Nicks was romantically linked to Don Henley of the Eagles, then Fleetwood himself.)

Her own breakup lyric “Dreams” is a swift rejoinder: “Now here you go again, you say you want your freedom.” The song’s first mix, nowhere near so radio-friendly, puts her voice starkly to the fore and buries its optimism.

This creative jousting inevitably leads to Buckingham replying, bluntly inviting her to “Go Your Own Way” because he was “Never Going Back Again.”

The band’s other couple, the McVies, were walking from the wreckage of an eight-year marriage. They were on such bad terms that they would only speak about music.

Christine McVie defiantly shows how she’s moved on with “Don’t Stop” about her on-tour romance with the band’s lighting director. “You Making Loving Fun” tells her husband that her new flame is much better.

Tender Songbird

Coproducer Ken Caillat recalls how huge rows in the Sausalito, California studio would be followed minutes later by the composition of sweet harmonies. He deserves credit for singling out the most tender ballad, “Songbird,” and taking it somewhere else — more precisely, to the Zellerbach Auditorium, Berkeley, which had the right acoustic and a Steinway piano.

The younger Nicks had the tougher words, but McVie is outstanding with her performance here: “And I love you, I love you, I love you, like never before, like never before.”

When the LP came out, I was a very young punk bassist and hated it, of course. This expensively produced, sentimental mush was exactly the stuff we were rebelling against. Just a few years on and I got it. “Songbird” now moves me every time. The record’s soft rock has echoes in acts such as Sting, Heart, Kelly Clarkson and Neko Case, to name just four.

The creative madness which had threatened to sink records as varied as “Exile on Main Street,” “Pet Sounds” and “Station to Station” again resulted in an act coming out with its best. Miracles do happen. As the lyric has it, “thunder only happens when it’s raining.”

The album is available on Warner as a remaster; a 3-CD version including the original album, bonus tracks and live material ($16); and a box with further outtakes, a DVD and a vinyl LP ($86). Rating: ***** for the shorter versions; *** for the large box because it’s too much for all but the most dedicated fans.

Fleetwood Mac’s tour starts in April.

Information: www.fleetwoodmac.com

By Mark Beech / Bloomberg News / Wednesday, January 29, 2013

Mark Beech writes for Muse, the arts and leisure section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own. Muse highlights include Manuela Hoelterhoff on arts, Ryan Sutton on New York dining and Rich Jaroslovsky on tech. To contact the writer on the story: Mark Beech in London at mb****@*******rg.net or twitter.com/home/Mark_Beech. To contact the editor responsible for this story: Manuela Hoelterhoff at mh**********@*******rg.net.

® 2013 BLOOMBERG L.P. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

January 29, 2013
Q&A: Fleetwood Mac on reissuing 'Rumours,' making new music

Few expected the reunion of Fleetwood Mac’s classic Seventies lineup back in 1997, and even fewer could have predicted it would still be going strong in 2013. On April 4th, in Columbus, Ohio, the band begin a North American tour with a set list that will include new songs. And on Tuesday comes the release of expanded editions of Rumours, their multi-platinum, career-defining disc from 1977.

“After all this time you would think there was nothing left to discover, nothing left to work out, no new chapters to be written. But that is not the case,” singer-guitarist Lindsey Buckingham tells Rolling Stone.

Buckingham, drummer Mick Fleetwood and singer Stevie Nicks recently gathered for interviews in a huge, wood-paneled room at the Village Recorder, a legendary recording space in West Los Angeles. More than three decades earlier, the band spent 13 months there making the 1979 double album Tusk, the surprisingly experimental follow-up to Rumours.

“We have a connection with this building like we have with nothing else,” said Nicks. “It’s hallowed ground.”

At the interview Nicks and Buckingham held hands, Fleetwood sitting beside them as votive candles flickered around the room. (Bassist John McVie stayed home, and former singer-keyboardist Christine McVie has been retired to the English countryside since 1998.)

Rolling Stone‘s cover story about the making of Rumours featured a photo of you all in bed together. Were the stories of romantic turmoil true?

Stevie Nicks: They’re all true. [Laughter]
Lindsey Buckingham: That really was a lot of the appeal of . The music was wonderful, but the music was also authentic because it was two couples breaking up and writing dialogue to each other. It was also appealing because we were rising to the occasion to follow our destiny. So you had to live in denial, you had to learn to compartmentalize your emotions and do what needs to be done. It brought out the voyeur a little bit in everybody.

