Saturday, November 28, 2020

Stevie Nicks Nicks has been embracing some of the busiest years of her dual careers

Stevie Nicks Answers All Our Questions About Harry Styles

BY KEATON BELL
VOGUE

Of all the disciples to worship at the altar of Stevie Nicks, none have managed to capture the attention of rock’s reigning priestess quite like Harry Styles. 

The 26-year-old rocker (who this week received three Grammy nominations) is the Gucci-clad poster boy carrying the torch for a bygone era of music history that the Fleetwood Mac frontwoman helped crystallize. Styles recently cited the group’s 1977 (and still charting) classic “Dreams” as one of the first songs he learned the words to growing up. Their friendship began in 2015 after the former One Direction member presented his idol with a hand-piped birthday cake after a Fleetwood Mac gig in London. (“Glad she liked carrot cake,” he later said.) The years since have seen the duo’s mutual affection blossom into one of pop culture’s most cherished bondings. 

Last year, when Styles inducted Nicks into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, he proclaimed the 72-year-old “everything you’ve ever wanted in a lady, a lover, in a friend.” Nicks has gushed about him in interviews as everything from “the son she never had” to her “love child” with bandmate Mick Fleetwood. Styles earned her official seal of approval after covering “The Chain” every night of his first solo tour in support of a record that sounds closer to Crosby, Stills & Nash than anything he released under his prior band. 

“Harry could’ve lost a lot of fans, but he didn’t,” Nicks recently told Vogue over the phone. “I’m so proud of him because he took a risk and didn’t go the One Direction route. He loves One Direction, I love One Direction, and a gazillion other people do too, but Harry didn’t wanna go the pop route. He wanted straight-up rock and roll circa 1975.”  

Nicks has been embracing some of the busiest years of her dual careers as both Fleetwood Mac frontwoman and solo sorceress—and doing so amid a global pandemic. Since she last performed with Styles at the Forum for his Fine Line release show in December, she’s released a 24 Karat Gold concert film and “Show Them the Way,” her politically minded single and first piece of original music in six years. After Miley Cyrus asked for Nicks’s blessing before releasing her “Edge of Seventeen”–tinged “Midnight Sky,” the two joined forces for an exhilarating new mash-up titled “Edge of Midnight.”

In honor of Styles making history as the magazine’s first solo cover boy, Nicks caught up with Vogue to answer all our questions about their cosmic connection. Currently beachside with her quarantine bubble in Hawaii, she’s been doing what one would expect Stevie Nicks to be up to during a pandemic: writing new music, dancing around her house to “Watermelon Sugar,” and “casting little spells.” As befitting rock’s foremost storyteller, our intended 30-minute chat turned into a two-hour confessional about her love of Styles, working with Cyrus for the first time, joining Fleetwood Mac, the president-elect Joe Biden, the Met Gala, betta fish funerals, and much more. 

Your assistant just texted me a photo of the most gorgeous sunset I’ve ever seen. Where are you calling from? 

We just got to Maui. It’s turning winter in Los Angeles, and I live close to the beach, where it’s colder than anywhere else in Southern California. Me and my quarantine buddies had a little break where we thought we could come over safely, so we did. 

Did you bring your dogs along?

Yes. We have three—two Chinese cresteds and one Yorkshire—and they’re thrilled. I think this pandemic affected them too because they’re travelers. It’s just a two-week trip, but we brought enough stuff to last us a year. I don’t really come out of my room much since I don’t go to bed until seven in the morning and typically sleep until three—and that’s whether I’m in L.A. or London. Wherever I go, I still end up having breakfast at five in the afternoon. 

Last time we spoke you talked about the inspiration behind writing “Show Them the Way” around the time of the 2008 election and waiting all these years release it until you felt the moment was right. How does it feel now to finally have it out in the world? 

Saturday, November 14, 2020

Q&A Anything Stevie Nicks says carries a massive amount of weight.

