Stevie Nicks Takes Toronto - Documentary screenings and a Fleetwood Mac show at the ACC

Stevie with moderator Magali Simard

A week of documentary screenings and a Fleetwood Mac show at the ACC prove that classic rock is still king
Toronto Standard

Tonight, Stevie Nicks made an appearance at two gala screenings of her In Your Dreams documentary at the TIFF Bell Lightbox to answer fans’ questions about the film and her decades-long music career. The film follows the production of her first solo album in a decade, produced by the Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart in Nicks’ home studio in 2010.

Stewart and Nicks directed the film which gives fans an inside look at Nicks’ creative process. For instance, before this album, she had never written with another person, and has no formal musical training, instead tapping away at a keyboard to figure out melodies. While tonight’s gala screenings were sold out, the documentary will continue to screen Tuesday through Thursday at TIFF, minus the post-show Q&A with Nicks.

The screenings come part and parcel of Nicks’ visit to Toronto as part of Fleetwood Mac’s current world tour. They play the Air Canada Centre tomorrow night. The popularity of the screenings and concert show the endurance of Nick’s and Fleetwood Mac’s music, nearly 50 years since the group’s inception, and continues the trend of classic rock reunion shows that have become the norm over the past few years.

Stevie Nicks stirs up fandemonium in Toronto
ON SCREEN / Singer is in town promoting her new documentary

Xtra

Stevie arriving on the TIFF Red Carpet (Courtesy of Twitter)

Right Photo: Mick Fleetwood and John McVie attended the screening

Interview: Dave Stewart Co-director, Stevie Nicks: In Your Dreams

Dave Stewart: Co-director, Stevie Nicks: In Your Dreams
By SUSAN G. COLE
Now Toronto

Dave Stewart put on every one of his musical hats – producer, guitarist, songwriter – for Stevie Nicks’s 2011 disc, In Your Dreams. He adds feature film co-director to his artistic resumé with this documentary tracking the album’s creative process and probing Nicks’s personal history and inspirations. He talked with NOW about that collaboration and why it worked. Stevie Nicks: In Your Dreams screens at the TIFF Bell Lightbox April 15 to 18.

Given your history with Annie Lennox, it’s obvious you like to work with strong women.

It’s my favourite thing. It’s much more rewarding than working with dumb women. I like working with strong men, too – Tom Petty, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger. They’re very vibrant thinkers. They have inquisitive minds so have much more to add to the process.

What makes you a good collaborator?

People have different ways of getting things done. Some people can be very controlling and not end up with what they want. But my way of working is to be not controlling and end up getting what I want. The smart thing to do is choose to work to with brilliant people. There’s less to do.

What surprised you about Stevie Nicks once you started creating together?

Her loyalty. She’s incredibly loyal to her fans and the people she’s worked with for years and years – her two backup singers in particular, her friends and her family. She’s kept all that private.

Then there’s her incredible work ethic – it’s unbelievable how hard she works. Most people wouldn’t think that about her. They remember her wild periods or imagine her as a kind of ethereal, floating figure. And then you get into the workplace with her and she’s running the ship. 

She’s more erudite than I expected, talking about Keats and Edgar Allan Poe....

But fans know Stevie is that character who’s walked out of an Edgar Allan Poe poem. She talks about how when she was a little girl she was sure that everyone had this thing about Poe, and still to this day she thinks that, when really, no, probably not. She’s always had this side of her – romantic but wandering to the dark side, a kind of Gothic world of writing. She also has a huge connection to something mystical and otherworldly, and when you’re with her and she talks about it, she makes it convincing because she doesn’t talk about it in an airy-fairy way.

How did the film project come about?

When we first started making the movie, Stevie didn’t realize it could be a movie. She thought we were documenting stuff in case we forgot it. But then I did some editing, and when I showed her some of the stuff and suggested it could be part documentary, part something bigger, a snapshot of what happened but also a snapshot of how her mind works, she started to get more intrigued.

You recorded the disc in the living room of Nicks’s mansion – hard enough. But it must have been just as hard to shoot there.

I had a few people miked up, and some ambient microphones. There weren’t that many cameras, and the camera operators worked discreetly. We used those Canon cameras that use very little lighåt, because there’s nothing worse for an artist than trying to work with a bright light shining in your face.