‘I am more appreciative of the fact that we are really family,’ says Lindsey Buckingham

Nicks: Most people, when they break up, you don’t see each other for a while. You hope that you don’t run into that person ever at that point. In our situation, the breakups were going on, and we had to go to work the next day. It was very hard. You had to walk in with your head high and an open heart. We had to be very focused, and we knew that because no matter how hard it was on us – and it was awful – we still wanted to make a great record. Nobody was going to say, OK, I’ll just quit.

You knew you were going to the studio at 2 [p.m.], and you knew you would be there until 3 or 4 in the morning. And you couldn’t sit there at the board and glare at your ex-partner. You had to be a grownup. Even though there were a thousand people around us saying to do this or do that, we still had to gather together as a fivesome and say, “We’re not going to let this beat us.”

When you do the Rumours songs now, do any of those original feelings ever come back?

Buckingham: Oh, I hope not.

Nicks: I think the original feelings do come back. They take me right back to where we were. The songs morph a little bit every time we do them. Instrumentally, they morph. “Gold Dust Woman” is sometimes Indian. Sometimes it’s just rock & roll. It travels, and all these songs do that. To me, they are always exciting. I never feel bored when we burst into one of our big hit songs, because what they were all written about was so heavy that they could never be boring.

What is it like to look closely at Rumours again so many years later?

Nicks: We’ve been waiting a long time to put this out. If you were a Fleetwood Mac fan, you get to hear the songs turn into the songs without a lot of overdubbing. It’s very simple. When I listen to it, I think if I was 20 years old, I would definitely want to be in that band. There is something strangely timeless about it that makes you feel like it was just recorded last year. I now know why I went to Lindsey and said, “I think we should give this a chance. This is a really good band.” It’s quite an interesting group of crazy people that managed to meld their styles together.

Mick Fleetwood: The cause and effect of that album was so humongous – not only for us as musicians, but what it did and what it allowed for the journey. It was the start of something for sure – the enormity of everything we were faced with and were going to go through, and the opportunities, and the opportunities maybe blown and then retrieved. Now we’re sitting here excited about going out and playing. This album wasn’t the trigger for us doing this, but it’s quite a story.

Nicks: It’s pretty great that it’s coming out at the same time.

Fleetwood: I’m glad it is. It wasn’t planned that way at all.

Nicks: There’s a lot of great stuff on it, and a lot of creepy, weird stuff that never got on an album – just cool stuff, little minute things, little snippets of stuff that’s really intriguing.

Since it is coming out at the same time as your tour, will it affect your set list at all?

Nicks: There are a lot of songs on Rumours that are in the set no matter what. I think what will happen is we’ll end up talking about it onstage. Most of those songs are in our set anyway. We’ll just end up telling stories and talking about how these things happen. It’s always fun to share that with your audience.

Fleetwood Mac’s reunion in 1997 for The Dance live album was fairly unexpected, but you’ve managed to stay together ever since. How did that happen?

Nicks: The Dance was very strong, and I think it really opened up our eyes. We had been apart for a long time. I absolutely did not think Fleetwood Mac was coming back at that point. Then all of a sudden it was, and it was like, all our plans were canceled, everything was flipped over, and Fleetwood Mac was coming back.

Buckingham: I took off in ’87 because –

Nicks: You quit.

Buckingham: [Nods] I quit because things were getting a little too crazy, and I wanted to try to get my feet back on the ground. We did Clinton’s inauguration in ’93, and that was sort of the catalyst and had a delayed reaction. I think by the time you cut to ’96, when we contemplated doing The Dance, there had been enough time where we all settled down as people. The craziness that existed in ’87 and ’88 was gone. We were – for all intents and purposes – adults. I think the time apart helped us appreciate each other. The group has always been a group of people you can say maybe didn’t belong in the same band together, but it’s the synergy that makes it so magical. We were able to see that more clearly.

Lindsey had hesitated in the past to come back, so did something get resolved?

Buckingham: There were a number of false starts where I was trying to make solo albums. They would get constantly folded into group efforts. In retrospect I can say fair enough that you call yourself a band member and you’ve got to step up to the plate when the need arises. So that was an issue I had for a number of years that has come and gone. I am more appreciative of the fact that we know each other, we’ve been through so much together and we are really family.

