Stevie Nicks: The Fleetwood Mac veteran and solo star picks the music that has inspired her through her 40-year career

Stevie Nicks: Soundtrack of my life 
The Fleetwood Mac veteran and solo star picks the music that has inspired her through her 40-year career

Interview by Gareth Grundy
The Observer,
Sunday 26 June 2011

From Florence Welch to Courtney Love, Sheryl Crow to Taylor Swift, there are plenty of artists who owe a debt to Stevie Nicks (63). She began as half of Buckingham Nicks, in partnership with then boyfriend Lindsey Buckingham. They remained artistically though not romantically entwined, joining Fleetwood Mac and helping the group become synonymous with 70s rock. Last month Nicks released her first solo album in a decade, In Your Dreams. The track "Soldier's Angel" offers a clue to how she's spent her time in the interim. It was inspired by regular hospital visits to wounded American veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq, something she's done since 2004, along with raising funds for their rehabilitation. "There's no politics involved," she says. "I'm just visiting kids. I take them presents of iPods loaded up with songs, which breaks the ice. Most of them don't even know who I am, although they do by the time they leave and I've sat and held their hand. I'll keep doing it as long as there is a need."

STARTING OUT IN ROCK'N'ROLL

'Rock & Roll Woman', Buffalo Springfield (1967)

Hearing this for the first time was like seeing the future. [Sings] "And she's coming, singing soft and low…" When I heard the lyrics, I thought: that's me! They probably wrote it about Janis Joplin or someone like that but I was convinced it was about me. I saw Buffalo Springfield at the Winterland Ballroom at the time, and it could not have been better. They were a very Californian band and it was the height of the Haight-Ashbury scene. My parents had moved to San Francisco in my final year of high school, so I was new and didn't know anyone. But music was everywhere, everyone was listening to the radio all the time – I was living in the middle of a music revolution.

By 1968 I was in a band with Lindsey. His family lived in the same gated community as us, and we would practise at his house. My mum and dad liked him, and everybody in the band. We practised Monday to Thursday, then played gigs on Friday and Saturday. So we were serious about it from the beginning, and my parents understood that.

THE ALBUM THAT TAUGHT ME TO SING HARMONY

Wondrous Stevie Nicks, love child of a fairy queen and a storm trooper performs Sunday London's Hyde Park

Stevie Nicks Daily Express Weekend June 25 2011

Stevie Nicks Live in Australia - November, 2011 - First 4 Dates Announced

• Nov 19 - Melbourne (Myer Music Bowl)
• Nov 20 - Mornington (Mornington Race Course)
• Nov 23 - Adelaide (Entertainment Centre)
• Nov 29 - Sydney (Entertainment Centre)

THE Twilight film New Moon has had a profound effect on rock superstar Stevie Nicks.

IT WAS just after she had seen the Twilight film New Moon while on tour in Australia. Stevie Nicks was so taken by the fated love story that she stole upstairs to her Melbourne hotel room and wrote a five-page essay about iconic love affairs.

She wrote about Bella and Edward, about Beauty and the Beast and about her own love story, between herself and her musical partner in life, Lindsey Buckingham, of Fleetwood Mac.

The similarities between their story and Bella and Edward's in New Moon were uncanny. A forbidden love. A love that cannot work, she describes it.

She went back to see the film to reflect on it again.

Meanwhile, a united Fleetwood Mac were playing sell-out shows around Australia. When they got to Brisbane, her hotel room contained a piano.

Audio Interview... Stevie Nicks from Absolute Radio UK

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Stevie Nicks Q&A: She spoke to SoundSpike about her recent illness,working with Dave Stewart & Lindsey Buckingham + Fleetwood Mac

Q & A: Stevie Nicks
Story by Christina Fuoco-Karasinski SoundSpike Contributor
Published June 24, 2011 04:11 PM
Soundspike

Singer/songwriter Stevie Nicks was feeling down before her recent interview with SoundSpike. She'd just bid adieu to her Chinese Crested Yorkie before heading off to England to do press and perform another show with Rod Stewart.

"[The dog is] on her way to Phoenix as we speak," Nicks said via telephone from her California home. "Much to my heartache, she can't go to England. She's staying with [a friend's] mom and dad. You can't take [dogs] into England. We're going to be gone for almost a month. It's been a horrific day of saying goodbye to her. ...It's just so lonely. It's so quiet around here."