REVIEW: Stevie Nicks’ dream state - Nicks turns her poetry into lyrics 4/5 Stars

Stevie Nicks' sweet Dreams

4/5 Stars - Toronto Star

By Jane Stevenson, QMI Agency
Toronto Sun
4/5 STARS

TORONTO - In the feature film about her life, Stevie Nicks wants Reese Witherspoon to play her.

This is one of many revelations found in In Your Dreams, the documentary about the making of Nicks’ 2011 solo album of the same name, co-directed by Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart, who also helmed the record with Glen Ballard.

On and off, over the course of a year, Stewart shot 50 hours of footage of the now 64-year-old Nicks, most intimately at her mansion high in the hills above Los Angeles. The resulting film features cameos by Witherspoon, Fleetwood Mac members Mick Fleetwood and Lindsey Buckingham, Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell and, of course, Stewart, who is a bit of a character himself.

When he’s not belting back the occasional martini, he’s got either an acoustic or electric guitar or camera in his hand.

During one funny moment, Stewart is filming Nicks and she looks up and says: “Oh, that was you the whole time. I’m going like, ‘Who’s the chick in the white outfit that’s filming us?’”

One genuine surprise? That until writing with Stewart, Nicks had never ever written a song with another person in the same room before.

“I don’t like to be told what to do,” she says at one point.

In another scene, she is seen arguing with Buckingham over tense changes in her lyrics. “Would you say that to Bob Dylan?” Nicks asks him.

And when Stewart tries to insert some “too siren-y, too weird” guitar effects into a song, Nicks says bluntly: “Don’t quit your day job.”

No pushover is Nicks. And she’s honest too.

She admits to ending up with a demo reel of 23 Campbell tracks in the ’80s after visiting Tom Petty and stealing one - Runaway Trains - for a Fleetwood Mac song until Petty got wind of it.

“All I could hear was Tom screaming,” she says to the camera. “I was so busted.”

The movie is certain to appeal to fans of Nicks, whose gypsy persona, fashion style and throaty voice made her an icon. And for those who aren't devotees, the behind-the-scenes music-making with some of rock’s top musicians will fascinate.

FILM | Stevie Nicks "In Your Dreams"

by Jason Steidman
BlogTO

Singer/songwriter Steve Nicks, known from her association with the group Fleetwood Mac, will be present tonight at a special screening of the film, In Your Dreams, a documentary about the making of her 2011 album of the same name. This album was her first effort in ten years. A top notch cast of LA production and musical talent was enlisted to make it happen, led by Dave Stewart, a well-known producer whose career was launched back in the early '80s as part of the group The Eurythmics. The film follows the project from the writing process onwards, and also features biographical passages, and footage from Nick's childhood and career.

In Your Dreams: Stevie Nicks is at the TIFF Bell Lightbox tonight at 7 and 7:30, with Nicks conducting a Q&A afterward.

Sweet dreams — musically anyway — are made of this.

by Jane Stevens
Ottawa Sun

Two rock icons, Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks and Dave Stewart of The Eurythmics, worked together on Nicks’ first solo album in a decade, 2011’s In Your Dreams.

But their creative collaboration didn't end there.

There’s also a Stewart-directed 2013 behind- the-scenes documentary of the same name about making the record, co-produced by Glen Ballard, that will debut in Toronto Monday night. The film then moves across Canada over the next several weeks.

“It’s a movie that Stevie Nicks’ fans love,” says Stewart, 60, from Los Angeles.

“Obviously, she’s been a bit of an enigma and very sort of mysterious and there’s an insight not only into her world and her home and how she works but inside her mind as well. How she works creatively and how she thinks. What’s good is that if you’re not a Stevie Nicks fan in particular and you watch it, you get kind of surprised at how kind of intense and focused she is working. Because I think a lot of the views or people’s opinions about artists during certain periods of their life is kind of spaced out, hippie like. And then you see Stevie at work in the film and you go, ‘Holy s---!’ She’s like a force of nature.”

Turns out Stewart and Nicks met 30 years ago.

The occasion was an Eurythmics show in Los Angeles and Nicks came backstage.

“We got on really well,” says Stewart. “And I went back to stay in L.A. for a bit and we hung out and I was writing just experimental stuff with her and I ended up writing this song for her but then Tom Petty liked it and wanted to record it — Don’t Come Around Here No More — that’s why at the end (of the film, Stevie) says, ‘ Hey, Dave, definitely come around here!’ Because it became this epic sort of song for Tom.”

