STEVIE NICKS INTERVIEW: ATLANTIC CITY WEEKLY

Stevie Nicks Finds New Inspiration, Talks About New Album
Rock Icon Stevie Nicks takes a break from recording her new album with Dave Stewart to play the Taj Mahal Aug. 27.
Atlantic City Weekly
by: Michael Pritchard

The last time Stevie Nicks played Atlantic City, in June 2009, she played Boardwalk Hall, the city’s big room, surrounded by a few band mates you may have heard of — Lindsay Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood, you know, Fleetwood Mac.

But Friday, Aug. 27, Nicks switches to her other side, as a solo artist, when she plays the Trump Taj Mahal.

And in either incarnation, whether she’s Mac’s “Gold Dust Woman” or her own “White Winged Dove,” Nicks is an icon in both settings. And she’s comfortable in both, she says in a telephone interview with Atlantic City Weekly from her Los Angeles home.

“You know, the two are very different,” she says. “There’s something to be said for the great huge hall and [playing for] 18,000 people in New Zealand. But then there’s the small venues that are much more intimate. And you can’t be that in the huge venues. You’re very far from the people.

“But when you’re in a small venue, it’s like way back in the beginning when you were playing clubs, even though it’s way bigger than a club [the Taj Mahal’s Etess Arena can seat 5,000], there’s still a little of that vibe. But there’s a lot to be said about both and I’m one of those very lucky people who gets to play both.”

And at 62, she’s also lucky enough to pick and choose her spots. Nicks isn’t currently on tour. In fact, she’s in the middle of writing and recording a new album (her seventh) with Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics, a project she speaks about with excitement and a little bit of wonder.

Yet, this month, she’s taking a break from the album and doing a brief five-concert tour.

“About two and a half months ago, my manager called and said, ‘I know you’re doing a record, but how would you like to do five shows in August?’ And I said basically, ‘You know I’m doing a record.’ And he said, ‘I know, but it’s good to work and in this economy ... maybe it would be a good idea for you to do this. Because if you do, it will be like you worked this year. And that’s always a good thing.’

“So I said basically, ‘You’re telling me that that’s what you want me to do?’” she says. “He said, ‘I think you should do it’ so I said, ‘OK, cool. We’ll break for the month of August.’”

Continue to the full article

STEVIE NICKS CARES MORE FOR THE JOURNEY OF MAKING NEW ALBUM THEN SALES

Source: Projo.com
By Rick Massimo
Journal Pop Music Writer

Stevie Nicks hasn’t come out with a new studio record since 2001’s “Trouble in Shangri-La,” and she says that around 2005 she decided she wasn’t going to bother — people would simply take it off the Internet anyway. But last year’s 83-show Fleetwood Mac tour convinced her that the fans were out there, and Nicks has been readying a new disc that she hopes will come out in March.

For the first time, Nicks is collaborating with another songwriter, Dave Stewart, formerly of Eurythmics. Nicks calls him “my new best friend. He’s all four Beatles rolled into one.”

Their method of working together was natural and organic, Nicks says. They set up a studio in her living room, and a couple of weeks before they got together, Nicks sent him a book’s worth of poetry culled from her journals, “never in a million years thinking he would read it. But he did read it, so he hands me a poem and says [thick English accent] ‘OK, what about this poem?’ And first, I’m like, ‘Wow, he read it,’ and second of all, I’m like, ‘OK, they’re all my poems, so I like this one.’ So he starts playing guitar, and … I just started reciting in a sing-songy way, right off the top of my head. And in about 10 minutes, we had written a really great song.”

They’ve written nine songs together, “and seriously it’s been the most fun I’ve had since I was a teenager. It’s been an eye-opening experience. We sit, we laugh, we make dinners. It’s like the way we used to make records in the old days. It’s not like making an album with GarageBand in your closet.”

