blurb from Ventura County Star
Multiple Grammy Award winner Stevie Nicks, while digging through her
old journals, found pages of poems she penned as a teenager and
throughout her career. Now 62, the Fleetwood Mac frontwoman and
accomplished solo artist said that many of those poems, and a few new
songs, will appear in her upcoming, untitled seventh solo studio album.
As fans eagerly await the new album (no release date yet), Nicks
will hit the road with her band at five venues, starting with the Santa
Barbara Bowl on Aug. 4. Proceeds from the concert will help pay the
medical bills of an 8-year-old girl with cancer, Cecilia, the daughter
of a family friend.
In a phone interview with The Star, Nicks talked about her song and
art “vaults,” Cecilia, Edgar Allen Poe, writing with a partner for the
first time, and the upcoming album, which the singer calls “the best
thing” she has ever done.
You just came back from a whirlwind tour with Fleetwood Mac
last year. Why did you decide to take on another, smaller tour in the
middle of recording your new album?
This isn’t really a tour. I’ve been doing a record since February.
Right after the Grammys, I started doing a record with Dave Stewart (of
the Eurythmics) as producer. I got a call a month and a half ago from
my manager and he said, “Well, you’ve had five offers to do some shows
in August. I think you should do them. I know you are doing a record
but it is only a month. If you do these shows it will feel like you’ve
worked all year.” And in this world of financial woe, it’s never a bad
thing to spend a month and it will be like you’ve worked a year.
Is this going to be a respite from being in the studio?
I am having such a ball, I don’t need a respite. It’s always good to
put some money in the bank, so it’s a good thing. It’s always good to
reconnect with everybody, and it is only five shows. I just did 83
shows for Fleetwood Mac. Our last show was on the 21st of December, so
it’s like I just got off the road. For me, this is a breeze. I am
really excited about it. We only have three days of rehearsal and we
haven’t played in almost two years, but my band is so great that we
kind of don’t have to. This is not a tour, but just a few shows. I
don’t know what they are going to call it — the “This Is Not a Tour”
Tour?
You have a plethora of hits to include in your set list. What can fans expect from your shows?
Well, since this is not a tour, you kind of do what you do. You do
all of your hits and then you throw a couple of new things in that you
don’t want to tell anybody about because it’s fun. We’re going to try
to do three songs that we don’t usually do, two of which are not my
songs, and one that I haven’t done in a long time.
I am doing (the Santa Barbara show) because I have a little friend
who is 8 years old. Her name is Cecilia and she has a very rare form of
cancer. It’s called rhabdomyosarcoma, a rare soft tissue cancer. It was
a mass hiding behind her cheekbone and it extended to her cranium and
down to her naval cavity. She has 45 straight weeks of chemotherapy and
six weeks of daily radiation.
I am very good friends with her parents, from Los Angeles, and she
has three sisters. It is very painful, and how in the world she has
managed to get though it as well as she has is just mind-blowing.
We are giving her the proceeds from the show — it is not a benefit.
This is basically my salary and that’s what she is getting. I am also
doing a T-shirt. I have been drawing since 1981 because my best friend
died of leukemia in 1981. I started to draw her little things just
little drawings to put on her wall. I certainly would not have started
to draw if she had not gotten cancer and died of it. So, I am going
back to my vault of drawings and pulling out a really special one and
we’re going to have it printed on T-shirts and sell it. Not only will
it be great because some money will go to Cecilia, but the fans will
get one of my drawings that they would not otherwise get.
Have you always painted?
I have kept my art close to me. I figure when I’m way too old to do
all that I am doing now, I will just flip to the art world. It (my art)
is in bags in my closet and I work on it all the time. I draw all the
time, but I take one with me when I go on a three-month tour. When I
come home, I put that one back in the bag and take another one out and
work on that for three months. They are never finished and I would
never sell them.
So this one is from the vault?
This is one from the Stevie art vault. It has a bunny in it. I
picked it specifically because I though it would be perfect for
Cecilia. I really hope people will come, not just to see me, but
because this is going to be wonderful for Cecilia and she knows about
it. I’m hoping she might be able to come.
People are dying to hear about your album. Are you going to perform songs from it at the show?
No, because it would be filmed and recorded and on YouTube the next
day. So this record, just like my art, will be held very close to the
heart. No one is going to hear it until it comes out because I want
people to be surprised. I want people to hear it in its finished form.
We filmed the whole thing and we had two photographers with us the
whole time.
Is Dave Stewart shooting the film?