Nicks: What else happened is I went into rehab on December 12th, 1993 and came out on the 27th of January – 47 days to come off of Klonopin. I nearly died. And I think one of the reasons that Lindsey left is because I was very, very high on this horrific tranquilizer. I didn’t even make it to most of the recording sessions for [1987’s] Tango in the Night. I was sick. And I think he was horribly worried that I was going to die. That’s one of the reasons you [turns to Buckingham] wanted to quit. We had this huge tour and it was booked. We were at Chris’ house and [Lindsey] stood up and said “I quit,” and I – being so high and so messed up – just raged across the room and I wanted to kill him.

When I came out of rehab, I did a small three-month tour, and I got through it. I was going to be OK, and everyone knew I was going to be OK. And I think that’s when Lindsey thought Fleetwood Mac could go on, because his beloved ex-girlfriend was not going to die. She was going to make it.

So everything since then has been different from what it was before?

Buckingham: It’s still evolving, and that’s the beauty of it too. I’ve known Stevie since high school. We were a couple for many, many years, and we’ve been a musical couple forever. After all this time you would think there was nothing left to discover, nothing left to work out, no new chapters to be written. But that is not the case – there are new chapters to be written. It’s quite extraordinary.

You have some history in this studio.

Buckingham: We recorded Tusk in Studio D.

Nicks: Thirteen months. We were here a lot.

That was right after Rumours, so you had a lot of freedom.

Buckingham: That was my line in the sand, the Tusk album. It was clearly an undermining of what was expected of us.

Nicks: It was the opposite of Rumours.

Buckingham: It was an undermining of upholding the brand, which we now represented. It was also an undermining of what a lot of groups find themselves doing, which is painting themselves into a corner by doing only what’s expected of them. It was a stand for art and for spontaneity and for the left side of the palette. It certainly did not perform commercially in the same way, nor would we have necessarily expected it to. It was a double album, for one thing. I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall when Warner Bros. put that on in their boardroom and listened to it for the first time. Over time it has been vindicated as a piece of work. It has become a darling for the indie bands, or at least the mentality of what that represents.

Nicks: Studio D was covered with Polaroids and shrunken heads and angel wings, and all of our stuff was in there. You walked into that room and there were big massive tusks on each side of the board, and the board was called Tusk. All of those songs – “Save Me a Place,” “Sara” – it became something so beautiful and so ahead of its time. I would have liked to be a fly on the wall too when they played it, because they had to be horrified. I was a little horrified myself over that 13-month period, but it was an experience. We were going to the top of the mountain, and it was very spiritual. And again, we were having serious relationship problems during Tusk, but when we went into that studio and saw those tusks, and all the amazing stuff we collected and brought in every day, we became part of a world that was fantastic.

What are your current recording plans?

Buckingham: When Stevie was on the road, and not long after her mom had passed away, Mick, John and I got together and we cut a bunch of tracks, and they turned out great. They were all done in Stevie’s keys. They were done with her in mind. Subsequently, Stevie and I have gotten together, and she’s sung on two of those. There’s also another track that dates back to [pre-Fleetwood Mac project] Buckingham-Nicks that Stevie and I built up from scratch. There’s a lot of stuff there. Some of this we will do in the show. We’re not pushing it. We’re just going to wait and see what everybody wants to hear.

Steve Appleford / Rolling Stone / Monday, January 28, 2013

January 28, 2013
Lindsey Buckingham talks new Fleetwood Mac music

Fans knew a Fleetwood Mac tour was imminent, but what they didn’t know was that new music was in the works. Two new songs, “Sad Angel” and “Miss Fantasy,” will come out before the tour kicks off in April. But longtime fans of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks might be even more thrilled with this development: They’re seriously considering reviving their pre-Fleetwood Mac career as Buckingham Nicks – and recently recorded a song that was originally intended for the follow-up that never came to their one self-titled album. Buckingham sat down to talk exclusively to MSN about the new (and old) recordings.

MSN: When we spoke last year about your solo album Seeds We Sow you said a Fleetwood Mac reunion would happen.

Lindsey Buckingham: “Did I say it was going to happen in 2012?”

Yes, but you said you wanted to do an album first. Stevie told me she wanted to do an album but people aren’t interested in them anymore, so you have just the two songs for now.