She’s also written five more typical “suffering Stevie songs … just me, sitting at my piano with tears in my eyes,” and says that working with Stewart, and her occasional long-distance collaboration with Tom Petty guitarist Mike Campbell, “opens up a whole new world of chords. I know four chords. And [they] know thousands. [I] can go places in your melody that I couldn’t go if I was playing the piano, because I can’t. I don’t know how.”

Nicks says that they’re shooting to get the record out March 1, and her fans are going to have to wait until then to be knocked out, because she isn’t going to do any of the new songs on the road. “We don’t want them to be filmed and on YouTube the next day. We want people to be surprised, and be listening to whole songs. I’m a girl who is all about mystery and surprise. I always want to keep my little jewel mysterious until I decide to flip the fairy dust in the air.…

“I think [my fans] are going to be knocked out.”

And even though live video grabs or even leaked studio tracks have been known to help a disc’s sales, Nicks says that’s not what she’s after: “I don’t really care if anybody buys this record. What I care about is the journey of making the record, and how much fun it has been for me.”

Though she hopes that after the disc comes out, people will buy it the old-fashioned way. “I’m pretty financially stable, so I’m gonna be OK. But what I try to put over to my fans is, try to support the music business, because it’s dying. Anybody who comes out with a new record, I can get it free from the record companies. But I don’t. I buy it, and every little thing that goes with it. Because I’m going to be that one person who does support the business.” Otherwise, “in 20 years, everybody’s going to be listening to — guess who? — Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones. There’s never going to be new music. It’s not going to last.”

Plenty of today’s young female singers and songwriters have cited Nicks as a musical and career influence, and Nicks says it’s a role she’s taken seriously ever since her first solo album, 1981’s “Bella Donna.”

“Absolutely,” says Nicks, who adds that she would have been a teacher if a musical career hadn’t worked out. “I try really hard to teach all these girls, or at least set an example for them.” She wants them to have their own style, but “watch what I’ve done, or how I’ve done it, and use that in their world of striving forward to be a big rock star.”

Mainly, she stresses the importance of writing one’s own material. You make more money that way, and otherwise “you’ll just be known as a singer of other people’s songs. And in my opinion, you should do it all. … So I have my little lecture periods with all of them.”

While we wait for the new disc, she’ll be performing Fleetwood Mac and solo hits. The first of the five shows Nicks is doing this month was a benefit for Cecelia, “a little girl with a difficult kind of cancer,” and she also made a special “Team Cecelia” T-shirt from one of her old drawings, which will be available at this weekend’s show.

And Nicks says she still gets the same charge out of performing that she always has.

“How can you not? … It never gets old.”

Stevie Nicks sings at the MGM Grand at Foxwoods on Saturday night at 8. Call (866) 646-0609 or go to www.mgmatfoxwoods.com for tickets.

STEVIE NICKS WANTS HER FANS TO BE HONORABLE

Stevie Nicks brings summer tour to MGM Grand
Source: Newstimes
Sean Spillane, Staff Writer

After coming off the road following a 2005 tour with Fleetwood Mac, Stevie Nicks planned to get back to the studio to record a new solo album. She was talked out of it by her manager, of all people.

There's no point, she was basically told. After all of her time and expense, Nicks' new creation would just end up available on some nefarious website for free download. That's just the way of the world now in the music business.

"That's why I didn't do another record," Nicks said in a recent phone interview from her Los Angeles home. "I was going to do another record, but my manager basically said not to bother because 150 of your closest fans will buy it and then in the dark of the night they'll just push `send' and send it out to everyone they know.

"I was horrified."

It was following Fleetwood Mac's most recent tour, which ended in December, that Nicks decided to throw caution to the wind and get started on a new album.

"One day I woke up and I just said, `I'm making another record and I don't care if anybody buys it,'" she recalled. "That's OK because at least I'll have done it. At least I made the effort.

"I'm going to hope that my fans are honorable and that they don't -- in the dead of night when nobody can see them -- send out my record to 500 of their friends. That's not because I need the money. It's because I need to know that my fans are honorable."

