VIDEO: The Wiltern Stevie Nicks - Annabel Lee | Dreams | Sorcerer - Great footage!

I can't even tell you how great the new music sounded on this night... I mean just spectacular. Here are a few beautifully shot videos from Thursday's show.

Annabel Lee:

[more videos - click continue reading]

(Review) Still magical: Stevie Nicks 'In Your Dreams' Grade 'A' (Ireland)

Stevie Nicks: In Your Dreams 
(Reprise CD, 64:47).

I think a 10-year wait between albums is a bit long, especially when you have material as strong as Nicks presents here. In fact, the first single and opening track, “Secret Love,” was written in 1976, when Fleetwood Mac was opening for Peter Frampton at the time. It is about a forbidden relationship, but not one with Frampton, Nicks said.

Nicks’ last album of new material was the Grammy-nominated “Trouble in Shangi-La” 10 years ago. It was written and recorded at her Los Angeles home and is co-produced by Dave Stewart and Glen Ballard, Nicks and Stewart (ex-Eurythmics with Annie Lennox) co-wrote seven of the 13 songs. Former bandmate Lindsey Buckingham sings and plays guitar on “Soldier’s Angel,” a highlight track that easily could have fit on Fleetwood Mac’s smash “Rumours” album. Mick Fleetwood himself contributes drums to the album. However, the core group that made the album was Nicks, Stewart, her longtime friend and musical director Waddy Wachtel and her girls, Sharon Celani and Lori Nicks.

Among the strong album’s many highlights are the travelogue “New Orleans”; “Moonlight (A Vampire’s Dream),” inspired by the “Twilight” series; the orchestrated seduction of “Italian Dreams”; the rocker “Ghosts Are Gone”; and “Annabel Lee,” a 6-plus-minute delight inspired by the 1849 Edgar Allan Poe piece and a meditation on love and death. In one song, she sings, “I’m just a dreamer; I’m just a storyteller,” while in another the 63-year-old singer (her birthday was Thursday) admits her desire to “wear feathers and lace.” Grade: A

Villagesoup - Ireland

By Tom Von Malder

STEVIE NICKS, ‘SOLDIER’S ANGEL’ – SONG REVIEW by @UltClassicRock:

Stevie Nicks has a special message for our armed forces in the form of her new single ‘Soldier’s Angel,’ which appears on her current ‘In Your Dreams’ album and has just been released on the edge of Memorial Day Weekend.

Nicks found inspiration for the song from her many visits with returning veterans at Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval Hospital, writing the track as way to honor those men and women who have served our country.

“I am a soldier’s angel / Through the eyes of a soldier / Through the eyes of a soldier / I am a soldier’s mother / Through the eyes of an angel / I am a soldier myself / And no one walks away from this battle.” Against the backdrop of a singular electric guitar, an unvarnished vocal from Nicks, naked and void of any polish or effect, considers the unique position of each person and how they’re affected by the effects of war and the absence of their loved ones.

Read the full review at Ultimate Classic Rock

Join Stevie Nicks to Support The Yellow Ribbon Fund

(Review) Rollingstone Magazine - Stevie Nicks The Wiltern May 26, 2011

 Stevie Nicks Jams Classics and New Material in Two-Hour L.A. Show
Former Fleetwood Mac frontwoman joined onstage by Lindsey Buckingham, Dave Stewart

By MIKAEL WOOD
MAY 27, 2011
Rollingstone Magazine

Last night at the Wiltern in Los Angeles Stevie Nicks performed at a star-studded concert in celebration of In Your Dreams, her first solo album in a decade. But yesterday the Fleetwood Mac frontwoman also turned 63, and a table full of miniature cupcakes greeted showgoers entering the historic venue, which Nicks said the Mac used for rehearsals back in 1975.

It wasn't the only reminder that this still-potent style icon has been a rock star for longer than Lady Gaga has been alive: Nicks treated Thursday's two-hour show like an in-person episode of VH1's Storytellers, explaining how new tunes such as "Annabel Lee" and "For What It's Worth" connect to classics like "Dreams." "It's all one big thread," she said, a point driven home when Lindsey Buckingham arrived onstage to help her play "Soldier's Angel," a haunting In Your Dreams cut inspired by a trip Nicks took to the Army's Walter Reed Medical Center. (Mick Fleetwood made the scene last night, though he didn't perform.)

(Billboard Review) Stevie Nicks Live at The Wiltern + Video of Opening Number "Stand Back"

Stevie Nicks Shares Songwriting Stories at Star-Studded L.A. Show
Billboard Magazine
by Phil Gallo

At a packed Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles on Thursday (May 26) where the audience included Lindsey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood, Reese Witherspoon and Andy Garcia, Stevie Nicks took advantage of a rare night in which musicians who worked on her first album in a decade, "In Your Dreams," were on hand to make cameo appearances. Nicks, who was celebrating her 63rd birthday, told the audience at the top of the show that she would be telling songwriting tales, even if it meant the show would last three hours and they would beg her to hush up and sing.

It didn't last that long -- she put in a nice two hours, 10 minutes -- but she did have a good number of stories, some whimsical, some historical and none more poignant than the one behind "Soldier's Angel."

One day in 2005, Nicks spent seven hours visiting wounded soldiers at a hospital and, on her way out, an emergency crew rushed in another set of the wounded. "I went in a girl and came out a changed woman," she told the audience.

The experience inspired her to write a poem that she had printed and handed out to soldiers for four years. In November of 2009, she was in London when seven British soldiers were killed in Iraq and media response in London was overwhelming; she wrote a four-page rant in her journal and eventually spent close to a year trying to turn the poem into a song. It never came to fruition.

"I have to call Lindsey," she said, which led them to completing "Soldier's Angel." Buckingham joined Nicks for an acoustic rendering of the tune, with the occasional roll of drums, that became the emotional high point of the show.

"Soldier's Angel" was one of eight songs from the new album performed, each of them explained in detail. "Annabel Lee," written when Nicks was 17, was inspired by an Edgar Alan Poe poem; "Moonlight (A Vampire's Dream)" shares a through line with "Lady From the Mountain"; "For What It's Worth" was written about her summer riding the bus across the U.S. with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. (Heartbreaker guitarist Mike Campbell joined the band for the tune). Nicks called it "the best summer of my life-and you can interpret that any way you like."

"Secret Love," one of several songs to feature Stewart as guest guitarist, was written in 1975, recorded on a cassette and eventually bootlegged many times over. The country-tinged duet "Cheaper Than Free" sprang from a comment Witherspoon made to Nicks and Stewart - she was offering her Nashville condo to Stewart for a couple of weeks, making it "cheaper than free."

Her six-piece band led by Waddy Wachtel and two background singers backed Nicks, who got her bearings straight after a rocky opening half-hour. At the opening of the show, she explained the importance of the Wiltern in her career: In early 1975, it was the venue where she and Buckingham first rehearsed with the other members of Fleetwood Mac - Christine McVie, John McVie and Fleetwood - having joined the band on New Year's Eve 1974.

Here is the set list to Stevie Nicks' Wiltern show:

"Stand Back"
"Annabel Lee"
"Dreams"
"Sorcerer"
"Moonlight (A Vampire's Dream)"
"Gold Dust Woman"
"Ghosts are Gone"
"Soldier's Angel"
"In Your Dreams"
"Rhiannon"
"For What It's Worth"
"Secret Love"
"Fall From Grace"
"Cheaper Than Free"
"Drums"
"Edge of Seventeen"

Encore:

"Love Is"

Video: Stevie Nicks Live at The Wiltern

Soldiers Angel


Anabel Lee


Ghosts Are Gone