It’s his two film people filming it, but he is an amazing
photographer and an amazing cinematographer, so he has his own films.
In fact, everybody films because we all have good cameras. We are
filming all the time. We realized we are doing something that I have
never done before — writing songs with Dave Stewart. I’ve never written
a song with anyone in my whole life. People send me tracks, which mean
they just send me the instrumental of the song. Like Michael Campbell.
I have written many songs to Michael Campbell’s tracks and he has two
on this record. But I don’t write songs sitting in the same room
looking at a person because I just never wanted to. It’s always been a
very solitary experience for me.
When I got together with him (Dave) and asked if he would produce
this record, I gave him a book of poetry that had been pulled by my
best friend Rebecca out of the last seven to eight years of journals,
which was something I would never do.
He came the first day to my house and said, “All right, I like this poem. Why don’t we start with this poem?”
So we had a little recording thing set up hanging over the coffee
table and in front of the couch. He’s sitting across from me and starts
playing the guitar. He just says, “OK. Go,” and I start reciting my
poem. By the end of a half an hour, we had written a great song. I was
completely amazed.
How many songs/poems do you have in those journals?
A lot.
Ballpark number?
Well, probably 60 pages. Usually when you are writing songs from a
formal, long poem, you use a few lines from this poem and a few lines
from that poem. But because of the way we wrote these songs, we really
used the full formal form. The songs are kind of long, but they can
always be edited and that’s how we looked at it. For me, to be able to
get all of my words in was just the best thing ever.
Was this a huge departure from your regular process?
Very much. I also dug out a lot of songs from the song vault. I
pulled songs from 1976 that I don’t know why in the world did not go in
the first Fleetwood Mac album. I must’ve misplaced the cassette. I had
one of my backup singers, my sister-in-law Lori, go to Phoenix and the
storage vault where all of our old cassettes are. She found the
cassette and I played it for Glen Ballard and Dave Stewart at the
studio just a few days ago. It’s kind of been lost for 30 years.
This is a song you penned yourself?
Yes, it was just me and a little piano. I think I wrote it in 1976,
maybe even ’75. It sounds like I’m 5. Glen Ballard said, “So where has
this little gem been hiding?”
I was able to pull four or five songs out of my song vault, and then
a song I wrote about the “Twilight” movies and a song about Hurricane
Katrina and New Orleans. So I came into this record with only two new
songs. I had no idea I was going to write songs with Dave.
At first I wanted to go in front of the piano and suffer and try to
write songs from this poetry. I kind of felt like a part of a great
writing team, like Rodgers and Hammerstein or Lennon and McCartney. I
finally understood what that was and why they did it because it is
amazing to share this experience. And it’s WAY faster. Sometimes
sitting over your piano, in tears, for month after month, trying to get
this one song to work, is almost soul-destroying.
So the songwriting process was easier this time around?
Totally easier and way more fun. I have really never felt as in
control of a situation, because Dave respects me totally as a writer
and as a lyricist and as a poet. We have a song I wrote when I was 17
that is the words to an Edgar Allan Poem called “Annabel Lee.” It’s
just lived in my head since I was 17. I didn’t record it about until 10
years ago. We found the demo and I’m not sure why I didn’t put it in
“Trouble in Shangri-la,” but I guess things got misplaced.
Dave and Glen loved it, so we recorded it. It’s all my song except
they wrote this 30-second English minuet thing that goes in the middle
that is very Annabel Lee-esque. It’s fantastic. That was a good song
without Dave, but with Dave and my musical director and lead guitarist
Waddy Wachtel, between all of them they wrote this amazingly beautiful
little piece of music. It just enhanced the song. I only know four
chords so I could never write that. I took a month of guitar lessons
when I was 15. I play with one note. I play well enough to write, but I
don’t play enough to really play.
I know you have worked with Waddy for a long time, but how has working with Glen and Dave helped you as an artist as well?
I think it has made me a way more confident and powerful artist. I
don’t think I will ever feel the same. I played (music from the new
album) one night at the studio for Reese Witherspoon, who is a friend
and has never heard any of it. She was completely blown away.
We played it for David Wild, the writer, and he said, “Wow, Stevie, you’ve gone and turned into Bob Dylan.”
He made a little comment: “There is blood in these tracks.” I
thought that was the most amazing compliment anyone can pay me as an
artist. I played it, of course, to the president of my record company,
Tom Wally. He is not someone who jumps up and down about anything
unless he is really knocked out and he was thrilled. Three different
people from three different walks of life loved it. This is like a
spattering of humanity here. I feel that this, in my heart this might
be the best thing I have ever done.
