STEVIE NICKS INTERVIEW: ATLANTIC CITY WEEKLY

Stevie Nicks Finds New Inspiration, Talks About New Album
Rock Icon Stevie Nicks takes a break from recording her new album with Dave Stewart to play the Taj Mahal Aug. 27.
Atlantic City Weekly
by: Michael Pritchard

The last time Stevie Nicks played Atlantic City, in June 2009, she played Boardwalk Hall, the city’s big room, surrounded by a few band mates you may have heard of — Lindsay Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood, you know, Fleetwood Mac.

But Friday, Aug. 27, Nicks switches to her other side, as a solo artist, when she plays the Trump Taj Mahal.

And in either incarnation, whether she’s Mac’s “Gold Dust Woman” or her own “White Winged Dove,” Nicks is an icon in both settings. And she’s comfortable in both, she says in a telephone interview with Atlantic City Weekly from her Los Angeles home.

“You know, the two are very different,” she says. “There’s something to be said for the great huge hall and [playing for] 18,000 people in New Zealand. But then there’s the small venues that are much more intimate. And you can’t be that in the huge venues. You’re very far from the people.

“But when you’re in a small venue, it’s like way back in the beginning when you were playing clubs, even though it’s way bigger than a club [the Taj Mahal’s Etess Arena can seat 5,000], there’s still a little of that vibe. But there’s a lot to be said about both and I’m one of those very lucky people who gets to play both.”

And at 62, she’s also lucky enough to pick and choose her spots. Nicks isn’t currently on tour. In fact, she’s in the middle of writing and recording a new album (her seventh) with Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics, a project she speaks about with excitement and a little bit of wonder.

Yet, this month, she’s taking a break from the album and doing a brief five-concert tour.

“About two and a half months ago, my manager called and said, ‘I know you’re doing a record, but how would you like to do five shows in August?’ And I said basically, ‘You know I’m doing a record.’ And he said, ‘I know, but it’s good to work and in this economy ... maybe it would be a good idea for you to do this. Because if you do, it will be like you worked this year. And that’s always a good thing.’

“So I said basically, ‘You’re telling me that that’s what you want me to do?’” she says. “He said, ‘I think you should do it’ so I said, ‘OK, cool. We’ll break for the month of August.’”

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STEVIE NICKS CARES MORE FOR THE JOURNEY OF MAKING NEW ALBUM THEN SALES

Source: Projo.com
By Rick Massimo
Journal Pop Music Writer

Stevie Nicks hasn’t come out with a new studio record since 2001’s “Trouble in Shangri-La,” and she says that around 2005 she decided she wasn’t going to bother — people would simply take it off the Internet anyway. But last year’s 83-show Fleetwood Mac tour convinced her that the fans were out there, and Nicks has been readying a new disc that she hopes will come out in March.

For the first time, Nicks is collaborating with another songwriter, Dave Stewart, formerly of Eurythmics. Nicks calls him “my new best friend. He’s all four Beatles rolled into one.”

Their method of working together was natural and organic, Nicks says. They set up a studio in her living room, and a couple of weeks before they got together, Nicks sent him a book’s worth of poetry culled from her journals, “never in a million years thinking he would read it. But he did read it, so he hands me a poem and says [thick English accent] ‘OK, what about this poem?’ And first, I’m like, ‘Wow, he read it,’ and second of all, I’m like, ‘OK, they’re all my poems, so I like this one.’ So he starts playing guitar, and … I just started reciting in a sing-songy way, right off the top of my head. And in about 10 minutes, we had written a really great song.”

They’ve written nine songs together, “and seriously it’s been the most fun I’ve had since I was a teenager. It’s been an eye-opening experience. We sit, we laugh, we make dinners. It’s like the way we used to make records in the old days. It’s not like making an album with GarageBand in your closet.”

She’s also written five more typical “suffering Stevie songs … just me, sitting at my piano with tears in my eyes,” and says that working with Stewart, and her occasional long-distance collaboration with Tom Petty guitarist Mike Campbell, “opens up a whole new world of chords. I know four chords. And [they] know thousands. [I] can go places in your melody that I couldn’t go if I was playing the piano, because I can’t. I don’t know how.”