Nicks' justifiable fear extends to her brief summer tour, which comes to the MGM Grand at Foxwoods Saturday night. She will stick to her solo hits and Fleetwood Mac favorites and is not showcasing any of the new tunes.

"No, because we don't want my brand-new song filmed and put on YouTube the next morning," she said. "Nobody is going to hear one note of this record until it is released. And then it can go everywhere, but at least it was new for one day.

"All you can do is laugh," she added, "but for five years, I cried about this."

In making the new record, Nicks enlisted Dave Stewart of Eurythmics fame to produce and she called the sessions "the best time I've had ever."

She also ended up writing songs with Stewart, something she said she never did with Fleetwood Mac's other main songwriters, Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie.

"It has just been an eye-opener for me," she said. "I've been very selfish about writing with anybody else and I never have -- I didn't write with Lindsey; I didn't write with Christine; I didn't write with anybody.

"I understood, all of a sudden, why people like Paul McCartney and John Lennon and Rodgers and Hammerstein and all of the great songwriting teams wrote together. They still wrote alone, but why they wrote together, also. It opens up something that you don't have, which in my case it's that I don't know thousands of chords.

"I only know four chords, and so writing with Dave opened up a whole side of music that I've never had at my fingertips before. These nine songs that we wrote, actually, are somewhat more musical because they have more in them. It's just been a lot of fun."

Nicks was thrilled when Stewart suggested that they just put her completed poems to music, as she was used to combining verses from several of her poems and creating lyrics in that manner.

"More of my words actually got into these songs because he'd say, `Well, I like this poem and I don't really want to take two verses out. Let's just do it. Let's just put all the verses in,'" Nicks, 62, said. "Of course, I'm just like, `Right on,' because my whole story is going into my song.

"He just starts playing ... and I just basically start reciting, in song, from my poetry page and in about five minutes we had written a really beautiful song and my life was forever changed.

"I think that the product that we've come up with is really spectacular. I could be wrong, but I don't think so. I think it's really, really great. I think people are going to love it."

One of the songs on the new album, which Nicks has targeted for a March 1 release, is especially dear to the singer, "Soldier's Angel." The song came about after Nicks' first trip to visit wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., and at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland.

"I wrote a poem called `Soldier's Angel' in 2005 and it is very much for them," she said. "I was going to make it into a song, but I never did. Well, I finally did it and it's pretty chilling, actually. It's about visiting the soldiers and seeing everything that goes on there -- the good, the bad and the ugly.

"I'm pretty proud of it and I hope the soldiers are proud of it, too, because it's theirs."

MGM Grand at Foxwoods is at 240 MGM Grand Drive, Mashantucket. Saturday, 8 p.m. $85-$135. 866-646-0609, www.mgmatfoxwoods.com.

@PEREZHILTON POSTS ABOUT NEW STEVIE NICKS ALBUM

LINK

TWO FLEETWOOD MAC DOCUMENTARIES AIR THIS WKND IN THE UK

If you missed its first string of broadcast dates back when it first aired in the UK and Ireland last November, 2009 - nows your chance to watch record it.  Or you can watch the documentary here (7 parts)

Date: August 27, 2010
Time: 23:30 (11:30pm)
Duration: 60 minutes
Channel: BBC Four

Also in the UK on BIO UK another documentary will air. [description]: Fleetwood Mac were a band born out of the English blues movement pioneered by John Mayall in the mid-Sixties. This is the story of the rise of the successful soft rock group.

Date: August 28, 2010
Time: 22:00 (10pm)
Duration: 60 minutes
Channel: BIO UK

STEVIE NICKS IS SHOOTING FOR A MARCH RELEASE

Stevie Nicks feels excited about collaboration with Dave Stewart
Syracuse.com
by: Mark Bialczak/The Post Standard

The call rings at precisely the appointed time the evening of Friday the 13th.

“It’s Stevie Nicks,” says the oh-so-recognizable rock voice, full of energy and a fair amount of good cheer.