Q&A: Stevie Nicks On How Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne And CSN Shaped Her Sound

By Steve Baltin - Forbes

Anything Stevie Nicks says carries a massive amount of weight. She is a two-time member of the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, solo and with Fleetwood Mac, and one of the most beloved icons in music today.

So when she talks about her influences, those artists that shaped her sound, it is a fascinating read. And one of the main influences in the quartet that she says, " I just put in the big witches' pot and stirred it up and made it into one thing," to make her sound, happens to be fellow multiple member of the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame (solo and with Buffalo Springfield), Neil Young, who turns 75 today.

So in honor of Young's seventy-fifth birthday, here is part three of my incredible 90-minute conversation with Nicks, where she talks about her quartet of influences, Bob Dylan and much more. If you want to know where Stevie Nicks' sound comes from, she tells you here. And not surprisingly it is some of the greats of music, like Crosby, Stills And Nash, who she talks about wanting to cover. How cool would that be?

Steve Baltin: I love the way that you refer to "Show Them The Way" as a prayer and saving the world. What are some protest songs for you, that give you the feeling of being able to save the world and also what are some songs that are like a prayer for you, that have a similar sort of ethos to show them the way?

Stevie Nicks: That’s a hard question. When I think of actual protest songs, the song that runs through my head is Bob Dylan’s "Tangled Up in Blue," “There was music in the cafes and revolution in the air." I was just losing my head the first time I heard "Tangled Up in Blue." Which was a long time ago, before there was ever a political bone in my body .But I understood that he was very political and that just everything he wrote was touched with some politics. And the idea that there was music in the cafes and revolution in the air, and that’s what music does to people. They may be out there protesting in the streets, but if there wasn’t a pandemic they’d still be going into restaurants and into bars and into clubs and discuss it in those places and play music and they’d be discussing it while music was playing. So I think that it’s what Bob Dylan meant by that statement. I just always think of that.

Baltin: Blood On The Tracks is such a personal album that is intertwined with political. When you look at other songs that you’ve written, are there other songs of yours that you feel you were… touched by God, as if you were a conduit for it?

Nicks: Well I think I was definitely a conduit for this. I don’t know if I’ve ever written a political song actually. I did write a song, "Desert Angel,' for Desert Storm, and that was a long time ago. I was in Phoenix when that happened. I must have been pretty bummed out about it because I wrote that song. And I wrote "Illume" for 9/11and I’ve never been able to do "Illume" on stage, still, after all this time, because it’s too close. I don’t know if I could do it. And "Desert Angel," that I never did. Those are my three political songs, "Illume," "Desert Angel", and this one.

Baltin: Most writers agree songs change for them over time. Look at a song like "Landslide," written in 1975, it probably feels like an entirely different life?

Nicks: Yeah, they do change for sure. It’s interesting that you bring up Jackson [Browne’s] song "These Days" because the line in that that I remember is the one, “Don't confront me with my failures / I have not forgotten them.” That line, because we all feel that way. You don’t have to bring up my failures to me because I know exactly what they were. That’s a pretty heavy statement. It’s like "Music in the cafes and revolution in the air," sometimes just a sentence out of somebody’s song will mean a million things to you, who didn’t write it. Just to the person that’s listening to it. And sometimes us as writers are the last people to really understand.

Baltin: What have you been listening to during this time?

Nicks: I love Neil Young . I've been listening to a lot of Crosby, Stills, Nash And Young and Joni Mitchell and just that whole era of people. Buffalo Springfield in the last seven, eight months. I've been listening to a lot of their music on my Sonos and it makes me happy. And I've decided that Neil Young was actually a lot more...he wrote a lot of very loving love ballads. He was not only the huge rock and roll crazy guy that I always thought. There are so many ballads I've gone, "Wow, you know what? You're just a big pussycat. I can't believe it." No wonder they chose him to come into Crosby, Stills And Nash. They wanted somebody like the Eagles wanted Joe Walsh, they wanted somebody that would have that heavy hand. But then when you listen to something like "Slowpoke" or some of these amazing songs, I've been blown away over the last couple of months listening to his ballads going like, "This guy, really seriously, in a way, wanted to be in love."