Nicks says that they’re shooting to get the record out March 1, and her fans are going to have to wait until then to be knocked out, because she isn’t going to do any of the new songs on the road. “We don’t want them to be filmed and on YouTube the next day. We want people to be surprised, and be listening to whole songs. I’m a girl who is all about mystery and surprise. I always want to keep my little jewel mysterious until I decide to flip the fairy dust in the air.…

“I think [my fans] are going to be knocked out.”

And even though live video grabs or even leaked studio tracks have been known to help a disc’s sales, Nicks says that’s not what she’s after: “I don’t really care if anybody buys this record. What I care about is the journey of making the record, and how much fun it has been for me.”

Though she hopes that after the disc comes out, people will buy it the old-fashioned way. “I’m pretty financially stable, so I’m gonna be OK. But what I try to put over to my fans is, try to support the music business, because it’s dying. Anybody who comes out with a new record, I can get it free from the record companies. But I don’t. I buy it, and every little thing that goes with it. Because I’m going to be that one person who does support the business.” Otherwise, “in 20 years, everybody’s going to be listening to — guess who? — Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones. There’s never going to be new music. It’s not going to last.”

Plenty of today’s young female singers and songwriters have cited Nicks as a musical and career influence, and Nicks says it’s a role she’s taken seriously ever since her first solo album, 1981’s “Bella Donna.”

“Absolutely,” says Nicks, who adds that she would have been a teacher if a musical career hadn’t worked out. “I try really hard to teach all these girls, or at least set an example for them.” She wants them to have their own style, but “watch what I’ve done, or how I’ve done it, and use that in their world of striving forward to be a big rock star.”

Mainly, she stresses the importance of writing one’s own material. You make more money that way, and otherwise “you’ll just be known as a singer of other people’s songs. And in my opinion, you should do it all. … So I have my little lecture periods with all of them.”

While we wait for the new disc, she’ll be performing Fleetwood Mac and solo hits. The first of the five shows Nicks is doing this month was a benefit for Cecelia, “a little girl with a difficult kind of cancer,” and she also made a special “Team Cecelia” T-shirt from one of her old drawings, which will be available at this weekend’s show.

And Nicks says she still gets the same charge out of performing that she always has.

“How can you not? … It never gets old.”

Stevie Nicks sings at the MGM Grand at Foxwoods on Saturday night at 8. Call (866) 646-0609 or go to www.mgmatfoxwoods.com for tickets.

STEVIE NICKS WANTS HER FANS TO BE HONORABLE

Stevie Nicks brings summer tour to MGM Grand
Source: Newstimes
Sean Spillane, Staff Writer

After coming off the road following a 2005 tour with Fleetwood Mac, Stevie Nicks planned to get back to the studio to record a new solo album. She was talked out of it by her manager, of all people.

There's no point, she was basically told. After all of her time and expense, Nicks' new creation would just end up available on some nefarious website for free download. That's just the way of the world now in the music business.

"That's why I didn't do another record," Nicks said in a recent phone interview from her Los Angeles home. "I was going to do another record, but my manager basically said not to bother because 150 of your closest fans will buy it and then in the dark of the night they'll just push `send' and send it out to everyone they know.

"I was horrified."

It was following Fleetwood Mac's most recent tour, which ended in December, that Nicks decided to throw caution to the wind and get started on a new album.

"One day I woke up and I just said, `I'm making another record and I don't care if anybody buys it,'" she recalled. "That's OK because at least I'll have done it. At least I made the effort.

"I'm going to hope that my fans are honorable and that they don't -- in the dead of night when nobody can see them -- send out my record to 500 of their friends. That's not because I need the money. It's because I need to know that my fans are honorable."

Nicks' justifiable fear extends to her brief summer tour, which comes to the MGM Grand at Foxwoods Saturday night. She will stick to her solo hits and Fleetwood Mac favorites and is not showcasing any of the new tunes.