Stewart and Nicks regrouped again significantly in 2006 when Nicks appeared on a pilot for Stewart’s HBO music- themed interview show. In the documentary, she reveals after that collaboration she knew she wanted Stewart to produce either her next solo album or a Fleetwood Mac record.

He says after recording the album with Nicks and shooting about 50 hours of footage — boiled down to one hour and 40 minutes on-screen — he learned two significant things about her.

“Stevie’s incredibly generous. She’s always kept the same backing singers, the same friends ... even the sounds guys and everybody. They've all stuck by her. They’re so loyal to her. And that’s an amazing thing that I discovered about Stevie of how deep that runs within her, this loyalty. And then all of the time and effort she puts into putting her lyrics together. Training herself in books and reading so much literature. She’s steeped in her job. She said it herself. She purposely decided not to have children because she just knew she couldn't do both. It’s a massive decision.”

In Your Dreams, reviewed: In the Nicks of it

The week ahead for "In Your Dreams"

Fans who have seen this film across the U.S. absolutely loved it!... I think if you've been along for the ride from the inception of this album (and film) like many of us feel we have been, you'll get it... Obviously as an 'outsider' looking in, Mr. Bidini will have a different take on this film and situation, which is not a career spanning document but one of an experience of two seemingly different people, yet very similar in a lot of ways coming together and trying to capture the magic that occurred over that year (2010) of recording Stevie's "In Your Dreams".  But it is interesting seeing another perspective.

The National Post (Canada)

by Dave Bidini

A documentary that follows Stevie Nicks as she begins writing and recording her first solo album in nearly a decade.

“And herewith be the tale of the bescarfed nymphette spritzed with the gay mist of ladyhood traipsing about her earthen wares and sacred beads while cast in the glow of an everlasting aurora” is how any review about anything regarding Stevie Nicks should probably start. And yet the film, In Your Dreams, about the Fleetwood Mac sirenette, begins, regrettably, without much of her medieval-by-way-of-Topanga hoodoo or late ’70s Angelino imagery choosing, instead, to put us on a jet — a private jet, Nicks’s jet — before lapsing into footage of fans outside some indeterminate concert bowl in some indeterminate American city espousing life-changing testimony bout the bigness of Nicks’s songs as they relate to their lives. After too much of this, the plane lands. A limo. More fans telling the camera (and, ostensibly, telling Nicks): “I love you.” Then Nicks being made up backstage. Nicks shaking her bracelets. There’s the dull roar of the crowd, some lights, and: go. Lips struggling to push a food cart into his old highschool cafeteria in the opening moments of Anvil: The Story of Anvil this is not.

Movies about rock ’n’ roll — its scent, its pulp, its shattering emotional properties — are inherently disappointing because they’re not rock ’n’ roll, although In Your Dreams is disappointing because it’s not even really a movie. Instead, it’s a vanity postcard co-directed and co-produced by the film’s two principles, Nicks and Dave Stewart of The Tourists/Eurythmics, who are to cinematic objectivity what Stewart was to the ’80s neckbeard: ill-suited and gaudy. Because Stewart and Nicks are new filmmakers — and because everyone these days is a pocket Buñuel with their digital apparatii — the movie plays as if demanding visual Ritalin: colour becoming black and white becoming bordered with Kodak film stock becoming archival footage becoming video before eventually blurring into a kind of artless everything. Within the first few minutes, Stewart and Nicks are seen talking about the genesis of their working relationship — they have gathered to make her first record in 10 years — which amounts to each of them, by turns, telling the other how great they are. It’s like an SCTV sketch only no one gets blown up.

The concept of the film is all right — it’s essentially a making-of doc that hiccups between tiresome music videos of the songs — yet it’s a wonder that neither of the musicians/filmmakers’ watched VH1’s Classic Albums instalment on Fleetwood Mac’s seminal Rumours, a fine 60 minutes that reveals more about Nicks and her life than anything here. That said, it’s easy to imagine them deciding that they could do better, the massivity of their ego being what it is. Long and terrible passages in the film are spent while Nicks lounges on a settee worrying over lyrics, which are also long and terrible. While watching people write is rarely effective cinema (“Let’s face the music and dance” is a great lyric, but I doubt the scribbling down of its words would make a good film), the only thing less gripping is watching people track boring albums, which Nicks and her band do throughout In Your Dreams. In these scenes, Stewart directs himself pitching advice while wearing his fedora and sunglasses, which he never takes off. The truth is that, after a few weeks in the studio, one is rarely in good enough shape to get dressed, let alone dress well. Being in the studio is like being shipwrecked: oxygen-deprived and starving for normalcy and a decent meal. There’s nothing here that comes close to reflecting this experience. In the end, this film, like the sessions that produced Nicks’ album, reeks of catering.