You mentioned that a lot of the songs on the album have been
in your “song vault” for years. Did making the album conjure up old
memories?
Well, sure! Every song was and is written about an experience. With
“Annabel Lee,” I remember sitting on my bed, in my mom and dad’s house,
writing that song and being so overwhelmed with the romanticism of it.
All of my songs are windows into my past, for sure, since they all
basically come out of my journals. If something cool happens I write
about it. If nothing happens then I don’t write.
Do you write every day?
I write four or five times a week. I write a page or two and that’s
where my poems come. If I have a day when all I do is drink coffee and
read magazines and read Vogue and watch mindless TV that I love, I
don’t write. I write the important stuff down.
You have been in the industry for many years. What are your inspirations?
In the beginning, when I was in the band Fritz, which was the band
Lindsey Buckingham was in, we started playing pretty immediately. They
already had a little bit of a reputation when I joined the band. We
started opening for a lot of big shows. We opened for Janis Joplin at
Stanford University. I got to be right next to her and watch her for an
hour and a half and I was very impacted by her performance. I saw in
her what I didn’t want to be and I also saw in her what I did want to
be. She was in her silky bell-bottoms and her little slip-on high heels
and a really beautiful silky outfit that I really loved.
And then she started to sing and it really didn’t matter what she
was wearing. It was just all about her singing and how she held that
audience in the palm of her little hands. It was really awe-inspiring
to me to see this extremely powerful woman take that kind of control of
the audience and just be with them like she was in her living room.
From a singing standpoint and from a performance standpoint, she really
touched me.
Another show that really knocked me out was Jimi Hendrix at San Jose
State. It was huge. He was awesome. He was extremely humble and
extremely nice to the audience. Janis was nice to the audience, but she
had been kind of the ugly duckling and you could tell al little bit
that she was like, “Neh, neh, neh , neh look at who I am now, all of
you losers.”
She had a little bit of that arrogant thing, but that was OK because
she was so great. You can be arrogant if you can back it up.
Jimi moved like an angel — like Prince. His feet never touched the
ground. He just blew my mind. I came away from those two shows going,
“Well, I have to remember to always be humble because I preferred his
humbleness. I thought, “That’s going to be me on stage. I will be very
humble on stage always.” And I will talk to the audience. Sometimes I
will talk too much and sometimes I will be too gabby, but I will go
that route and I will try not to be arrogant. It’s easy to be arrogant,
especially in the beginning years when you are a rock ’n’ roll star.
It’s easy to be arrogant because all of a sudden you were rich and a
year and a half ago you were a waitress.
I would think, when putting yourself out there as a
performer, sometimes you need some arrogance because you are constantly
being judged.
And sometimes it is needed, but you can be extremely cool and
fantastically gorgeous and still be humble. That’s what I learned. You
want the people to leave really liking you and you want them to come
back to see you because they really liked you.
What was the best advice you received when you were starting out?
Well, I didn’t know any rock stars until I joined Fleetwood Mac.
When we met them in 1975 I ran right out and got their six or seven
records and listened to all of them so I would have some idea of who
they were and what they did. So as far as people giving us advice, we
didn’t have anybody to give us advice. Everyone was just as crazy as we
were, or crazier, really, because anyone that we did meet on the road
or opening for, they were more famous than us. We never really got to
talk to anybody. If we were opening for Peter Frampton, we barely got
to say “hello” as he was on his way to his limo.
Do Lindsey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood, Christine McVie or Peter Green appear on the upcoming album?
Mick actually does appear. He was there five or six days during the
recording of the last two weeks. He had a lot of fun. He’s on half of
it. He got to hang out with Dave — you know, the English have a great
time together. They were double funny.
Will the film/DVD be a companion to the album?
We are documenting and filming it and I don’t really know what we
are going to do with it, but we know it’s terrific. You have to put on
makeup every day and you have to dress up, so it’s been kind of a
nightmare on that side of it, but in the long run, it’s been so worth
it.
When does the album drop?
It’s basically close to being done now. I can’t really tell you, but
I know we are trying to move fast because we have places to go and
people to see.”
What can fans expect from the new album?
