(Review) Stevie Nicks: In Your Dreams

The dreamy, mystical “Annabel Lee” offers Nicks’ catchiest melody in years, her precise vocals pulsing over a sturdy, John McVie-esque bass and a Lindsey Buckingham-influenced guitar sweep.

Paste Magazine
By Ryan Reed

5 Stars

Amid the fingerpicked folk of “For What It’s Worth,” the most nostalgic, romantic track from Stevie Nicks’ seventh studio album, America’s most beloved and mysterious gypsy princess emotes, “I got to sing; I got to dance; I got to be a part of the great romance.” No mystery there. As a former vocalist and songwriter for ’70s legends Fleetwood Mac, Nicks did experience the ups and the downs, the fame and the decline, the mysticism and the harsh reality of the rock star life.

No matter what she does, Nicks will never escape the large-looming legacy of her former band, the monster collective that cranked out masterpieces like Rumours and Tusk. Not that she’s avoiding the association—she did, after all, record with the band on their 2003 comeback, Say You Will, and participate in the sporadic tours that have taken place since. But she’s never quite reached her former act’s level of acclaim or commercial success, and she’s certainly never crafted that one album that’s come to define her as a solo artist. Her first attempt, 1981’s Bella Donna, has come closest on all counts, sprouting an array of top-notch singles (like “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” and the oft-referenced “Edge of Seventeen”), but even still, most of her best moments as a soloist bear The Mac’s stylistic hallmarks.

Full Review

Stevie Nicks on In Your Dreams and the Duet That Brought Her Back to 1973 With Lindsey Buckingham

Stevie Nicks on In Your Dreams and the Duet That Brought Her Back to 1973 With Lindsey Buckingham

NYMag.com

By: Robert Burke Warren

Stevie Nicks says writing and recording her seventh studio album, In Your Dreams, was probably the most fun she’s had making music since Fleetwood Mac put out its self-titled album in 1975. The thirteen tracks came together at Nicks's Pacific Palisades home in early 2010, with producer-songwriter-guitarist Dave Stewart (Eurythmics), hit-maker Glen Ballard (Alanis Morissette, Michael Jackson, Aerosmith), and Fleetwood Mac alums Lindsey Buckingham and Mick Fleetwood. Vulture spoke with Nicks about her "magical" communal writing process and how it compared to her contentious collaborations with Buckingham.

Why was making this album so much fun for you?

We worked four or five days a week, and we’d break at seven for dinner — we had dinners for ten to twelve people every night — and we’d discuss politics and music and the world, and then went back to work for two or three hours. It was an experience. It was like Magical Mystery Tour. It was so much fun that when it was over and all of the people started packing to go and taking the recording equipment, I just sat down on the couch and started to cry. It was like, "I don't want this to be over."

Read The Full Q&A at NYMag.com

(Review) “In Your Dreams” reminds us that Stevie Nicks has far too much music in her to be solely confined within Fleetwood Mac"

Stevie Nicks
“In Your Dreams”
Reprise
★★★ out of 5
The Oakland Press

It’s been a decade since her last solo studio album, but Nicks sounds anything but rusty here. Former Eurythmics principal Dave Stewart co-wrote seven of these 13 songs and sings on two, clearly pushing Nicks into vintage form on Beatles-leaning cuts like “Everybody Loves You,” “Italian Summer” and the lengthy Edgar Allan Poe adaptation “Annabel Lee,” rockers such as the title track and “Ghosts Are Gone,” and rich melodic fare like the single, “Secret Love,” “For What It’s Worth” and “New Orleans.” Mick Fleetwood and Lindsey Buckingham both show up here -- the latter on the affecting “Soldiers Angel” -- but “In Your Dreams” reminds us that Nicks has far too much music in her to be solely confined within Fleetwood Mac.

CHECK IT OUT... New Warner Bros. Website for STEVIE NICKS! Beautiful...

CHECK IT OUT... New Warner Bros. Site 

(Reviews) Stevie Nicks "might, shockingly and unexpectedly, be Nicks’s best album"

STEVIE NICKS: In Your Dreams (Warner Music) B-
The Vancouver Province - Ultra Sound

Fleetwood Mac’s beloved diva has always relied on a great producer to make her often pedestrian songs spring to life. Dave Stewart, who produced her first disc in 10 years with Glen Ballard, and wrote the music to some of its strongest tracks, might be no Lindsey Buckingham, but he’s been the midwife for what might, shockingly and unexpectedly, be Nicks’s best album. While some songs are expendable and most are simply too long, this is more consistently fun than we had any reason to expect.