Nicks is touring in support of her latest solo effort, "In Your Dreams," a collaboration with Dave Stewart of Eurythmics fame. Prior to her visit to England, the Fleetwood Mac singer had to briefly put promotional efforts on hold, including a stop on "The Today Show," as she recovered from pneumonia.

Now that she's feeling better, Nicks is ready to promote her album, which features the single "Secret Love." She spoke to SoundSpike about her illness, working with Stewart and if there's another Fleetwood Mac reunion in the offing.

SoundSpike: So are you feeling better?

Stevie Nicks: You know what, I'm over the pneumonia, but I've definitely still got the residue of being that sick for three weeks. I was really sick. Having really bad pneumonia on the day your record comes out -- your favorite record you've ever made in your life -- really sucked. And having to cancel "The Today Show" in New York really sucked. I mean, that part of me was going, "Why are you doing this to me, God?" My mom said to me, "You know what? There's a reason. There's a reason. Maybe it's because you never take a break. Maybe the spirits were saying, 'You need a break.' So if we have to give you pneumonia and knock you down for a couple weeks, you're down." It was a hard three weeks.

Were you still ill when you performed on "Dancing with the Stars" [on May 17]?

I was still a little sick on "Dancing with the Stars."

You sounded great.

Thank you. I have been sicker than that and done concerts. That was on the end of the pneumonia. But had I had to do a bunch of songs, then it would have been a problem. Singing one song, not so hard.

Do you have plans to tour North America again soon?

I do, like more toward the end of the summer when it's even hotter. Then we're off to Australia in November. We'll do probably two months here. When you release a new record, you never really know what's coming. I would hope and love to do a few shows in Europe. I don't know whether that'll happen or not. We're leaving tomorrow to do press in Europe and to do one big, huge show in [London's] Hyde Park, 55,000 people on the 26th of June. That's exciting. My band hasn't played that big of a show since like I don't know, Peace Sunday. That's a lot of people.

You said this is your favorite record.

This is my favorite record, absolutely.

Full Q&A at Soundspike.com

REVIEW - STEVIE NICKS: IN YOUR DREAMS (REPRISE) "Poetic, majestic, delicious" ★★★★/5

Nicks, the eccentric Fleetwood Mac vocalist, is back with her first album in a decade to prove that her strange, iconic voice is everything it ever was, even at the age of 63.

The first single from the album Secret Love was originally written in 1976 for Mac’s masterpiece Rumours.

Put together with new songs such as the one she was inspired to write when a group of British soldiers were killed in Iraq, it forms a real thing of beauty. Poetic, majestic, delicious.

By Simon Gage
Express.co.uk

EURYTHMICS co-founder Dave Stewart must be one of the hardest-working rockers in the business.

With half the new Stevie Nicks album bearing his name and a new Joss Stone offering coming later this month you cannot help but wonder how he found time to round up the talent and lay down the tracks for this new project.

Including songs he wrote with Bob Dylan and collaborations with Stone and Nicks and Martina McBride, it’s a high-quality, bluesy, American-flavoured affair with Dave himself sounding like the veteran music man he really is.

By Simon Gage
Express.co.uk

STEVIE NICKS In Your Dreams (Reprise) ★★★★✩ "In Stevie's world, it's always Avalon or Camelot, fair maids and dashing knights"

CD'S Of The Week 
London Evening Standard

STEVIE NICKS In Your Dreams (Reprise)
★★★★✩

The pop world goes through its phases but it's good to find that Miss Nicks stays resolutely the same. In Your Dreams has on its cover a photograph of Stevie in flowing skirt leading a pure white horse through a forest, the sun flaring behind them. In Stevie's world, it's always Avalon or Camelot, fair maids and dashing knights. The soft rock is still in place, this time masterminded by our very own Dave Stewart. But what has always set Stevie apart continues to do so: that sexy, sassy voice is never drowned in a flood of cheap, hippy sentiment. Thus, songs such as Wide Sargasso Sea, Moonlight (A Vampire's Dream), Secret Love and the title track are borne along on undercurrents of sex and memories of wild times.

PETE CLARK