“Oh no, that’s not true. I don’t know what she’s talking about. She just didn’t come with any songs. She didn’t want to do an album. I said ‘Stevie, what do you think?’ and she said ‘No, I don’t want to do that.’ So I didn’t push it. I’ve got all this stuff sitting around. I’ll get John (McVie) and Mick (Fleetwood) over here from Hawaii and do a low-key, under-the-radar situation, producer-wise, just see what happens. We cut like seven, eight tracks with Mitchell Froom and the stuff turned out great. We did it all in the proper keys for Stevie’s range, and for her to drop in her parts. My hope she would hear some of this stuff and love it and get drawn in. She wasn’t really prepared to love it, so she didn’t. She’s starting to love it more now, now that she’s on a couple. She felt sort of put-upon and that’s fair enough I guess. She had her idea of not wanting to do it and here I was getting John and Mick over, doing this rah-rah thing. Come on guys!”

I have a feeling this interview is going to get the tour canceled before it begins…

“No, no, no, not at all. But I think probably she felt put-upon in the sense she didn’t have a lot of material sitting around to bring. Maybe there was a sense of pressure on her part. I was talking to Mick yesterday. At some point we’re going to be very glad we did this material. Something’s gonna happen with this. What that is remains to be seen. If we only use a couple of these for now, that’s fine. Stevie still needs to come with something. Who’s to say? I’m not pushing for an album. Down the line, maybe. I think it would be great. Stevie’s gotta be happy, she’s gotta be comfortable and that’s really the bottom line.”

How did you hook up with Mitchell Froom?

“I had never met Mitchell but spoke with him on the phone. I like the guy. I like some of his reference points that I was aware of. I also knew he was a very skillful string-arranger in case we wanted anything more outside the box like that. And to top it off he lives about five minutes from me. We did this whole thing in a very handcrafted way. I’d go into his house and gave him all my rough demos first, some of which were fleshed out, others just snippets of things hummed into my phone….we sort of agreed on what songs we’d do, worked on arrangements. We had the whole thing worked out before John and Mick showed up. Then it was pretty organic. It was interesting for him – the peculiarity of how we do things… for three weeks we came up with all that’s stuff. It’s all very pop. It hearkens back to the Fleetwood Mac classic feel. And John and Mick were just playing their asses off.”

With all your recent touring and solo albums and new songs are you in a particularly prolific phase?

“I’m not sure. It’s maybe the fruition, or something like that, of the choices I’ve been able to make and implement. You can take it way back if you wanna get really philosophical and go back to Tusk. Since 2005, we got off the road from doing the Say You Will tour. I was working on a certain level of frustration at having several attempts of solo projects being co-opted and turned into Fleetwood Mac projects. It happened several times. I asked for three years off in order to do two back-to-back albums, which I did, just trying to get it all out of my system … I did Under the Skin and Gift of Screws … I began to get a much stronger sense of myself by putting some chronological things together …confidence enters into it, I guess, but just focus and momentum.”

Let’s talk about the new music coming out. There’s another deluxe Rumours package coming out with more unreleased stuff. After the DVD-A and the previous deluxe release what’s left in the vaults for that?

“You’re asking the wrong guy (laughs). I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but it’s a marketing thing. I don’t have much invested in that. What my function is when these things come out – someone else finds this stuff, finds stuff that hasn’t come out before. Then it’s my job to make sure it’s OK, that it’s something I’m comfortable with… that the whole thing makes sense or even relates to the Rumours album. Having said that I’m not a fan of repackaging things over and over again. I wouldn’t lose any sleep if this package didn’t come out, let’s leave it at that.”

It’s frustrating to fans to get that again while the surround-sound mix of Tusk is still sitting in the vaults.

“We did it! Getting Warner Brothers to put it out is another matter. And getting the band to want to put it out. That was my baby and there’s a certain subtext of it being the undermining factor of the brand. Maybe there’s a certain sublime level of suppression going on – not that anyone’s sitting around saying that, it’s just not on anybody’s A-list of things to do (laughs).”

Tell me about the new songs “Sad Angel” and “Miss Fantasy.”