Baltin: That is fascinating. But it's interesting because I noticed that transition musically from angry young men in Dylan and Petty to much more sentimental and forgiving. But I also think guys just mellow as they get older.

Nicks: Yeah, I do too. And I'm glad that most of them got their hard rock parts out and then also got some of the beautiful love things out at the same time so that it wasn't like they were tacking on the other side at the end of their career. So they were actually written around the same time because I've been listening to Crosby, Stills, Nash And Young and some of those songs, some of those records, are really sweet from Neil Young and I just never knew that.

Baltin: Is there one song off that record that speaks to you the most?

Nicks: Well, that whole record. I spent my whole summer after my senior year listening to nothing but that record for three solid months. Every single song from "Helplessly Hoping" to a bunch of songs I would really like to record and talk about protest songs, "For What It's Worth" and "Ohio," they wrote some really amazing protest songs. You're like, "Wow, those things could have been written today too."

Baltin: Great protest songs are timeless because the best protest writers are also the best storytellers often, Look at Jackson Browne, who is one of my favorite lyricists of all time.

Nicks: "That Girl Could Sing," one of my favorite songs because I always wanted to think that, even though I didn't know Jackson Browne at that point, that he wrote that about me because, "Oh, I'm such a cool presence." And when you take, "She was a friend to me when I needed one," and you remember those sentences and even the melody of those sentences. When I tell people my greatest influences I say Joni Mitchell for phrasing, she could fit 50 words in a sentence and have them sound glorious without being rushed or crushed in, so I really learned a lot from her about phrasing. From Jackson I learned about writing love songs. From Crosby, Stills And Nash it was the three-part harmony I wanted Lori [Nicks], Sharon [Celani] and me to become like to make my first solo album, which we are doing even on this record, even on this song. There's one line where we do a three-part, "It was just another night in the presence of Martin Luther King," we did that in a three-part. And every time it goes by I go, "That was it, that was what I told Jimmy Iovine when I told him I wanted to produce the record." I told him, "I have two girl singers and they sing amazing. And together we have created a sound. It's like a Crosby, Stills And Nash sound and that's what we want. I don't always want my voice to be louder than theirs." And he said, "Okay, that's what we'll do." That's another thing. I'm so proud of this song, I'm so proud of the singing in this song. It maybe a political song, it maybe a protest song, it may just be a really good song. But what it also is, it's a really well-sung song. And I'm so proud of the girls because we didn't have much time and we pulled off some of the best vocals we have ever done since 1980 when we started Bella Donna.

Baltin: How do you hear all of those influences in your music?

Nicks: When I was coming out of high school to my second year of junior college that was when those four influences really started to take over my life, to the point I'd get in an elevator with Lindsey [Buckingham] and I would be singing Joni Mitchell's "Same Situation:" and he'd look at me and go, "Don't you know anything else?" And I'd look at him and go, "No, I don't. That's all I know right now is that song. I'm just gonna continue to sing it, so thank you" (laughs). That was how completely attached I would get to each one of the songs on all those records. I would just pick one and stick with it for two weeks. That's how I learned. I put them all together, all those people, I blended them into one voice. I took what I thought was the greatest thing about the way Joni phrased and about how Jackson picked out incredibly romantic things to say and about how Crosby, Stills And Nash had the three-part harmony that made me think I should be on the Southern Cross sailboat that was going across the ocean singing at the top of your lungs and that Neil Young was actually a sweet, loving guy that just wanted to be in love besides being a rock star. And all of that I just put in the big witches' pot and stirred it up and made it into one thing. And that was my inspiration for everything I ever did.

Q&A with Stevie Nicks "One Last Thing" People Magazine November 23, 2020

 From the November 23, 2020 issue of People Magazine with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on the cover.



