Stevie Nicks and Dave Stewart Film "In Your Dreams" Out Now

Eurythmics' Dave Stewart Talks His New Film With Stevie Nicks

By Nathan Reese
Refinery29

Over their respective careers, Stevie Nicks and Dave Stewart have accomplished more than just about anyone else in rock 'n' roll. Nicks, as both a solo artist and a driving force behind Fleetwood Mac, continues to captivate audiences young and not so young (including much of the Refinery29 staff), while Stewart's work with the Eurythmics, as well as his career as a producer and activist, has kept him in the limelight for more than three decades. Considering their histories, when we heard that Stewart would be working with Nicks on her latest solo album, we were more than a little bit excited. What we didn't know is that Stewart and Nicks had decided to film the whole process. 

The result is In Your Dreams, a documentary that serves as a time capsule for the months the two spent writing and recording the 2011 album of the same name in Nicks' beautiful California home. The film shows what it's like to have two icons (and friends) throwing ideas back and forth, arguing about creative decisions and shaping the sound of the record. Along the way, there are guest appearances by Lindsey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood, and Reese Witherspoon, who helped contribute to the album. We caught up with Stewart to talk about working with Nicks, recording the album, and staying inspired. If you're interested, you can purchase the film from iTunes here. 

Was it hard to get used to the constant presence of the cameras during the recording process? 

"No, not once I'd established how omnipresent they were. And also nowadays, there are these great, very small cameras. Sometimes we'd set up cameras on tripods, and they'd capture hours of unusable stuff, but then you'd capture magic moments." 

Was there any moment in particular that you were amazed you had captured? 

"There were loads, actually. I loved watching how spot on and focused Stevie was. All these nuances that captured her focus. A lot of artists don't particularly want cameras, but in that sense, she was surprisingly open. It was pretty amazing." 

In the documentary, you mention that you've been filming for much of your life, but Stevie also has a directing credit. 

"I sort of suggested she had a directing credit, [because of her role in] the editing process. She was devouring information. I think because of that it took a lot longer because, interestingly enough, she wanted to [be involved] with the editing process." 

10 tidbits about Fleetwood Mac's Stevie Nicks

By Carla Meyer
The Sacramento Bee

Here's a sobering fact: Stevie Nicks is 65.

Everyone's favorite witchy woman has ushered her crystal visions, white-winged doves and fringed tambourines into early senior citizenhood.

But she has not slowed down, or rather, further slowed down while spinning at a deliberate speed to better display her shawl.

Nicks looks like she's in her mid-50s, tops, and she still tours with Fleetwood Mac (minus Christine McVie, for purists), performing Saturday at Sacramento's Sleep Train Arena.

In 2011, Nicks released the finely crafted "In Your Dreams," her first solo album in 10 years. A

documentary, "Stevie Nicks: In Your Dreams," released on video on demand this week, charts the album's making. The film was directed by Nicks and Dave Stewart, the ex-Eurythmics member and Nicks' collaborator on the album.

They recorded much of the album and shot most of the film in Nicks' huge Southern California house, which appears to have been built in the 1920s. Though the house is accented by the occasional dream-catcher or goddess painting, it is unexpectedly airy and bright, without a scarf-covered lamp in sight.

VIDEOS | PHOTOS: Fleetwood Mac at Staples Center Los Angeles - July 3rd

FLEETWOOD MAC LIVE

LOS ANGELES, CA - STAPLES CENTER

JULY 3, 2013

FAN PHOTOS:

Above Photos by Mindy Harris... Thanks Mindy!

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(below) Photos by Noah Graham

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DREAMS Welcome to the city of Angels!

GOLD DUST WOMAN
My god she's completely transformed this song... SO GOOD!

GO YOUR OWN WAY
DON'T STOP
BIG LOVE
LANDSLIDE
Dedicated to Margi Kent, Christopher Nicks and to both Stevie's and Lindsey's families
MORE PHOTOS FROM LOS ANGELES View Gallery

Fleetwood Mac " the Brits in the group liked to drink and the hippies liked to smoke pot."