“I was writing a lot of stuff. I was thinking about Stevie when I was putting these together. Many of the songs I came up with were directed at Stevie. They were a dialog to her. Both those are very much that. ‘Sad Angel’ – I think of her in all her traumatic splendor as having quite a bit of sadness that she still deals with. At the moment that it was being written I really was thinking about the fact that she and I were not agreeing on the idea of an album. The chorus is ‘Hello, sad angel, have you come to fight the war?’ It goes on to talk about ‘the crowd’s calling out for more.’ It’s sort of a cyclical look at our lives, the competitiveness of it yet the underlying unity of it. Each of our journeys has never been not a little about the other. ‘Miss Fantasy’ is more of the same thing. It’s a look back on….it’s talking about having a dream, recalling certain events that occurred years and years ago. The chorus is talking about ‘Miss Fantasy, it may be that you don’t remember me, but I remember you.’ That’s addressing all that’s happened over the course of time. You remember the person you were and the person I was back then? Is there any way to find any of that? Do we want to? Is it important to? Those are songs about Stevie and me.”

Doing the song “Stephanie” on your solo tour from the out-of-print 1973 Buckingham Nicks album raised fans’ hopes that it’ll come out on CD someday. You also made a comment on the BBC about working with Stevie again. I assume that meant this tour but it was interpreted by some as you saying you might want to re-form Buckingham Nicks.

“That’s not a misinterpretation. I would love to go out and do Buckingham Nicks. It’s sort of ironic because when Stevie came over here and started working we just had a great time, the best time we have had in years. She did bring in one song that was supposed to be her contribution to the Fleetwood Mac thing. After we were done with it she decided she wanted to put it on the Buckingham Nicks album (laughs). So that’s fine too. I don’t care. It’s an old song from pre-Fleetwood Mac. It was written sometime after Buckingham Nicks came out but before we joined Fleetwood Mac. We were working on a second possible Buckingham/Nicks album that never happened. So yes. The issue with all of that is once again a logistics issue. I have no problem with dropping a bonus track or one from her and one from me and putting out Buckingham Nicks finally on CD. …she said ‘We could do some dates between legs of the Fleetwood Mac tour.’ I’m thinking ‘No, I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s logistically possible.’ We’ve got a little less than 40 dates on the books, we’ll probably add a few more…we’ll do Europe and probably go down and do the summer in Australia and New Zealand. When the hell are we going to get together and rehearse a Buckingham Nicks show? So in my mind if she’s really serious what would be good to do is wait to put the (old) album out, or put it out and then do a new Buckingham Nicks album. The tour would have to wait till after that. Whether or not that will happen….she’s very heartfelt about what she’s saying, but it isn’t always clear. I don’t know what to say about that. But yes, to be very direct in response to your question if it were up to me… I would love to go out and do that again. That would be so cyclical and so karmically appropriate. If you see Stevie just tell her I said that.”

Mark C. Brown / MSN

December 6, 2012
Stevie Nicks talks upcoming Fleetwood Mac tour

Some chains are unbreakable, even after nearly four decades: Fleetwood Mac announced today that they will embark on a 34-date tour in 2013, beginning April 4 in Columbus, Ohio, and wrapping June 12 in Detroit; tickets go on sale Dec. 14.

EW spoke to the legendary, always loquacious Stevie Nicks about heading back out on the road with bandmates Lindsey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood, and John McVie — and what she’s been up to since we last talked to her.

EW: You spent most of 2011 promoting and touring behind your most recent solo album, In Your Dreams. How different is that experience from touring with Fleetwood Mac?

Stevie Nicks: My solo career is more like an intimate gathering, an intimate beautiful party at your home, and Fleetwood Mac is like a big, huge Christmas ball at a big huge ballroom somewhere. Fleetwood Mac is just way bigger and way grander. And I think that’s one of the reasons why it’s always been so good for me to be able to go back and forth. Because what I do is very, very different than what Fleetwood Mac does and vice versa. So when I come out of one and go into the other, it’s very new for me.
And I always try to make sure, I put my foot down, on a three-year time allowance. I think that Fleetwood Mac should not go out any sooner than every three years. Because I think that we need to get out of the spotlight. And it’s the same with me. It’s like, I was out for the last two years, actually promoting a record. And then Fleetwood Mac really wanted to go out at the beginning of 2012 and I said ‘No, I’m not doing it. I will give you 2013. 2013 will then be the year of Fleetwood Mac.”

