Friday, June 03, 2011

CONTEST: WIN STEVIE NICKS "IN YOUR DREAMS" - Durban South Africa East Coast Radio

WIN WIN WIN
ERC.co.za

We have five Stevie Nicks CDs to give away. Answer the question below and email buzz@ecr.co.za by Wednesday, June 8, with the answer and your contact details.
Q: Who co-produced In Your Dreams?
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Charis Apelgren - Many critics and fans are calling Stevie Nicks’ new album the best of her solo career.

No matter what she does, Stevie will never escape the large-looming legacy of her former band Fleetwood Mac, the monster collective that cranked out masterpieces like Rumours and Tusk.

In Your Dreams is an album about 'exorcising the demons of the past and moving forward toward the beauty lingering in our imaginations'.

In Your Dreams, is one of seven songs Stevie wrote with the Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart, who also co-produced the collection. The pair spent the past year recording the album at Stevie’s California home. Other collaborators include Mike Campbell of Tom Petty’s band The Heartbreakers, Stevie’s former bandmate Lindsey Buckingham, and Fleetwood Mac drummer Mick Fleetwood. Stevie refers to the making of In Your Dreams as the highlight of her entire career.

Thursday, June 02, 2011

Contest: Win Tickets to see Stevie Nicks in London at Hard Rock Calling June 26th!


See Bon Jovi, Stevie Nicks, Rod Stewart, & BNL in London!

Toronto, Canada radio station boom 97.3 is sending you to experience the Hard Rock Calling Festival, June 24 to 26 at Hyde Park in London, England! You & a guest will be rocking it out all weekend with Bon Jovi, Stevie Nicks, Rod Stewart, Barenaked Ladies, & more! Starting Monday, June 6 - every time you hear Bon Jovi on boom 97.3, be the 20th caller through at 416.870.0973 & you could be off to London for Hard Rock Calling! Grand prize draw will be in the 7am hour on Monday, June 13. Good luck!

Stevie Nicks In Your Dreams - Week 4 Official Billboard Numbers

Billboard published their latest charts today which will be reflected in the magazine dated June 11, 2011. Stevie's In Your Dreams lands at # 47 in it's 4th week on the Top 200 Album chart down from # 24 the previous week. On the Top 200 Current Albums Chart the album ends the week at # 46 down from # 23 last week. Sales this past week were 9,933 in the USA for a 4 week total of 97,379. On the Rock Album chart the album slips one place to # 10. In Australia In Your Dreams drops from # 51 to # 87.  In Canada the album slides from # 62 to # 100 this week.

# 47 - USA Billboard Top 200 Albums week ending 05/29/2011
# 46 - USA Billboard Top 200 Current Albums
# 10 - USA Billboard Top Rock Albums
# 87 - Australia - Top 100 Albums Chart 06/06/2011
# 100- Canada Top 100 Albums week ending 05/26/2011

Fleetwood Mac's Rumours in it's 4th week back on the Top 200 Albums chart in the USA sees the album drop from # 81 last week to # 120 this week. On the Top Catalogue Albums Chart the album drops from # 03 to # 15.

# 120- USA Billboard Top 200 Albums week ending 05/29/2011
# 15 - USA Billboard Top Catalogue Albums

I'll update as more info becomes available.

PHOTOS: Stevie Nicks Live at The Wiltern with Dave Stewart, Lindsey Buckingham + More



Photos and link provided by Kris Driggers... Thanks Kris!
Amazing vantage point at the show... 
See more of The Stevie Nicks Birthday Bash Live
from The Wiltern May 26th on Facebook

(Review) Stevie Nicks "In Your Dreams" ★★★★ Album Of The Week - New Zealand

I'm not sure what critics want from Stevie Nicks these days. Demned with faint praise with lines such as "archly conservative". "a pale Fleetwood Mac" and Tainted with the smear of lip-gloss California studio muses" are just some of the criticisms aimed at this disc. It's quite possible that these journalistic hacks forget the times that created the monster that became Fleetwood Mac, a group breaking apart from fragile on-road relationships, bitter artistic direction disputes and audience expectations. They also defined their - and the critics' - times and recorded Rumours, which is still on of the top 10 best selling albums of all time. Fleetwood Mac and Nicks are made from the same cloth and no amount of wishful thinking on behalf of the music made will change that, nor should it. Her solo career produced many great songs such as Stop Draggin My Heart Around, Stand Back and Nighbird, and because of that back catalogue I see this album slotting perfectly into her oeuvre.