It’s been a turbulent ride, but the group is back. "We are the kind of people who don’t all belong in the same band together,' says Lindsey Buckingham.

By George Varga

UT San Diego 

It’s been 39 years since Lindsey Buckingham and his then-girlfriend, Stevie Nicks, joined Mick Fleetwood and John and Christine McVie in Fleetwood Mac.

Faster than you can say “Landslide,” the 8-year-old English blues-rock band and its two new American members shifted gears, changed musical styles and soared to international pop stardom. The 1975 album “Fleetwood Mac” was the group’s first release to top the U.S. charts, while its 1977 masterpiece “Rumours” has now sold more than 40 million copies worldwide and yielded such enduring hits as “Don’t Stop” and “Go Your Own Way.”

Did Buckingham ever imagine then that the band would still be active in 2013 and embarked on a world tour, which includes a Friday stop here at San Diego State University’s Viejas Arena?

“Well, time kind of slips by and it doesn’t seem that long,” said the veteran guitarist and singer-songwriter, speaking from a recent tour stop in Boston. “You know, when you’re in your 20s and contemplating that (long an) amount of time, you think: ‘Gee, will I even still be alive by then?’ So, it’s all kind of relative to your perspective. And it certainly is a surprise, although there are bands that have managed to stick around that long.

“The one thing that probably would have disabused me from thinking then that we’d still be around now is that the chemistry was always so volatile. Not just because there were two couples in Fleetwood Mac who had broken up (before ‘Rumours’ was completed), and that whole subtext, but from the point of view that we are the kind of people who don’t all belong in the same band together.”

Those two couples were, of course, Buckingham and Nicks, who split up while making “Rumours,” and the McVies, who separated before recording sessions for “Rumours” began and soon divorced. For any other band, such upheaval would spell the end. For Fleetwood Mac, it was the launchpad to fame, fortune and more upheaval, including drugs, Fleetwood’s bankruptcy, his on-tour affair with Nicks and enough other ups and downs to fuel a rock ’n’ roll soap opera.

“The conception is the volatility would eventually become a divisive force,” Buckingham said. “But I guess it went the other way; that same dynamic has a musical synergy, and we’re still working through things on a personal level.”

He laughed.

Billy and Rick

"There's no way (39 years ago) I thought we'd still be doing this, now, in this form."

Of course, Fleetwood Mac has hardly remained constant since its “Rumours” heyday.

Buckingham, always the most musically adventurous of the band, quit in 1987. He was replaced by Billy Burnette and Rick Vito. Nicks and Christine McVie left the group in 1990, followed by Vito a year later, at which point Fleetwood Mac ground to a halt.

Clinton Inauguration

In 1993, Buckingham, Nicks, Fleetwood and the McVies reunited to perform at newly elected President Bill Clinton’s inaugural ball (“Don’t Stop” was his campaign theme song). Burnette quit the same year, leaving Fleetwood and the McVies to soldier on. They were soon joined by singer Bekka Bramlett and, briefly, ex-Traffic singer-guitarist Dave Mason. Burnette returned in 1994 and Christine McVie left.

In 1998, a year after the band’s “Rumours” lineup reunited — perhaps as much for financial reasons as artistic ones — Fleetwood Mac was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Christine McVie quit the band, for good, the same year.

Lindsey Buckingham says a love-fest vibe has replaced the heavy drama of old

Fleetwood Mac is back
by Randy Lewis
Los Angeles Times

Randy Lewis examines the band’s legacy as it brings its tour to the Southland. For a notoriously perfectionist band like Fleetwood Mac, it shouldn't come as a big surprise that its live show leaves nothing to chance.

Fleetwood Mac’s 2013 tour, which wraps up with a final run of shows this week in California, is built around a song list that’s gone virtually unchanged since the concert run began in April.

“We’re not one of those bands that throws the names of all their songs in a hat and pulls them out right before they go on stage,” guitarist, songwriter and singer Lindsey Buckingham said last week from a tour stop in Charlotte, N.C. (Buckingham and the band play Staples Center on Wednesday.) “Years ago I was hanging out with Peter Buck and went to several shows R.E.M. did and they literally did just that. That’s one end of the spectrum.