Three years is a great amount of time to be away. Because Fleetwood Mac is a big-ticket item, and if you just saw us last year, or a year and a half ago, we may not be the one when you choose when the five or six big bands come through your city. And it’s always really good to give people that rest from you. To let them get away from you and you from them. So when that tour starts up, everybody’s super excited. And you’re not gonna be near as super excited if you just saw us at the beginning of last year. I think that it’s really worth it to do that. I will always feel that way, so I have to take a little bit of flak for it.

After all these years and tumultuous relationships within the band, have you figured out how to get along with each other while you’re touring?

Well, in Fleetwood Mac there’s always gonna be drama [laughs]. You’re never gonna get away from that. And I think if we ever got away from that everybody would be very bored. The audiences would certainly be bored. So it’s never gonna happen. But what we have done is, I spent almost a week up at Lindsey [Buckingham]’s house two or three weeks ago. We were working on some music. But we spent probably 70% of the time just talking. And talking about all our old stories. And telling my assistant all the old stories, going all the way back to 1966, when I first met Lindsey. And she’s there, her eyes as big as saucers listening to all this.

It’s really good therapy for Lindsey and I too, you know, and we have stories for hundreds of years that we can tell you. It was great for us. It really reminds Lindsey and I of how far we’ve come and how hard we worked. And how lucky we are to be where we are today. And that Lindsey and I are always gonna be that dramatic couple on stage. Because we just are. It’s who we are.

We’re never gonna be, there’s that French word, laissez faire, we’re never gonna be that. We’re always gonna be tumultuous and we’re always gonna be crazy, and because there’s a part of Lindsey’s and my relationship that is so ultra-special from back in the day, that you can never, no matter how old we get, it’s never gonna go away. He’s married now, he has three beautiful children, and a really lovely wife. He lives in girl world! Between his wife and his two daughters, he and his son are like, they’re a minority. It’s like, these are beautiful little girls and they have little beautiful girlfriends that are all over at the house all the time. So he lives in a world full of women.

They probably don’t know him as a rock star, he’s just Dad.

Absolutely! They don’t know anything about all that. They are from a new generation. So they have softened him.

Do you find that with things like Rumours charting again after those songs were featured in a Glee episode last year, that much younger people are coming to the shows?

Absolutely. When you look out over our audience, you’d be very, very surprised to see how many younger people there are there. And I think that’s not just Glee. It’s mainly because their parents played Fleetwood Mac. And played Stevie Nicks. And those kids heard the music. And they caught onto it a long time ago. And so little kids that were listening to it that are now 25, they’re there.

And at first, when we first went back out in 1998, after not touring for almost 10 years, we thought, “Well really, the only people that are gonna come see us are gonna be people that are our age.” And that was really kinda true, for like the first half. And then, all of a sudden, there’s like tons of really young people, and I can remember Lindsey saying, “Oh my God, I thought that only people our age would come. And I said to him, “Lindsey, build a field and they will come. They are here. So lucky you, you’re not playing to an audience of totally older people. Half of this audience is not even 20!”

I know that you keep up with current pop music — you did the intro for that Katy Perry video last year, and dueted with Taylor Swift at the 2010 Grammys. What have you been listening to lately?

Honestly, I listen to so many people that I couldn’t even… My mind goes blank. I’m walking around singing “Call Me Maybe” all the time. And I can’t help it. It’s like a curse. And I love it. I totally love it. And I kinda like it when I’m singing it by myself and I love it when she’s singing it. I have it on my iPod. And it’s gonna go on my future treadmill tape that I’m getting ready to make.

I listen to Rihanna, I listen to Mary J. Blige — I kinda go toward R&B, and always have, strangely enough. And all my music tastes are about music I play before I get ready to go on stage for three hours, and music that I play when I’m walking on the treadmill and that I want to dance to. I love ballads, and I love the slow wonderful love songs, but they’re not the stuff I listen to that much, because I need energy, I don’t need to curl up in a ball and cry.

So I go more for the soul music, modern and un-modern, all the way back to the ‘50s. Because that’s when I first started singing. I started singing to Top 40 music when I was in the 4th grade, and that was all R&B. That was black girl groups, and the Ronettes, and the Righteous Brothers. That’s kinda where my heart went, strangely enough, since I had a grandfather who sang country music for real, as a job. And everybody in my family would go, “Who are you? Really, why do you like this R&B music when you have a total country background.” And I’m going, “I don’t know. But I do. And I wish you guys would all be quiet because I’m singing.” [Laughs]
What about this tour will be different than your last one?