STEVIE NICKS, THE SINGER- SONGWRITER, 72, JUST RELEASED HER 24 KARAT GOLD TOUR LIVE ALBUM AND HER NEW SINGLE ‘SHOW THEM THE WAY’


Last time I was starstruck


David Beckham. It was at a big concert in San Francisco, and he just oozed handsomeness. Gorgeousness, you know? I just stood there, like, “Is this real? Maybe it’s a dream.”

Last time I danced

I dance around my apartment all the time. I like to make up dances to Lady Gaga’s song “Applause.” my girlfriends and I have our own version of the Hustle that we update.

Last time I missed someone

My niece just got married, and I couldn’t go to her wedding. I can’t run over and hug my friends. My mantra every day is: I’m not getting [the coronavirus]; I can’t chance it.

Last indulgence

I found out I’m allergic to gluten. But I just had these gluten-free brownies from Erewhon Market in Pacific Palisades that taste like chocolate soufflé. As long as they exist, I can do this.

Last time my dog made me laugh

Lily, my Chinese crested, just the way she walks: Her little butt does the total Marilyn Monroe wiggle. It’s back and forth, back and forth. I say to her, “We will get old, but this will never get old.”

By JULIE JORDAN



Friday, November 13, 2020

LINDSEY BUCKINGHAM LIVE AT HOME DEC 5TH (livestream)


AT HOME WITH LINDSEY BUCKINGHAM LIVESTREAM ON 12/5 ANNOUNCED

Lindsey Buckingham has announced an intimate livestream show. On Saturday, December 5th at 5:30PM PST / 8:30PM EST, Lindsey will deliver a completely live performance from his home studio in Los Angeles, featuring hits from across his iconic catalog. Fans from around the world will also have access to purchase Q&A VIP packages for the show, along with exclusive merchandise. Tickets are priced at $15 and go on sale on Friday, November 13th at 7am PST.

Not able to make this show? No problem, Lindsey’s performance will remain exclusively available to ticket purchasers for 48 hours post show.

GET TICKETS

NEW Remix of Midnight Sky "Edge of Midnight" with Stevie Nicks


Miley Cyrus and Stevie Nicks Team Up for ‘Edge of Seventeen’/’Midnight Sky’ Mashup

By Chris Willman - Variety

Because it’s not enough for just one vintage Stevie Nicks song to have reentered the zeitgeist (see: the TikTok “Dreams” resurgence), Miley Cyrus is doing her best to make sure that history quickly repeats itself by pushing another Nicks favorite, “Edge of Seventeen,” back into public prominence.

Late Thursday night, Miley released what is officially deemed “Edge of Midnight (Midnight Sky Remix),” a track that mashes up her own current single, “Midnight Sky,” a top 20 hit released in August, with “Edge of Seventeen,” the hit that appeared on Nicks’ first solo album, “Bella Donna,” back in 1981.

Although no details were immediately released about the track apart from the two singers’ respective tweets, it does appear that Nicks participated in the remix to the extent of lending her voice to Cyrus’ new song, too, as it appears in the conjoined mix, which starts off with Waddy Wachtel’s unmistakable 16th-note guitar riff.

“Stevie Nicks has always been my idol & an inspiration. It’s an honor to now call her my friend and collaborator,” Cyrus wrote on Instagram. Among the immediate responses were triply repeated fire emoji from fan Kacey Musgraves. Nicks herself posted: “Miley…Magical! Loved singing with her!”

Cyrus had previously acknowledged getting Nicks’ approval to sample “Seventeen” for the original track, in which the interpolation is far more subtle. The singer said on Jimmy Fallon’s show that she contacted Nicks and “said, ‘I have an alternate melody if you don’t want to kind of like pay tribute to you and your greatness and how much you’ve inspired me.’ And she said, ‘You can borrow from me anytime.'”

The idea of a more overt mashup of the two songs had already achieved some popularity before this official release. YouTube user Kelly Green, who goes under the name “kelexandra,” combined the two songs in a series of videos that have accumulated more than a million views since the first of them was uploaded August 15.

