Stevie Nicks and Dave Stewart discuss the making of Stevie's latest album "In Your Dreams." Listen to Stevie and Dave discuss making each track on the album and the history behind the album!
Stevie Nicks on Love, Loss and What She Wears With her first solo album in a decade widely praised as her "best yet," the rock icon reflects on past loves, present challenges, and her growth beyond Fleetwood Mac
MORE: In an interview I did with you previously, you said that you saved all your old tapes from when you were writing or working on songs.
Stevie Nicks: I do. Two songs for this record were pulled right off of old cassettes. "Annabelle Lee" was pulled off of a demo I did in about 1995, and "Secret Love"--the single--was pulled from a demo from a cassette that I wrote in 1976.
More: You must be really organized to be able to find that.
Stevie Nicks: I'm not, but the people who have worked for me have been very organized. I bought a house in Phoenix in 1978 and from 1978 on, we have what we call "The Song Vault.” It’s a storage unit that's temperature controlled, and it's several big armoires that are shelf after shelf after shelf of everything from collections of tapes that I used to make-- that people make now for their iPods—to collections that I play when I'm on the road, starting when I first joined Fleetwood Mac. So I have all the old collections of whatever songs were hits at the time, and then there's just everything else I liked.
More: I love the new CD. Some of the songs are like short stories and some are like poems. There are certain themes that come across, like dreams, and ghosts and, it seems, memories of past relationships.
Stevie Nicks: Ghosts ... except the great thing is that they're not gone. Like in "The Ghosts Are Gone": the cassette ghosts remain forever.
More: What inspired that song in particular?
Stevie Nicks: I wrote that as a poem. I was on the road with Fleetwood Mac, I think it was the end of 2004. We were in London, and I met a singer-songwriter named Amanda Ghost. I just loved the fact that her last name was Ghost. So I just wrote that poem. It’s not about her because I didn't really know her, but the main inspiration was her last name.
Lots of time I'll get an inspiration, like "The Ghosts Are Gone"-- that's just a sentence. Then I have to write a story around it. And so "The Ghosts Are Gone" song actually was about the end of a relationship, in the way that you say, "I'm done forever. This can never be again.”
It's one of the most solid songs I've ever written. The ghosts are gone: all memories are gone, all feelings are gone, it's as if it never happened. And I don't write too many songs like that. I always have more or less a hopeful outlook, but in that situation it was like “you are gone to me.”
More: Saying that through the song, did that help you get your head out of the relationship?
Few women in rock inspire as hypnotically devoted a following as Stevie Nicks. For more than 35 years, through both her days with Fleetwood Mac and her solo career, she's mesmerized fans with her gravelly velvet voice and her bewitching songs and her ability to twirl.
Ten years after her last solo album, "Trouble in Shangri-La," she returns May 3 with "In Your Dreams," recorded largely in her Los Angeles living room and produced primarily by Dave Stewart and Glen Ballard. Both Fleetwood Mac's Mick Fleetwood and Lindsey Buckingham play on the compelling set. And as MSN Music found, once someone is in Nicks' life, he or she seldom leaves.
MSN Music: You just came off the road with Rod Stewart in the Heart & Soul tour. Do you have a ritual for celebrating the end of a tour?
Stevie Nicks: No, not really. Everybody was starting to get sick. It was a lot of shows. The last night of the tour, Rod just had a new baby, his eighth, a little boy, so I bought him a little blue diamond shoe, little baby shoe, and then engraved it with Aiden's initials and my initials and the date and gave it to him and told him how much I had enjoyed it. [The tour] ended up to be a really great thing. I wouldn't be surprised if it happened again, because it went very smoothly.
You told a Santa Barbara newspaper that you thought "In Your Dreams" would go down as your greatest work.
STEVIE NICKS
Officially on Billboard Stevie's 'In Your Dreams' drops 10 places to #16 with 20,400 units sold for a two week accumulated total of 72,800 in the US.
On Billboards Top 200 Current Albums Chart the album drops from #6 to #15.
In Canada - 'In Your Dreams' drops down to #41 in it's second week on the chart for the week ending May 12, 2011. The album debuted at #24.
In Germany 'In Your Dreams' is one of the top three new entries this week on the German Top 100 Albums Chart debuting at # 37.
In Sweden 'In Your Dreams' in it's 2nd week on the Swedish chart moves up 13 places to #39. This is Stevie's 7th top 40 album in Sweden.
Stevie Nicks "In Your Dreams" - Week 2
# 16 - USA Billboard Top 200 Albums Chart - (Week ending 05/15/2011)
# 15 - USA Billboard Top 200 Current Albums Chart
# 05 - USA Billboard Top Rock Albums Chart
# 35 - New Zealand - (05/16/2011)
# 39 - Sweden - (05/20/2011)
# 41 - Canada - (05/12/2011)
# 57 - The Netherlands - (05/14/2011)
So far by Country... Here are the debut positions for "In Your Dreams"
# 06 - USA
# 24 - Canada
# 24 - Austrlaia
# 37 - New Zealand
# 37 - Germany
# 39 - Norway
# 47 - The Netherlands
# 52 - Sweden
# 90 - Belgium
FLEETWOOD MAC
In the US Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours" album sprang back onto the Top 200 Album Charts last week at # 11 with roughly 30k in sales thanks to the GLEE episode. This week it drops down to #38 with approx. 12,072 in sales which is really impressive for an album 34 years old.
Fleetwood Mac "Rumours"
# 38 - USA Billboard Top 200 Albums Chart - (Week ending 05/15/2011)
# 08 - USA Billboard Top Digital Albums Chart
# 02 - USA Billboard Top Catalog Albums Chart
"Rumours" in Canada drops from #16 to #61.