Wait a sec. Isn’t she a bit hesitant about baring her soul on this day of supreme superstition?

Not a bit.

“I didn’t even know it was Friday the 13th. Anyway, it’s a good day for me, you know,” says the woman who’s long had mystical elements tied to her persona since her whirling, twirling days on stage with Fleetwood Mac and thereafter.

Great grist for the mill.

Headline over an Associated Press story from 1998: “Stevie Nicks Denies Witch Rumor.” In the article, Nicks says, “I can’t believe people are still telling me I’m a witch because I wear black.”

Now, in summer 2010, as Nicks is in the midst of a short tour that includes a Wednesday night stop at the Turning Stone Resort and Casino Event Center in Verona, N.Y., Nicks is in a good mood about a lot of things.

As the 62-year-old singer and songwriter continues, you get the feeling that Nicks’ life is full of a lot of good days.

She’s positively effusive about the aura surrounding her collaboration with Dave Stewart for Nicks’ upcoming solo album, her first since 2001.

“It’s the best time I’ve had since my teens. I was going to say my 20s, but that wasn’t all that much fun. So, since high school,” Nicks says of her work with Stewart. Stewart previously teamed with Annie Lennox in Eurythmics, the British band that landed the song “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This” at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1983.

Nicks teamed with Stewart after he grabbed his guitar, walked into her living room and simply rocked her world.

Before that magical day, Nicks’ co-writing process centered around guitarist Michael Campbell sending her tracks of his lines.

“This is the first time I have ever written in the same room as somebody,” she says.

To prepare for the collaboration, Nicks sent Stewart a collection of 50 poems she’s written. “I didn’t expect him to read it, really, but he did,” she says. “He handed me a poem and said, ‘Let’s start with this one. I love it.’

“He plays guitar and gives me this no-frills English works and says, ‘Go.’ Within 10 minutes we had finished the song,” Nicks says.

“Suddenly a light bulb came on and I found out why great songwriting teams worked between people who could write great songs on their own,” she says. “Lennon and McCartney. Rogers and Hammerstein.”

Their two greatest individual attributes fit together like the last two pieces to a puzzle, Nicks explains.

“He doesn’t write long story poems. I have that to give him,” Nicks says. “I don’t have a million chords. He has that to give me. I thought, I could get at a piano for a thousand years and never write a chord structure like that. The two of us are able to give each other a whole other world.”

The album, produced by Stewart, will contain nine songs they co-wrote and five Nicks wrote alone.

It’s almost done, Nicks says, and they’re shooting for a March release, even though it could be ready months before that.

“We don’t want to be declared a Christmas album with a release around the holidays,” she says. “March is a good time to drop the record and be out on the road.”

She’s not playing any of them in concert now, leaving this tour to her huge hits — solo, such as “Stand Back” and “If Anyone Falls” and with Fleetwood Mac, such as “Rhiannon (Will You Ever Win)” and “Landslide.”

If she played one of the new ones live, she says, a video would be on YouTube minutes later. “I don’t want these songs to be leaked out,” Nicks says. “I want the big reveal to be the record.”

She’ll talk about the songs with enthusiasm, though.

She calls “Italian Summer,” inspired by a trip to Ravello, Italy, “the sweetest love song I’ve ever written. And I didn’t write it about anybody. It’s about being in Italy,” Nicks says.

And she’s proud of “The Soldier’s Angel,” which she’d been promising herself to write since first visiting the soldiers hospital in Bethesda, Md., five years ago.

For that one, she and Stewart stuck with a demo she recorded herself.

“I decided there’s no way to beat the demo I recorded myself at home late at night,” Nicks says. “It’s brutal and honest, for the kids that are injured.”

Nicks and Stewart thoroughly enjoyed their sessions, she says. "We had similar relationships in our pasts,” Nicks says. “Stevie and (Fleetwood Mac guitarist) Lindsey (Buckingham). He and Annie. We have that in common.”