Cyrus’ official mashup is not the first time a major pop star has felt compelled to adopt Nicks’ classic as part of a new song. Destiny’s Child sampled Wachtel’s guitar part on “Edge of Seventeen” for the trio’s “Bootylicious” smash in 2001, and although Nicks didn’t appear on the track itself, she did put in a cameo in the video.

Nicks has openly admitted doing some nicking herself, when she based another early solo hit, “Stand Back,” on something she picked out of Prince’s “Little Red Corvette,” although few probably would have noticed any similarity if she didn’t point it out. In her new concert film, “24 Karat Gold,” Nicks tells the story of calling up Prince to tell him she was borrowing an element from his hit and inviting him to the studio to get his seal of approval.

Cyrus’ new album, “Plastic Hearts,” is due Nov. 27.





Monday, November 02, 2020

REVIEW: STEVIE NICKS REMAINS AT THE TOP OF HER GAME


Stevie Nicks – Live in Concert: The 24 Karat Gold Tour

Rating ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

RetroPop

In 2019, Stevie Nicks became the first woman to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame twice – for her work with Fleetwood Mac and her illustrious solo career which, since 1981, has spawned 8 hit LPs and classic hits like Edge of Seventeen, Stand Back, Talk to Me, Rooms on Fire and Leather and Lace. 

Her latest project, the movie 24 Karat Gold: The Concert, comes amid the pandemic that’s seen touring events cancelled and live music venues shuttered – with the star taking her 2016/2017 solo tour to the big screen as a means of escapism for fans. 

Accompanying the release is Live in Concert: The 24 Karat Gold Tour – collecting Stevie’s live set on 2CD and 2LP formats for the first time. 

Fans of the star, who recently released her first single in six years, Show Them the Way, will know the frustrations of her solo sets which, for a number of years, rarely differed and featured the same handful of classic solo and Fleetwood Mac hits. This time around, though, things are different… 

The 24 Karat Gold Tour came following two back-to-back tours with the band – 2013’s Fleetwood Mac Live jaunt and the 2014/2015 On With The Show Tour, which saw the return of Christine McVie – in between which Stevie recorded and released her eighth solo album, 24 Karat Gold: Songs from the Vault.

The record sees the singer-songwriter revisit outtakes from her previous LPs, which she took to Nashville with Eurythmics star Dave Stewart and re-recorded over a three-week period. 

It resulted in a 16-track collection and, after dipping into her “gothic trunk of lost songs,” the star hit the road to unearth more lost gems on stage – with a setlist featuring all the hits along with album cuts and rarities that’d never been performed on the concert stage. 

Look no further than opening track Gold and Braid – originally recorded for and omitted from Stevie’s debut LP Bella Donna – which, to this day, has not been issued on a studio album. It sets the tone for a set packed with golden moments which, even for the most casual fans, is a breath of fresh air. 

Three 24 Karat Gold tracks are included – Belle Fleur, Starshine and If You Were My Love – along with rare album cuts Bella Donna, Wild Heart and New Orleans, and Crying in the Night – the should-have-been lead single from her 1973 pre-Fleetwood Mac album with Lindsey Buckingham. 

Of course, the hits are in there, with Gold Dust Woman and Edge of Seventeen both clocking in around the 10 minute mark. Rhiannon, Gypsy and Landslide also feature from her Mac catalogue, alongside solo hits like If Anyone Falls and Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around.

The pièce de résistance: a stunning, mid-set, eight-minute rendition of 2010’s Moonlight (A Vampire’s Dream), which has been reimagined as a sweeping piano ballad, building to a crescendo that incorporates the rock-tinged album version and elevates the track to another stratosphere. 

When it comes to live albums – whoever the act – we’ve come to expect the usual mix of hits plus a 3 or 4 “deep cuts,” so for a star like Stevie Nicks to let loose and throw as many curveballs as she does in this show is a testament to an artist who, after five decades in music, remains at the top of her game. 

Brava, Stevie…

Stevie Nicks – Live in Concert: The 24 Karat Gold Tour is available on download or stream now. The 2LP version will be released in December.