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Chatting with Stevie Nicks: The Reigning Empress of Rock and Roll
BY MARKOS PAPADATOS - Digital Journal
Two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Stevie Nicks chatted with Digital Journal's Markos Papadatos about her "24 Karat Gold" concert film, her live album, upcoming single on October 9, and she shared the key to longevity in the music industry.
Track and field legend Wilma Rudolph once said: "Never underestimate the power of dreams and the influence of the human spirit. We are all the same in this notion: The potential for greatness lives within each of us." Stevie Nicks is a woman that embodies this wise quotation.
Nicks has been hailed by this music aficionado as the perennial "Empress of Rock and Roll," and rightfully so. She possesses one of the most significant and powerful voices in the music business; moreover, she has had an illustrious music career that has spanned well over five decades. She scored six Top 10 albums, eight Grammy nominations for her solo work, and she has sold in excess of 140 million albums collectively as a solo recording artist and as part of the iconic rock group Fleetwood Mac.
She earned several Grammy Awards as a member of the Fleetwood Mac: their seminal studio album Rumours won the Grammy for "Album of the Year" in 1978, and two Fleetwood Mac albums have been inducted into the coveted Grammy Hall of Fame: Rumours in 2003 and Fleetwood Mac in 2016 respectively. Last year, she made music history because she was the first woman inducted into the coveted Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice.
This interview delves into the conscience of Stevie Nicks as a prolific songwriter, vocalist, poet, storyteller, and a song stylist.
Stevie Nicks — 24 Karat Gold The Concert
"The song 'If You Were My Love' is a ballad that I love to sing so much, and I wanted to make sure that it was perfect. It's the song that I love to sing most on stage with the girls," she said.
"Stevie Nicks 24 Karat Gold The Concert" will be available at select cinemas, drive-ins and exhibition spaces all over the world. With this concert film, Nicks will be taking her fans and listeners on a trip down memory lane, where she will provide them with a virtual front-row seat to her live shows. "The film is coming out soon and this tour that we filmed was the most fun that I've ever had on a tour," she acknowledged. "When you can add six or seven new songs into a setlist, it changes the whole show, and it makes it seem like the whole show was brand new."
Concert setlist: An eclectic program of classic and newer songs
Her setlist for this concert film includes such fan-favorite songs as "Rhiannon," "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around," "Edge of Seventeen," "Stand Back," and "Landslide," among many other classics from her extensive musical catalog. "Even the older songs that weren't on the 24 Karat Gold album become new again because of the six or seven new songs that nobody has ever heard before. When I walked off stage, that whole show felt new to me, and when you watch the film, you can really see that," Nicks said.
"It's always a risk when you add new songs to a show. I hope that my intuition said 'people will love this because I am going to tell them a good story' but my risk factor is definitely there, so when we left the stage that very first night, I was able to look at the audience, and I realized that it worked very well. We had all the confidence in the world to continue on from that moment then," she added.
"When I recorded the 24 Karat Gold album, we were on a break from Fleetwood Mac. I went to Nashville for only two weeks, and then I came home and we finished it at my house. The album was done in five weeks, and I gave it to Warner Bros. and that was it. It was amazing that I actually pulled it off and it actually happened, and I was so excited about it," she said.
"In May of 2020, I went to Chicago to edit the stories of this film," she recalled. "I was a little scared to do it because of COVID, but we took precautions and went to Chicago. We stayed at a house by a golf course where nobody had been since the previous October and we went to a studio where nobody had been for months and I was there for a month and that's where we edited the 46 minutes of stories. That's when I actually started working again.
"Getting this film all done was not easy especially since you couldn't get in your car and go to a studio," she acknowledged. "Everything that we have been doing was done pretty much from home except for the short trip to Chicago. I actually am being creative now, and I am really happy about that."
Chrissie Hynde and The Pretenders served as her opening act for the majority of the "24 Karat Gold Tour." "It was so fun to be o the road with Chrissie Hynde. She and I became really good friends, and Chrissie does not like everybody. She's a badass chick," she said.