"No, because we don't want my brand-new song filmed and put on YouTube the next morning," she said. "Nobody is going to hear one note of this record until it is released. And then it can go everywhere, but at least it was new for one day.

"All you can do is laugh," she added, "but for five years, I cried about this."

In making the new record, Nicks enlisted Dave Stewart of Eurythmics fame to produce and she called the sessions "the best time I've had ever."

She also ended up writing songs with Stewart, something she said she never did with Fleetwood Mac's other main songwriters, Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie.

"It has just been an eye-opener for me," she said. "I've been very selfish about writing with anybody else and I never have -- I didn't write with Lindsey; I didn't write with Christine; I didn't write with anybody.

"I understood, all of a sudden, why people like Paul McCartney and John Lennon and Rodgers and Hammerstein and all of the great songwriting teams wrote together. They still wrote alone, but why they wrote together, also. It opens up something that you don't have, which in my case it's that I don't know thousands of chords.

"I only know four chords, and so writing with Dave opened up a whole side of music that I've never had at my fingertips before. These nine songs that we wrote, actually, are somewhat more musical because they have more in them. It's just been a lot of fun."

Nicks was thrilled when Stewart suggested that they just put her completed poems to music, as she was used to combining verses from several of her poems and creating lyrics in that manner.

"More of my words actually got into these songs because he'd say, `Well, I like this poem and I don't really want to take two verses out. Let's just do it. Let's just put all the verses in,'" Nicks, 62, said. "Of course, I'm just like, `Right on,' because my whole story is going into my song.

"He just starts playing ... and I just basically start reciting, in song, from my poetry page and in about five minutes we had written a really beautiful song and my life was forever changed.

"I think that the product that we've come up with is really spectacular. I could be wrong, but I don't think so. I think it's really, really great. I think people are going to love it."

One of the songs on the new album, which Nicks has targeted for a March 1 release, is especially dear to the singer, "Soldier's Angel." The song came about after Nicks' first trip to visit wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., and at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland.

"I wrote a poem called `Soldier's Angel' in 2005 and it is very much for them," she said. "I was going to make it into a song, but I never did. Well, I finally did it and it's pretty chilling, actually. It's about visiting the soldiers and seeing everything that goes on there -- the good, the bad and the ugly.

"I'm pretty proud of it and I hope the soldiers are proud of it, too, because it's theirs."

MGM Grand at Foxwoods is at 240 MGM Grand Drive, Mashantucket. Saturday, 8 p.m. $85-$135. 866-646-0609, www.mgmatfoxwoods.com.

@PEREZHILTON POSTS ABOUT NEW STEVIE NICKS ALBUM

LINK

TWO FLEETWOOD MAC DOCUMENTARIES AIR THIS WKND IN THE UK

If you missed its first string of broadcast dates back when it first aired in the UK and Ireland last November, 2009 - nows your chance to watch record it.  Or you can watch the documentary here (7 parts)

Date: August 27, 2010
Time: 23:30 (11:30pm)
Duration: 60 minutes
Channel: BBC Four

Also in the UK on BIO UK another documentary will air. [description]: Fleetwood Mac were a band born out of the English blues movement pioneered by John Mayall in the mid-Sixties. This is the story of the rise of the successful soft rock group.

Date: August 28, 2010
Time: 22:00 (10pm)
Duration: 60 minutes
Channel: BIO UK

STEVIE NICKS IS SHOOTING FOR A MARCH RELEASE

Stevie Nicks feels excited about collaboration with Dave Stewart
Syracuse.com
by: Mark Bialczak/The Post Standard

The call rings at precisely the appointed time the evening of Friday the 13th.

“It’s Stevie Nicks,” says the oh-so-recognizable rock voice, full of energy and a fair amount of good cheer.

Wait a sec. Isn’t she a bit hesitant about baring her soul on this day of supreme superstition?

Not a bit.