You know, we always do probably 20-21 songs, and so there’s always those 10 songs that we have to do. Which are the hits. The audience came and bought their ticket to see those songs. But then we have the other 10-11 songs to play with. So what we do is we know the songs we have to do, so we put them all in one column. And then we put all the songs from all the different records, from you know, Fleetwood Mac, Rumours, Tusk, Mirage, Tango in the Night, Behind the Mask, all those, and then we start choosing, well what song have you always wanted to do, John? And Mick? Is there a song you have a soft spot for? So then we start making a list of slightly more unfamiliar Fleetwood Mac songs.

And then, once we’ve made that list, we start sitting around with acoustic instruments and we start playing them. And you never know what’s gonna stick. Because something you might have tried in 2009 or 2003 that didn’t work, and everybody said “No, that’s not gonna go.” And all of a sudden, when we go into rehearsal in February, might totally work. And I think that’s because, it’s just the time. There might be something going on in the world that might really speak to a song on Tusk that we’ve never done on stage before. And so that’s always a really super exciting part. Because we know what 10 songs are gonna be, but we don’t know what the other 12 are gonna be.

Do you feel stuff out on the road at all?

Not so much. If there’s a song where the first night we play we’re like, that didn’t work, we drop it immediately. It doesn’t even get another chance. Because it’s worked out and played beautifully the first night. So when we go up through our first show, we are, and I always say, as Michael Jackson said, in that last film of his rehearsals, when they ask if he’s ever nervous, and he said, ‘No, because if you know what you’re doing there’s no reason to be nervous.” And that’s really true.

So when we walk on that stage on that first night, we have played that show twice a day for six weeks. And we know it. And we are playing all those songs really beautifully. And we know all our parts. It just depends on, you can kind of feel what ticks the boxes of the audience and what doesn’t. There’s a song that we kinda feel was a little bit of a lull – it’s gone. It’s just gone. And then we have, we always have that extra five songs, that we know, and we know people love, and we can always pull a song back. So it’s very exciting.

I mean, because it is big, and because it is grand, it’s almost like it’s more dressy. It’s not casual. There’s nothing casual about it. It’s not casual Friday. It’s fancy Saturday. So you put on your black velvet and your high black velvet heels and you do your hair and you put on a lot of beautiful makeup and that’s Fleetwood Mac. Everybody knows they’re going to a big, dressy party.

Leah Greenblatt / Entertainment Weekly / December 03, 2012

December 3, 2012
Rumours Abounds

By Keith Caulfield
Billboard
Saturday, May 21, 2011

Right outside the top 10 on the Billboard 200 is Fleetwood Mac’s classic 1977 album Rumours. It re-enters at No. 11 with nearly 30,000 (up 1,951%) thanks to exposure from the May 3 episode of Fox TV’s “Glee,” which dedicated its entire hour to the album. Of the nearly 30,000 copies it sold last week, 91% were downloads. The week previous, the set sold nearly 1,000 copies.

Since the Billboard 200 began allowing catalog titles to chart in December 2009, this is the highest re-entry for a non-reissued album.

May 21, 2011
Classic Album Review: Fleetwood Mac Tango in the Night

The Classic Album Review is back after a two week hiatus. Maybe it was the trip across the pond that did it, and got me thinking of the best cross-Atlantic musical collaborations to date. Fleetwood Mac naturally came to mind first, and seeing as it’s suddenly become cool within the past few years to celebrate them (Radiohead and Deerhunter have openly professed their love), I figured it was their turn.

When people think of Fleetwood Mac, they undoubtedly think of Rumours, copious amounts of cocaine consumption, incestuous affairs where every band member sleeps with every band member, and Steve Nicks.

I’ll be the first to admit that Tango in the Night is not some kind of rarity, with critics dismissing it as the final demise of the band into a mushy-adult-contempo-soft-boiled-soft-rock -commercial-radio-mess. As the second bestselling FM album, a heavy rotation on CHFI to this day, and the last release from the legendary McVie-McVie-Buckingham-Nicks-Fleetwood line-up, there doesn’t seem to be anything remotely indie about it. But who cares? What it is, is a damned good recording with some of the best guitar, drum, and bass lines known to man. Besides, that’s not what this series is about anyway.