As well as co-authoring nine of the tracks, the Eurythmics' Dave Stewart has produced this album and in doing so revealed a love of a time and sound now lost. OK, it harks back to the Byrds, Jackson Browne and The Eagles, but so what? Opening track Secret Love was actually written in 1976 about a former lover. Nicks has now conveniently forgotten his name and the theme is reflected in several other songs that dot the album: For What It's Worth, Wide Sargossa Sea, Everybody Loves You and You May Be The One all reflect fleeting romances that leave the listener with lessons learned from such a romance. One song New Orleans, shines through as a perfectly written ode to the Big Easy with a simple request that she wants to don beads, feathers and lace and sing again the French Quarter, a sentiment that reflects what America really wants from that city. Let's hear it for retro.

★★★★
Colin Morris
The Dominion Post - New Zealand

Stevie Nicks Making Up For Lost Time...

If she had her way, Stevie Nicks wouldn’t have let a decade go by between solo albums.

‘In Your Dreams’ was released last month, her first solo album in 10 years

The singer and songwriter, best known for her work with Fleetwood Mac, released In Your Dreams in May, 10 years after her last solo album, Trouble in Shangri-La. She was certainly busy in between, most notably with a new album and several tours with Fleetwood Mac, but Nicks feels that she easily could have made some new music several years ago.

“When I came off the road with Fleetwood Mac in 2005,” she says, speaking by telephone from her Los Angeles home, “I was definitely ready to do a record. But the powers that be, the people that surrounded me, pretty much said, ‘Don’t bother. It’s not a good time. The music business is in a terrible place. There’s no money, and the Internet piracy is taking over. Everybody’s just stealing records and music.’

“I didn’t know what to say,” the 63-year-old admits, “because I’m not a computer person and I don’t have a computer and I don’t Facebook or Spaceface or Myplace or whatever. I don’t do all that. So I just kind of said, ‘OK.’

“If I hadn’t have been so exhausted from 135 shows, I might have fought back on that a little, but I just said, ‘OK.”’

During the interim Nicks reconnected with former Eurythmics member Dave Stewart, a hit-making producer whom she’d met in 1985, when they worked on Don’t Come Around Here No More, a song that Nicks never completed but which became a hit for Tom Petty. In 2006 Nicks was a guest on the pilot for Stewart’s HBO show Off the Record, and in January 2009, when she started planning In Your Dreams, Stewart was the first potential collaborator who came to mind.

“I called and asked him if he’d be interested in working with me on some songs,” Nicks recalls, “and he said, ‘I have a song for you already. I’m going to send it to you, and I’d like if you would write the verses.”‘

The song was called Everybody Loves You, and it set many wheels turning.

I told him, I'm going to send you a binder that has 40 type-written pages init, 40 poems, and hopefully maybe you'll read it," Nicks says. "He actually did read it, so, when he came up to my house to listen to Everybody Loves You, he pulled out one of the poems and said, 'I like this one very much. Let's work on this poem.' And we stared writing a song."

Nicks has written a great many songs since 1974, when she and then-boyfriend Lindsey Buckingham joined Fleetwood Mac and immediately turned the British blues-rock group into a multiplatinum pop super-act, with Nicks in a lead role thanks to her ethereal charisma and songs such as Rihannon (1976), Dreams (1977), Sara (1979) and Gypsy (1982).

