(Review) Stevie Nicks ""Italian Summer" is a lush romantic waltz with stately orchestration"

'In Your Dreams' Rating: 

(Reprise)
AZ Central
Ed Masley

It's been 10 years since Stevie Nicks released an album, and she starts her new one with a song she wrote the same year Fleetwood Mac recorded "Rumours."But Nicks sounds surprisingly vital and engaged in the creative process here, especially on "Secret Love," a song she's had 35 years to record. Of course, it sounds exactly like the sort of thing she would have written then. Even Dave Stewart's production has a certain Lindsey Buckingham-esque sheen to it on that one. And the lyrics would have fit right in: "I am not asking forever from you/I'm just asking to be held for a while."

It's not the only highlight here.

"Italian Summer" is a lush romantic waltz with stately orchestration, recalling both the drama of Roy Orbison and the aching beauty of that Morning Benders single from last year that tried so hard to sound like they'd recorded it in 1961. And Nicks rushes the phrasing in all the right place on the chorus hook: "At the end of the Italian summer, It rains fast and it rains hard/The wind blows right through you/Tears you apart."

There are echoes of Stewart's past shading the techno-pop intro to the yearning "Everybody Loves You," whose chorus hook ends on a brilliantly Beatlesque chord change. Buckingham's harmonies on "Soldier's Angel," a dark, dramatic anti-war lament whose eerie atmosphere recalls "The Chain," are sure to conjure flashbacks to the '70s for Fleetwood Mac fans. There's also a definite Buckingham vibe to the rollicking California rockabilly of the title track, despite his lack of input on that song. And it's a shame she didn't get "Moonlight (A Vampire's Dream)" together in time to cash in on the "Twilight" craze.

Those "Twilight" kids would find plenty to love if they investigated Nicks' back pages.