“We’ve always had the sensibility that you work on the set and you structure it, much like a play, where once you’ve got the lines down and blocking right, you freeze it, and then you go out and do what you’re doing night after night,” he said. “You want to structure something that has form and that builds the right dynamic from start to finish.”

This time out that set list runs from “Second Hand News,” the “Rumours” opening track that serves the same function on this tour, through cornerstone hits including ““Rhiannon,” “Gold Dust Woman” and “Go Your Own Way” that are interspersed with deeper tracks such as “Not That Funny,” “Eyes of the World” and “I’m So Afraid.”

When it comes to touring, the group stresses a sense of stability onstage that rarely existed for the members off stage. The group famously channeled feelings unleashed by the disintegrating relationship of Buckingham and Stevie Nicks as well as the failing marriage of John and Christine McVie into the songs that catapulted “Rumours” and the band into the commercial stratosphere. Ever since, interpersonal dynamics have been nearly as big a part of Fleetwood Mac’s history as the music it made.

“You could look ... and think these people don’t belong in the same band together,” he said. “But it’s the differences and disparity that creates a kind of synergy where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and that’s what makes Fleetwood Mac what it is, and what makes the politics of the band what they are.”

Certainly the remaining four core members are long past the big drama that fueled their breakthrough 1975 album “Fleetwood Mac,” the first after Buckingham and Nicks joined the lineup with founding members Mick Fleetwood and John McVie and longtime member Christine McVie.

But drama still surfaces — most recently over whether the group would have a full album out in conjunction with the latest tour. After bumping the band’s tour from 2012 to 2013 so Nicks could continue to support her 2011 solo album “In Your Dreams,” Buckingham, John McVie and Fleetwood worked up eight new tracks for what they hoped would be a new album, anticipating several more from Nicks when she returned to the fold.

But she brought just one, and an old one at that: “Without You,” an unreleased song from the days she and Buckingham recorded and performed as Buckingham Nicks before joining Fleetwood Mac. (There’s talk of a possible Buckingham Nicks tour and album reissue to note the 40th anniversary of that group’s one and only release, but it’s too early for any specifics, Buckingham said.)

“Without You” is one of two songs from “Extended Play,” the new four-song EP released in April, that are incorporated into the live shows. The other is Buckingham’s song “Sad Angel.”

“All four are some of the best stuff we’ve done in a long time,” he said. “I think they fit right in alongside the other songs. ‘Sad Angel’ we play very early in the set, and for the song of Stevie’s, she tells a story — a very long story — as an intro about how it predates our involvement with Fleetwood Mac.... Referring back to the past, it becomes an embodiment of how long Stevie and I have known each other, so that has a certain context of its own that fits in very well.”

Return of the Mac! why the cool kids love them

Page 34 Irish Independent
July 2, 2013

by Ed Power

Irish Independent - July 2, 2013

Music’s most hip are lining up to pay tribute to Fleetwood Mac, says

Their greatest album was recorded in a blizzard of cocaine, champagne and heartache. Thirty five years later, Fleetwood Mac are suddenly the name to drop in fashionable music circles. Tickets for this September's brace of O2 dates sold out in a heartbeat; a ‘ lavish' — i.e. super-expensive — re-issue of their 1977 blockbuster record Rumours is basking in fivestar reviews (you get the impression certain journalists would award six stars were that allowed).

So what, you cry. Fleetwood Mac have always been popular. Until Michael Jackson's Thriller, Rumours was the biggest-selling LP of all time, some 40 million copies residing in record collections around the world. Well, yes. The difference is that today it isn't merely nostalgiahappy oldies flocking to the band. ‘The group’s fastest growing fanbase is among the under 30s.

In trend-conscious alternative pop, in particular, people can't get enough of Fleetwood Mac. Natasha Khan of Mercurynominated outfit Bat For Lashes says her biggest hit, ‘Daniel’, was inspired by their 1987 soft-rock classic ‘ Tango in the Night’.

Last year, cooler than-thou names such as MGMT, Best Coast and Lykki Li lined up to pay tribute to ‘ the Mac' on a covers album.