STEVIE NICKS: In Your Dreams (Warner Music)
Calgary Herald — Mike Bell

It’s telling that there’s a song on the new Stevie Nicks album inspired by the new Moon film (yes, the film, not the book). Telling because it sets the tone for a dreary, ridiculously maudlin set of aC pap, the type aimed singularly at lonely, frumpy, single women in their mid’40s named Mallory, abigail or susan (but goes by “suze,” cuz it’s more fun!), who’ve given up on finding anyone or anything else to fill their lives. The material congeals into one amorphous blob of soft rock, and features every trite and obvious touchstone in the songwriter handbook, including: war, on the cringe-inducing soldier’s angel; epic tales of star-crossed love on wide sargossa sea (inspired, presumably, by the film, not the novel); and the now ubiquitous new orleans song, titled, quite imaginatively, new orleans. and the biggest crime is that, be it the original material or merely time, nicks no longer sounds like that vibrant gypsy singer of past days. she sounds like, well, like someone who gets inspired by Twilight films.

Smukt Stevie
Stevie Nicks. **** out of 6 Stars
Hvad: In Your Dreams,
producere: Dave Stewart og Glen Ballard.
Hvor: Reprise/Warner.
Denmark: Berlingske Tidende

Det er et vidunderligt genhør med en af rockhistoriens største kvindelige stemmer. Det er helt klassiske folk-sange, kærlighedsballader og grandiose rockschlagere. Sublimt produceret af Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart og Glen Ballard (Alanis Morissette). Og Stevie Nicks selv, for det er naturligvis om hende disse linjer roterer, lyder virkelig som den snart 63-årige levekvinde, hun er, med ridser, revner og buler. Det gælder både selve sangskrivningen og den vokal, man ikke har lyst til at leve uden. Bob Dylan vil elske denne plade, hendes gamle beau, Lindsey Buckingham, ligeså. Det er Nicks’ første soloskive i ti år, og hendes bedste siden de første solodrøn i startfirserne. Fremhæves må den gigantiske strygerbårne ballade »Italian Summer«, hvem der kan lytte til den uden at kny... Hvem der kan undgå at skære sig på »Soldier’s Angel« og synge med på den flyvske titelsang. Et herligt comeback.

(Review) Stevie Nicks "In Your Dreams" 4 STARS "best solo work since she began recording outside Fleetwood Mac"

'In Your Dreams'
Stevie Nicks' 'In Your Dreams' is her best solo work to date
JIM FARBER
New York Daily News

Stevie Nicks lives in a world of clues and innuendos. Her songs read like gossip items with the names cut out, tantalizing bits driven by hints rather than disclosures.

That's never been more true than on her first disk in a decade, on which she made sure to title the lead single "Secret Love," in case you miss her love of the salacious.

The song alludes to an affair Nicks had in the mid-'70s with a coupled man, a guy whose identity she has told journalists she can't quite recall.

Nicks follows that with a song ("For What It's Worth") that addresses another "great romance" with somebody famous on the sly. Later, in "Wide Sargasso Sea," a mysterious "Englishman" moves in with Nicks, but hates her West Coast lifestyle and, so, takes off, while in "Ghosts Are Gone" a shadow of an old lover keeps haunting her dreams.

Snapshot of the New York Daily News Article

It's a vintage Stevie move — a guessing game disguised as poetry. But, then, what else would you expect from a woman who rose to power in a band that turned their own romantic entanglements into something both marketable and mythic? In doing so, Fleetwood Mac functioned like a musical reality show, 30 years before its time.

Luckily, her exploitation of the strategy on "In Your Dreams" isn't the only intriguing thing about it.

(Review) Stevie Nicks – In Your Dreams **** (out of 4 stars)

Stevie Nicks’ ‘In Your Dreams’ 
This Dream Album Might Just Be Her Best Ever 
Written by Greg Victor
Parcbench.com

Here she is — the eternal chronicler of California canyon stream of consciousness sending out notes as if they were bubbles capable of bursting at any altitude, yet entirely capable of floating up to the heavens intact. I’m talking about the one and only Stevie Nicks, of course. In case you feel like treating your ears, your heart and your soul well — Stevie has released her new album, In Your Dreams. It’s one of those albums that comes along in a legend’s career — the milestone album that solidifies the reputation of a true artist forevermore. The queen of folk rock is in royal form. Long may she live and love and make songs to unpack the hidden meanings of it all.

In Your Dreams sounds like it could only have been an extraordinary experience to make. Co-producers Dave Stewart, Glenn Ballard and Stevie Nicks have created an album that attempts to do it all (that’s praise-worthy enough)… what’s more, they damn near succeed. It’s an album bursting with creativity. Yet it maintains its balance through a precise focus. These songs present Stevie as potent as ever without relying on any sort of gimmick. All that is asked of her is to be truer than ever in her delivery. Yeah, that’s all. And she is. It’s just this sort of relaxation within the parameters of tautness that brings out the best in most artists. And it must have been a fun album to make, what with Stevie Nicks writing and recording in her home studio. Writing and recording In Your Dreams must have been as close as it gets to what the experience was in the profound 1970s heyday of American rock.

At 62, the gold dust woman proves that there is legend after Fleetwood Mac. She has turned out the finest solo album of her four-decade career. If you love her unmistakable, ageless vocals and intricate storytelling, you will love this album.