Visit inyourdreamsmovie.com for more information.


A Stevie Nicks documentary by Stevie Nicks
The Globe and Mail (Canada)
by Brad Wheeler

Billed as an “intimate portrait of one of rock’s most enduring and legendary artists,” In Your Dreams, a documentary on the making of Stevie Nicks’s 2011 album of the same name, runs the risk of being too intimate for its own good. Musician Dave Stewart, who co-produced the album, shared directorial credit on the film with the singer herself. We spoke with him about a documentary being too close to its subject.

Stevie Nicks was involved in the editing of the documentary. Without someone independent doing it, doesn’t In Your Dreams end up being a fans-only film?

I suppose. My favourite music documentary is D.A. Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back, on Bob Dylan. But that kind of film would have never been made with Stevie. She never would have allowed an independent filmmaker to film her making a record. She wouldn’t have felt comfortable writing and recording with a camera filming. This came about naturally. A lot of it in the beginning was filmed on a cell phone.

I cringed watching her visit with soldiers in the hospital. Isn’t that a bit self-serving on her part?

Maybe. But it’s something she’s been doing for quite a while, that kind of charitable endeavour. It’s something she wanted to put in. She felt very seriously about the song Soldier’s Angel. The film could have had many different narratives. But once she got involved in the editing and really put herself into it, it meant that it wasn’t going to be the movie I would have exactly made.

At the end, she describes the experience of making the album as the best year of her life. You were there. Why do you think she felt so strongly about it?

I think there was a realization that happened to her – that the album was a collaboration, and that it was possible. She’d been closed in and locked in, if you know what I mean, and then the whole world opened up for her. I’m sure she could spend a lot of time in her house on her own, or with the people she normally works with, and not realize that there’s a world out there to play with.

In Your Dreams screens April 16 to 18 (special screenings on April 15 with Nicks Q&A sessions are sold out). TIFF Bell Lightbox, 350 King St. W., 416-599-8433.

In Your Dreams runs from April 16-18 at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto, with further screenings across Canada listed below.

Amazing photos of Dave Grohl with Stevie Nicks - Relix Magazine is out now!

Relix Magazine with Stevie and Dave on the cover (s) is out now... Check your local magazine retailer.  

Dave Grohl & Stevie Nicks 

The Old Dreams & New Realities of Rock and Roll

Photos by Danny Clinch - More on his website

Read an excerpt from the magazine at Relix

People seem to be having a hard time finding this magazine especially at Barnes and Noble.  Not sure why they aren't stocking it - yet. Another individual was told by B&N that it comes out in May, when it's actually OUT NOW!.  An alternative to buying at a magazine store is ordering it directly through Relix. You can buy single issues directly through them. In the U.S., it will cost you $3.99 extra for shipping on top of the magazine price of $6.99 (they also offer international shipping).  A cheaper alternative would be to just subscribe to the magazine for one year at a discounted price (which ends on April 17th).  The price is $20 and Relix will send you BOTH magazines featuring the different covers... So it's up to you. $11.00 for one magazine or $20 for both covers plus a yearly subscription.  Click through here for more details at RELIX on the subscription discount. Use Promo code SPECIAL in the promo spot HERE to place your subscription order.

April 25th - The Soundtrack Series welcomes Fleetwood Mac Producer Ken Caillat to The Gallery

Ken Caillat will make an appearance at The Gallery at Le Poisson Rouge - 158 Bleecker St, New York, NY on Thursday, April 25th at 8pm.  The Soundtrack Series produced and hosted by Dana Rossi on the fourth Thursday of every month will feature Ken speaking about his book "Making Rumours - The Inside story of the Classic Fleetwood Mac Album", which chronicles his experience as co-producer in the studio with Fleetwood Mac during the creation of  1977's "Rumours".  Get the "Making Rumours" book, bring it along and Ken will be happy to sign your copy.

Advance Tickets to this engagement can be purchased on-line at Le Poisson Rouge.  Tickets are $5 in advance, with day of tickets at $8.  

The Soundtrack Series (Website)
The Soundtrack Series (Facebook)
Le Poisson Rouge (Website)
The Gallery at LPR (Facebook)
Making Rumours (Website)
Rumours - The Book (Facebook)