Also on the Billboard 200 Fleetwood Mac's 1988 Greatest Hits album remains for a second week after re-entering last week at #90 - moving down to #187.
Fleetwood Mac came back big on Glee a couple of weeks ago and last night Stevie Nicks was on Dancing With The Stars. Tonight, American Idol finalist Haley Reinhart channeled her inner Stevie Nicks as she performed “Rhiannon” live. Jimmy Iovine chose the song for Haley and despite it being a little windy on the Idol stage; Haley Reinhart did the song justice. Can she win American Idol Season 10?
Watching Haley audition, I'm more convinced than ever that she's improved as much as any top-three contestant I've ever seen. The voice was there from the beginning, but she has learned how to use it better and how to present herself.
Haley says remembering the words will be a challenge as she sings Fleetwood Mac's Rhiannon. "From the minute I met you, I felt you should sing a Stevie Nicks song," he says. Haley's a Stevie Nicks fan, via her mother.
Haley gets smoke and dramatic black-and-white lighting for Rhiannon, which begins with only piano accompaniment before kicking into a more Mac-like arrangement for the second verse, at which point a wind machine kicks up underneath her, blowing her hair and her dress every which way. More than Scotty or Lauren, Haley knows how present a song, and the show's producers are giving her every opportunity to show off that skill. Good performance, great TV.
For me, Round Two goes to Haley, too, though Scotty came close.
And, at this point, even the awkward banter with the judges is playing to her favor.
"You're in a zone right now," Randy says. "You're just having a good time right now. ... I would grow my hair out if I could have the whole wind thing."
"You remind me of why I fell in love with Stevie Nicks to begin with," says Steven.
"It was a really beautiful moment," Jennifer says, "and you looked really beautiful on camera. ... It was a nice contrast to what you did earlier."
From the judges, Round Two is a mixed result: Steven goes for Lauren Alaina, while Jennifer and Randy (and Jimmy) go for Scotty.
"It's going to be an interesting finish," says Ryan, pointing out that Neil Sedaka is sitting next to Jimmy.
The singer opens up about the inspiration for each song on 'In Your Dreams'
[If you buy the itunes version of Stevie's new album... All this song inspiration below is part of the cd booklet within itunes]
Stevie Nicks released her new album In Your Dreams last week and it's a hit, coming in at #6 on the charts. The veteran songstress recently sat down to open up to fans about the inspiration behind 'In Your Dreams' 13 tracks. Check out what she has to say:
SECRET LOVE - I love this song. I still do not remember exactly who it is about...I wrote it a very long time ago. Life was moving very fast in the late '70s...Love was everywhere. We were beautiful. I saw everything through a sort of stained glass window of perfection. It was a pretty spectacular time and I think the song represents many relationships, not only mine, but lots of people at that time. I was living in a pink Spanish house which belonged to silent film stars. I wrote a lot of songs there and this was one of them. I didn't completely remember the song and amazingly discovered an early version of it on YouTube.
FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH – Somewhere in the '90s – in my post Klonopin era (a drug that almost destroyed me)– I'd just come out of 47 days in rehab. I was trying to recover. I was petrified of life with no tranquilizers. I was afraid to come back into the real world. Someone appeared out of nowhere. An angel stepped in. He arrived and walked me through and he saved my spiritual life. I think it's a reminder for everyone that sometimes when you are filled with fear or pain, someone arrives and takes you by the hand and helps you on your journey.
IN YOUR DREAMS - This was another difficult time in my life and when I was on the road touring my sound engineer would hear me say, "I can't do it...I can't go up there." And he would say, "Stevie, I'm right at the other end of this cord." His words of assurance that I would sound good made me feel safe.
WILD SARGASSO SEA – This song is based on the book and movie of the same title. It is the precursor to Jane Eyre. It was about Mr. Rochester falling in love with Antoinette and how he felt the moment he met her on the island. They both went mad but Antoinette Rochester never recovered and was locked up.
Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, multi-Grammy award winner and living legend Stevie Nicks came to perform two songs. Loved how she got into the spirit of “DWTS” with her skirt of many fabrics and chain mail on her gloves, and that lasso move that she made at the end of her performance of her single “Secret Love,” which featured bare-chested Dmitry Chaplin making sweet ballroom love to Anna Trebunskaya on the judges table, as well as Peta Murgatroyd and bare-chested Damian Whitewood. Stevie followed that up with a rendition of the classic Fleetwood Mac hit “Landslide,” with Cheryl and Tony Dovolani in classic black and white doing a classic rumba on the dance floor. Did I mention how classic this was? Also instant classic: the fact that Stevie had chains on her microphone stand, which only solidified the “DWTS” rock star that she is.
Well... She finally made her first prime time appearance promoting 'In Your Dreams'!... and the first prime time performance of 'Secret Love'. Stevie looked really great, wore the boots, was rocking the wavey hair she's been sporting lately and it looked like she was wearing a new skirt on the outfit... It was nice. She sounds like she still has some residual of the flu and pneumonia that she caught on the day her new album was released (May 3rd). But I think she pulled it off! Plus given it was LIVE I'm sure she was a little nervous knowing the size of the Dancing With The Stars TV audience. Vocally on 'Secret Love' you could hear a bit of a rasp in her voice and she may have been slightly out of tune in places... But like I said given that she's only just getting over the flu and pneumonia where she had to cancel shows and other appearances on the east coast - I think she did really well.
Landslide sounded much better vocally. The song was cut down for the show but still sounded like the great Landslide!
It seems it doesn't matter what TV show any of these live performers play on, it never really sounds right. Even on the award shows where there are a lot of live performances, you would think it would be perfect, but it isn't... there's just something missing... I'm sure it's the way it's mixed.
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