Starting with the chart-topping, quadruple-platinum Bella Donna (1981), Nicks also has notched five platinum-or-better albums on her own, along with 10 Top 40 hits. Between her and the band, Nicks has sold more than 140 million albums worldwide and netted 13 Grammy Award nominations, as well as a 1998 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The silver lining has had some clouds, however: After a stormy breakup with Buckingham, one of the inspirations for Fleetwood Mac’s Grammy-winning album Rumours (1977), Nicks’ romantic life has included high-profile hookups with bandmate Mick Fleetwood and with the Eagles’ Don Henley, as well as a brief marriage to Kim Anderson, the widower of a friend of Nicks’ who had died in the early 1980s. A heavy cocaine addiction took her to the Betty Ford Center in 1987, but was succeeded by an equally debilitating dependency on the tranquilizer Klonopin, which she kicked after a 47-day detox and subsequent rehabilitation eight years later.

“I’ve been through a great deal of hard stuff,” Nicks admits. “A lot of it I did to myself. I lost a lot of time, but I don’t wallow in it or beat myself up. I just accept what happened, am happy I got through it still alive and hope I learned something along the way.”

In Your Dreams first took shape in December 2009, when Fleetwood Mac was on tour in Australia. Staying in a Melbourne hotel that also housed a movie theatre, Nicks checked out a showing of The Twilight Saga: New Moon and was “quite taken with the movie” – so much so that she immediately saw it a second time. Returning to her room, she wrote a five-page essay inspired by the film’s star-crossed lovers, her own relationship with Buckingham “and all the fairy tales that live in my head from my childhood.”

After completing the essay, Nicks “started to pull some poetry out of it,” then combined that with elements of a never-finished 1970s song called Lady from the Mountains.

“So this ancient song became a song written somewhere between 1976 and 2010,” Nicks says, “and when I finished it in Brisbane, which was the next city we went to that had a piano, I got up from the piano and said to my assistant, ‘I’m ready to do a record now.”‘

With Stewart involved, it was clear that In Your Dreams would be more collaborative than any solo work Nicks had done before. The pair ended up co-writing seven of the album’s 10 songs.

“The second thing we did ended up being the song You May Be the One,” Nicks says, “and my eyes instantly opened and I understood why Paul McCartney and John Lennon wrote together – because they each had something the other didn’t have. And with Dave and me, he had thousands of chords and this amazing musical knowledge, and I know six chords but had thousands of pages of poetry. So it was this amazing song that I could never have written by myself and he could never have written by himself either.

"It was like an amazing little meeting of the minds, and I immediately went, 'Well, this is just great,' and we wnet on from there."

Eventually Stewart's Grammy-winning production partner Glen Ballard was brought in to help, along with long-time Nicks guitarist Waddy Wachtell and back-up singers Sharon Celani and Lori Nicks, the singer's sister-in-law, the three who, Nicks says, "are truly the backbone of the Stevie Nicks sound." "It was the best year of my life," she says, "and that's really the best thing I can say to you. Dave Stewart made the best year of Stevie Nicks' life happen."

Like Nicks and Buckingham, Stewart started Eurythmics with Annie Lennox, his then-girlfriend, but the two continued the group after they broke up and found a way to overcome any hard feelings.

"I don't think it was conscious at all, "Nicks says, "but tere'ss really only a few duos, so I think it was a great conetion, because my experience with Lindsey and his experience with Annie definitelly made us two people who would understand ech other better. So in Everybody Loves You, when we write, 'You're so along / no one really knows you / I'm the only one,' that's how people in duos feel, expecially after they're famous.

"So, whether he wrote that about me or he worte that about him or I wrote that about Lindsey... duos really fee like the other one is the only person who will ever really know you."

Nicks tapped Buckingham to help with one of the songs on In Your Dreams: Soldiers Angel, which was inspired by her periodic visits to wounded US military personnel at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington. She started with a poem and then "an insanely emotional demo," but then couldn't figure out where to go from there. At wit's end, she called Buckingham, who has remained a friend and confidante decades after their break-up.

Times of Oman
June 2, 2011