"This song is a prayer for people to unite" - Stevie Nicks

On edge of 72, Stevie Nicks just wants to sing a song live

By MESFIN FEKADU - Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — It’s Saturday at 9:30 p.m. and Stevie Nicks is singing on the phone.

The rock icon is at her Los Angeles home, where she’s been cooped up since December after wrapping the “An Evening with Fleetwood Mac” tour. She arrived there at first to relax after spending a year on the road and to celebrate the holidays. But then the coronavirus pandemic hit.

Stuck at the house is both good and bad for Nicks. The good news? Her house is a creative oasis where all her favorite musical instruments live. It’s where she spent a year recording her 2011 album “In Your Dreams” with Dave Stewart and Glen Ballard.

Her current 10-month stint — and counting — at home even fueled her to record the new single “Show Them the Way,” out on Friday.

“It’s beautiful,” she says after singing the song’s chorus at the end of a 90-minute-plus interview, where Nicks excitedly discussed everything from her admiration for late icons and pals Tom Petty and Prince to her relationships with Harry Styles and Beyoncé.

The bad news? Nicks is 72 and doesn’t want to be homebound when she prefers to be singing live on the road.

“This pandemic is more than just a pandemic for me. This is stealing what I consider to be my last youthful years,” Nicks told The Associated Press. “I don’t have just 10 years to hang around and wait for this thing to go away. I have places to go, people to sing for, another album to make. With every day that goes by, it’s like taking this time away from me. That I think is the hardest thing for me.”

“I have a lot of friends that are 60 and they’re going, ‘Oh I’m so old, I’m 60.’ I’m like, ‘You know what, the violins of the world are playing for you. You’re going to really appreciate 60 when you turn 72,’” she continued. “I don’t feel like the whole world is really getting behind getting this to go away. I feel like people are just thinking it really is just magically going away. All it takes is a few people that don’t wear a mask to spread. Just let one person catch it from you and there it goes — it’s like the never-ending story. That worries me because I’m going, ’Will it really be gone by the end of 2021?

“Will it be safe next year for us to walk into Madison Square Garden?’ I don’t know that it will,” she said.

Nicks is hoping to satisfy fans she would typically see in-person on tour with the new concert film “Stevie Nicks 24 Karat Gold The Concert.” It was recorded over two nights during her 2016-17 “24 Karat Gold” tour and will be available at select theaters and drive-ins on Oct. 21 and 25. A CD and digital album of the concert will be released Oct. 30.

“As we started to understand that this COVID thing was not a joke, I started going to myself, ‘Well, you know what? This may be the closest to going to a big, big concert that’s actually not from 1977 that is new,’” Nicks said. “It’s brand new and it’s fantastic.”

The only time she left her West Coast home was to edit the film in Chicago. She took a private jet to the home on a golf course that had been vacant for some time, spending a month there and editing down hours of footage to create the 140-minute film.

“They can’t do it without me. I won’t allow it,” Nicks said. “We got it all done. It was really fun. We were really safe.”

But at the end of the trip, Nicks tripped in the snow and fractured her knee: “I was like screaming as I went through the air and saw the gravel driveway coming toward my face and just made a quick turn. So, I didn’t fall face down and caught myself. Because of my strong, tambourine arms, I was able to stop myself from crashing even worse. It was a really bad fall, but it’s OK.

“It’s had a hard time getting better,” she continued. “I hurt this knee really bad, my left knee, before, years ago. I had been dealing with it and fixed it. ...I had just really gotten it to be to the place where it was totally better, then I fractured it. So now it’s almost better,” she said.

Apart from producing her concert film and recording “Show Them the Way,” Nicks has been busy in the home where she’s been creative in the past: “Another famous rock ‘n’ roll star, who will not be mentioned, sent me a song that he wants me to sing on,” she revealed.

Though “Show Them the Way” arrives Friday, Nicks said the song came to her in a dream in 2008 when Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were competing for the Democratic Party nomination for president. In the dream Nicks is performing at a political benefit where attendees include Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., John Lennon, John Lewis, John F. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy.

Dave Grohl plays drums on the new song, which was produced by Greg Kurstin (Sia, Adele, Beck). Cameron Crowe is directing the music video.

“This song really is a prayer. This song is a prayer for people to unite. A prayer for people to get together,” Nicks said.

“I didn’t really realize that until just the last few days. The chorus was written a week or so later,” she continued.

“The chorus, and I can sing it for you, it goes, ‘Please God show them the way/Please God on this day/Spirits all give us strength/Peace will come if you really want it/I think we’re just in time to save it/Please God, oh please God, show them the way.’”

NEW INTERVIEW Stevie Nicks Single “Show Them the Way” Due out Oct 9th

The moonlight confessions of Stevie Nicks

By AMY KAUFMAN - LA Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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