Here’s the long and short of it: Tango in the Night has some of the happiest songs that take me to the crux of musical glee. There’s something about upbeat Christine McVie songs that puts me into a temporary, lulled yet elated state of mind, and there’s no funk too deep that it won’t drag me out of.

In its heart of hearts, Tango in the Night is a Christine McVie and Lindsey Buckingham (who I still have a crush on, despite his increasing resemblance of a deep fried Dr. Emmett “Doc” Brown from Back to the Future) show. They both produce all of the best tracks (“Everywhere,” “Big Love”) on the album, along with some of its guiltiest rockin’ 80’s pleasures (“Isn’t It Midnight,” “You and I Part 2”).

Let’s go through a play-by-play:

Big Love – The original is still by far, my favorite Buckingham penned and voiced FM tune. It’s very synth, slick, and is simply an odd little ditty that works, even with the weird “uh-ah” wheezes that serve as some kind of back-up vocal substitute.

Seven Wonders – This is Stevie Nicks’s greatest contribution to Tango in the Night. I’m not sure if this is because this was the time period where she was addicted to tranquilizers that her doctor at the time had prescribed to help defeat her cocaine addiction, or if she was doing this as a favor in-between her solo career. Either way, it’s one of the few Stevie songs that’s not a downer, and though I love her more melancholy songs, I’m happy this one came along as it serves her nomadic spiritual crystal-collecting image well.

Everywhere – This might as well be the only song on the album, because it would single-handedly make Tango in the Night one of the best albums of the 80’s . I listen to this song an average of three times a day, everyday, and there’s nothing in my life that it can’t seem to solve. Last.fm indicates that I have listened to it around 200 times since January 15, 2010, and if you hear it for yourself, you may understand why. There’s something about it that is akin to magic…it’s got that fairy-dustsish feeling that pacifies me to the point of stupid grin for no apparent reason. Maybe because I would imagine this is what it feels like to be dumb and happy all the time must feel like (or young love, as this was co-written by McVie’s new and second husband, which must have been more than awkward for alcoholic ex-husband John).

Caroline – Kind of what Peter Gabriel was doing at the time with all of his tribal-beat-new-age-sex-sounding songs, only with an anthem-ish edge.

Tango in the Night – I can imagine how this might be the type of song I will be playing around the house a decade from now, much to my childrens’ mortification at their uncool mom. OK, so it’s got a bunch of terrible cliched 80’s mood guitars churning away unnecessarily to fill the oddly high number of dramatic pauses. But how can you resist that opera-like chorus, or that ridiculously over-the-top guitar solo towards the end??

Mystified – A surprising Buckingham/McVie collaboration that isn’t what you might expect from them. Slow, methodical, and longing. One of those long-forgotten adult-contemporary FM songs you dust off that makes you remember how good it was.

Little Lies – The other huge McVie standout that still reminds me of riding in the back of my parents’ car in the late 80’s / early 90’s, where I would always downplay my joy at hearing something my parents might have liked, too. I’m still riding in the back of their car, but no one plays this song nearly as often as they ought to.

Family Man – This one just puzzles me, as does its placement in their Greatest Hits collection. Well, maybe Buckingham just had a kid or something.

Welcome to the Room Sara – The first of Nicks’s two slow numbers, and neither of them are very memorable. Her voice is sounding increasingly goat-bleatish at this point.

Isn’t It Midnight – Completely shameless 80’s rock-out that I hate to admit I love in a nostalgic Ray Ban, caped neon cap kind of way.

When I See You Again – See above.

You and I Part 2 – A slightly higher class rendition of “Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time,” demonstrating Buckingham’s irrepressible ability to make even the tackiest beat sound catchy.

Now that I have the opportunity to, I want to talk a bit more about Christine McVie. Tango in the Night demonstrates that she had become a songwriting force and performer in her own right. I always felt she deserved more attention as an equal force to be reckoned with along with Nicks, but that she wasn’t really recognized publicly as one-half of the female talent of the band. Maybe that’s my false perception coming into play, but I thought her equally tawdry but comparatively unglamorous personal life contributed to some of her being downplayed in the group. Buckingham, too I felt carried much of the band in its heyday both as a songwriter, vocalist, and plucky guitarist. He added a distinctive flair to everything he wrote, usually with some sort of staccato accent.

Allison / Panic Manual / August 4, 2010

August 4, 2010