“I didn’t even know it was Friday the 13th. Anyway, it’s a good day for me, you know,” says the woman who’s long had mystical elements tied to her persona since her whirling, twirling days on stage with Fleetwood Mac and thereafter.

Great grist for the mill.

Headline over an Associated Press story from 1998: “Stevie Nicks Denies Witch Rumor.” In the article, Nicks says, “I can’t believe people are still telling me I’m a witch because I wear black.”

Now, in summer 2010, as Nicks is in the midst of a short tour that includes a Wednesday night stop at the Turning Stone Resort and Casino Event Center in Verona, N.Y., Nicks is in a good mood about a lot of things.

As the 62-year-old singer and songwriter continues, you get the feeling that Nicks’ life is full of a lot of good days.

She’s positively effusive about the aura surrounding her collaboration with Dave Stewart for Nicks’ upcoming solo album, her first since 2001.

“It’s the best time I’ve had since my teens. I was going to say my 20s, but that wasn’t all that much fun. So, since high school,” Nicks says of her work with Stewart. Stewart previously teamed with Annie Lennox in Eurythmics, the British band that landed the song “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This” at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1983.

Nicks teamed with Stewart after he grabbed his guitar, walked into her living room and simply rocked her world.

Before that magical day, Nicks’ co-writing process centered around guitarist Michael Campbell sending her tracks of his lines.

“This is the first time I have ever written in the same room as somebody,” she says.

To prepare for the collaboration, Nicks sent Stewart a collection of 50 poems she’s written. “I didn’t expect him to read it, really, but he did,” she says. “He handed me a poem and said, ‘Let’s start with this one. I love it.’

“He plays guitar and gives me this no-frills English works and says, ‘Go.’ Within 10 minutes we had finished the song,” Nicks says.

“Suddenly a light bulb came on and I found out why great songwriting teams worked between people who could write great songs on their own,” she says. “Lennon and McCartney. Rogers and Hammerstein.”

Their two greatest individual attributes fit together like the last two pieces to a puzzle, Nicks explains.

“He doesn’t write long story poems. I have that to give him,” Nicks says. “I don’t have a million chords. He has that to give me. I thought, I could get at a piano for a thousand years and never write a chord structure like that. The two of us are able to give each other a whole other world.”

The album, produced by Stewart, will contain nine songs they co-wrote and five Nicks wrote alone.

It’s almost done, Nicks says, and they’re shooting for a March release, even though it could be ready months before that.

“We don’t want to be declared a Christmas album with a release around the holidays,” she says. “March is a good time to drop the record and be out on the road.”

She’s not playing any of them in concert now, leaving this tour to her huge hits — solo, such as “Stand Back” and “If Anyone Falls” and with Fleetwood Mac, such as “Rhiannon (Will You Ever Win)” and “Landslide.”

If she played one of the new ones live, she says, a video would be on YouTube minutes later. “I don’t want these songs to be leaked out,” Nicks says. “I want the big reveal to be the record.”

She’ll talk about the songs with enthusiasm, though.

She calls “Italian Summer,” inspired by a trip to Ravello, Italy, “the sweetest love song I’ve ever written. And I didn’t write it about anybody. It’s about being in Italy,” Nicks says.

And she’s proud of “The Soldier’s Angel,” which she’d been promising herself to write since first visiting the soldiers hospital in Bethesda, Md., five years ago.

For that one, she and Stewart stuck with a demo she recorded herself.

“I decided there’s no way to beat the demo I recorded myself at home late at night,” Nicks says. “It’s brutal and honest, for the kids that are injured.”

Nicks and Stewart thoroughly enjoyed their sessions, she says. "We had similar relationships in our pasts,” Nicks says. “Stevie and (Fleetwood Mac guitarist) Lindsey (Buckingham). He and Annie. We have that in common.”

THE DETAILS

What: Stevie Nicks in concert.

When: 8 p.m. Wednesday.

Where: Turning Stone Resort and Casino Event Center, Verona.

Tickets: $80, available at the Event Center

box office, Ticketmaster outlets, www.ticketmaster.com and 877-833-7469.