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NEW YORK — Stevie Nicks has her own way of doing things. And why shouldn’t she? The Rock and Roll Hall of Famer with five platinum albums to her name, not to mention all her work with Fleetwood Mac, has done pretty well for herself.
So when producer Dave Stewart, of Eurythmics fame, showed up at her house one day, guitar in hand, expecting to write a song with a woman who has written alone for decades, she was taken aback.
“He just said, ‘I like this poem. Let’s do this one,’ ” says Nicks, calling from her home in Los Angeles. “I’m thinking, ‘ OK, he doesn’t really think we’re going to write a song here in the room together.’ Then, he just started playing, and he said, ‘Chime in.’ And I’m like, ‘OK,’ and I start reading my poem, and pretty soon a melody started to happen, and in 20 minutes, ‘You May Be the One,’ which is a pretty serious song, was done.”
For Nicks, it was an epiphany. “I got it,” she says. “I understand why people write together who don’t have to write together. I understand Paul and John, and Rodgers and Hart, and Carole King and Gerry Goffin. … They didn’t need to write together. They could write just great on their own. So why did they? Well, now I know.”
Nicks says the sessions that became the album “In Your Dreams” (Reprise) were so good that she thought, “Oh, my God, I’m never gonna make a record this good again.
“This record is what we would call in San Francisco in the ’60s a ‘happening,’ ” she says. “Every part of it was so much fun. ... It had everything that I love. It had craziness, and we set up a very romantic setting. There were a lot of people here, and we had dinners every night, where we stopped and talked about the world. … We created a Parisian salon in the ’20s in my house. Friends came, and they asked if they could listen, and we said, ‘Sure, come on,’ because it was a very open thing. Everybody was welcome. It was a very easygoing, free-flowing musical thing.”