THE DETAILS

What: Stevie Nicks in concert.

When: 8 p.m. Wednesday.

Where: Turning Stone Resort and Casino Event Center, Verona.

Tickets: $80, available at the Event Center

box office, Ticketmaster outlets, www.ticketmaster.com and 877-833-7469.

UK CHART UPDATE: FLEETWOOD MAC MOVIN' ON UP

For the week of August 28, 2010 on the official UK Albums Chart Fleetwood Mac's 2009 double disc release moves up from #93 to #84 in it's 223rd week on the chart (223 weeks combines the 2002 & 2009 release).

STEVIE NICKS RE-ENTERS AUSTRALIAN ALBUM CHART THIS WEEK

AUSTRALIA'S TOP 50 CATALOGUE CHART: WEEK OF AUGUST 23, 2010
"Crystal Visions The Very Best Of Stevie Nicks" re-enters Australia's Top 50 Catalogue Chart this week at #37 after being absent last week.

STEVIE NICKS: "CURRENT PASSION REMAINS NEW CD" EVENTUAL MAC CD AND TOUR ON HORIZON

Fleetwood Mac star Stevie Nicks finds her groove collaborating with Dave Stewart for 7th solo album

Stevie Nicks has gotten her groove back.

NY Daily News

by: Phil Roura

Nine years after her last solo CD, the Fleetwood Mac superstar is deep into her seventh album - which for the first time she is writing with a collaborator, one-time Eurythmic Dave Stewart. Rumors of a romantic liaison notwithstanding, Nicks says it's the best time she has ever had putting out a CD.

"I've never before written anything with anybody else," says the smoky-voiced rock icon. "This is a great opportunity to do something new. I now understand why John Lennon and Paul McCartney worked so well together. You feed so much off each other."

As a result, Nicks has not ventured far from her California cocoon where she and Stewart have been working. The only concession: a short series of summer concerts that includes the Trump Taj Mahal on Friday night and Foxwoods' MGM Grand on Saturday.

"My management pushed me," she explains. "They said I had to take a month away from the record, and I'm glad I listened to them. It's been a good change of pace and a lot of fun."

The untitled CD is "a full-blown rock 'n' roll album with some beautiful ballads. And it's been fantastic and funky working at home."

It wasn't something she had planned. "My last performance was Dec. 21 in New Zealand after 83 shows with Fleetwood Mac," she says. "Coming straight home, the farthest thing from my mind was going straight to work."

Then along came Stewart, whom she had known in other circumstances. "I gave him a book of 50 poems I had written over the years," she recalls, "and he really liked them."

The day after the Grammys in February, they went to work. "I sat on a couch across from Dave. He'd play something on the piano. I'd throw out some lyrics."

Somehow, they got to talking about the Sargasso, a sea within a sea off Bermuda, from a movie she had seen. "He became intrigued with it," she adds. "I started developing lyrics off the top of my head - and a crazy, creepy, weird story began to take form. Dave liked it. In 10 minutes we had a song."

Word is that the CD will drop in the spring and that contributors include Mike Campbell of the Heartbreakers, Waddy Wachtel, Steve Ferrone and Mick Fleetwood on a drum solo.

It was on May 26, 1948, that Stephanie Lynn Nicks warbled her first note when she was born in Phoenix to Jess Nicks, a corporate veep, and Barbara Nicks, a housewife. As a toddler, she had trouble pronouncing her name, which came out "tee dee" and eventually "Stevie." It stuck.

Her great initial success was with lover Lindsey Buckingham. In 1974, they joined Fleetwood Mac and by 1977 the "Rumours" album had churned out four top 10 singles - including Nicks' megahit "Dreams," the group's only U.S. No. 1. By 1981, she began a solo career with the album "Bella Donna," but she continued to record and tour with Fleetwood Mac; the band's latest studio album is 2003's "Say You Will," for which Nicks wrote the title track.

Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with Fleetwood Mac in 1998, the now 62-year-old rocker worries about the future of the industry she loves.

"The Internet has destroyed rock. Children no longer develop social graces. They don't hang out anymore," she complains. "I'm financially stable. I'm okay. But what about the kids trying to make it in this business? If you're not an established band, if you don't have a hit single, they're gonna drop you. There are a lot of people out there as talented as we were, but they can't sustain being in a rock 'n' roll band for long without success. We were able to, but we're going to die out."

Still, her current passion remains the new CD. "Eventually, there will be another Fleetwood Mac record and another tour," says Nicks. "But this record is my moment. All next year, it's going to be this. This is now my turn." It's her groove.

JANET ROBINS AMAZING ADVENTURE... INCLUDES A STINT WITH LINDSEY BUCKINGHAM

From Randy Rhodes To Precious Metal, from Lindsey Buckingham to her own solo career, the ongoing tale of guitarist / singer / songwriter Janet Robin is a fascinating journey.

It’s the tale of how a young girl barely into grade school fell in love with the guitar as she took lessons from an axe-slinger about to make his own mark upon the rock world. It’s a story where the daughter of a Southern California dentist grows up to join the 1980s all-girl band Precious Metal, plays in Lindsey Buckingham’s first solo group and further evolves into the performer she is today.


Full Article on Pollstar

Here's the section that includes Lindsey Buckingham:

A musician’s life is filled with unexpected breaks and this time opportunity came a knockin’ in the form of Lindsey Buckingham.

“He was putting together his first-ever solo band for a record,” Robin said. “A very special ten-piece band that was going to incorporate five guitar players, two percussionists, a drummer, bass player and keyboards.”

The audition took half the day in a studio where the two guitarists spent most of the time talking, as Buckingham instructed her to play specific guitar parts. Five hours later, the audition concluded, Robin went home to wait. And wait.

“I didn’t hear for two weeks until the agent called and said, ‘You got the gig. You’re going on Leno in a week.’”

As it turned out, Robin wasn’t the only woman in the band and she joined a lineup that also included Liza Carbe. First came rehearsals, then “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno,” followed by a six-week tour. Robin remembers her time with Buckingham as her “most professional gig.”

“It was semi-pro with Precious Metal. We had some tour buses and we played some good venues,” Robin said, comparing the two experiences. “But it stepped up a notch with Lindsey. That was the 1992 ‘Out Of The Cradle’ tour.”

Robin’s gig with Buckingham lasted until 1994 with the band touring as a headliner as well as supporting Tina Turner. Six years later, Robin recalls the experience as one of the most important times in her career, saying Buckingham demanded nothing less than perfection.

To accomplish this, Buckingham would record rehearsals on individual tracks and then meet with each musician and critiquing his or her work. The message was clear: get it right or get out.

“So you got your shit together,” Robin said. “He motivated me to rise to the occasion, whatever it meant. Like going to vocal lessons or deal with the metronome. I did all that and worked with the other guys in the band and we kind of came together.

“I learned what it takes to be close to perfect, what you do in rehearsals, what you expect from a band, how you put a band together and how to put a show together. I cannot thank him enough. He mentored me and he was very respectful to me. We still stay in touch.”

Here's Janet as part of Lindsey's guitar army - just to Lindsey's left.

Don't Look Down Live 1992
(from Out of The Cradle)

TAKING DAWN cover FLEETWOOD MAC... YES? NO? YOU DECIDE

TAKING DAWN cover FLEETWOOD MAC's classic "The Chain"

Not bad... The musics not to my taste, but I can appreciate a good cover...

Stevie could take some tips from the guys near the end of the song where they're 

all thrashing their hair around... Could be interesting ;)

(PHOTOS) STEVIE NICKS LIVE IN SANTA BARBARA - AUGUST 4, 2010 - NICE IMAGES!!

Stevie Nicks w/ Mia Dyson

Santa Barbara, CA - August 4, 2010

Photos by: Larry Miller

Gallery

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