It’s very diversified. There is an Italian love song I wrote when I
was in Italy last summer. There is a crazy, wild rock ’n’ roll song
called “The Ghosts Are Gone.” There is a song about a novel called
“Wide Sargasso Sea,” the precursor to Jane Eyre. It was a crazy movie
in the ’80s that I loved. There are two tracks that Michael Campbell
wrote that I wrote songs on top of, and they are just magical. There
are love songs, hard rock ’n’ roll songs, really contemplative songs
and very Bob Dylan-y songs and there are lots of good poems. I think
people will be really happy with this. And I think it will be a record
people will listen to for a long time and they will be thrilled because
I am thrilled. There is a part of your heart that knows. I think this
could possibly be my best work.
What advice would you give young up-and-coming artists?
Most important, write your own songs. With the Internet piracy and
stuff, if this is what you want to do, you have to put your nose to the
grindstone and you cannot listen to anybody. You have to just write,
write, write. Colbie Caillat jumped on it and started writing songs and
put them on the Internet and said, “I know I’m the daughter of Ken
Caillat and nobody is even going to throw me a bone because they think
I am getting this free from my dad,” which is not true because nobody
can make you a star. Nobody. She did it, so it’s possible.
You kind of have to create a phenomenon. That’s what Dave Stewart
says. You have to really believe in yourself and you really have to
work your butt off and never take no for an answer. Ever.
Talk about it on The LegBoard
MF Blues Band NZ Show Reviewed!
Blurb from The Press
Elder Statesmen Fly With Blues
What looked like a showcase for the faces behind a lot of mature FM radio
hits was actually a rare glimpse of some of the best players in the music
business.
Rhythm and blues was the lifeblood linking this triple treat comprising one
of rock's great drummers (Mick Fleetwood), arguably its finest blue-eyed soul
artist (Michael McDonald) and an adult pop practitioner with a pedigree far
deeper than many suspect (Boz Scaggs).
Fleetwood, the venerable giant with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes,
started things by paying tribute to his roots in the British blues boom with a
set that included Fleetwood Mac classics such as a gloriously authentic-sounding
Black Magic Woman and Albatross.
What made his Blues Band an unheralded sensation was Mac alumni Rick Vito,
surely one of America's finest guitarists, whose shimmering slide guitar and
bluesy vocals made the quartet's set an event in itself.
While Fleetwood thumped the kit and mugged enthusiastically, Vito set the
place on fire, especially in Love That Burns, when he bypassed the microphone to
sing directly to the crowd.
Watching Michael McDonald, you're struck by qualities that lots of
contemporary musicians leave at the door.
He pours endless amounts of soul and passion into his music, whether it's
bright and funky stuff like What a Fool Believes, which got them dancing in the
aisles, or ballads with worrying levels of heartache like I Keep Forgettin'.
The yearning in a lot of Motown is a natural fit for this guy, so familiar
favourites like Heard It Through the Grapevine and Ain't Nothing Like the Real
Thing regain freshness. Happily though, the St Louis native focused on his solo
and Doobie Brothers material, which was carried brilliantly by his crack
six-piece band and back-up vocalist through to a rousing gospel-style finale in
Takin' It to the Streets.
Scaggs, accompanied by yet another group of hand-picked American musicians,
was a contrast in style.
Mention his name and many think of disco-era celebrations, but he has matured
and mellowed into a masterful purveyor of mellow funk and jazz, as well as
blues.
The introductory Jojo was just elegant perfection that could have stopped on
a dime.
It was like being escorted in slow-cruising musical Cadillac carrying supple,
sumptuous grooves and steered by Scaggs' distinctive mellow warble.
Lowdown came halfway through and as the band took solo turns, it was easy to
reflect on a night of deep-seated luxury that was warmly appreciated by the
moderate-sized crowd
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Stevie Lauds Taylor Swift in Time Mag Article!
Stevie-penned article from Time Magazine
"When I first got the call from Taylor Swift about performing with her at this
year's Grammy Awards, I really didn't want to do it. She's 20 years old, 5 ft.
11 in. and slender; I'm 40 years older and, to be frank, neither of the other
two things! I was not about to stand next to this girl on national television.
But her little face just lights up like a star, and I couldn't say no.
Taylor reminds me of myself in her determination and her childlike nature.
It's an innocence that's so special and so rare. This girl writes the songs that
make the whole world sing, like Neil Diamond or Elton John. She sings, she
writes, she performs, she plays great guitar. Taylor can do ballads that could
be considered pop or rock and then switch back into country. When I turned 20
years old, I had just made the serious decision to never be a dental assistant.
Taylor just turned 20, and she's won four Grammys.
I still walk around singing her song "Today Was a Fairytale." All of us girls
want that boy to pick us up and think that we look beautiful even though we're
in jeans and clogs. We want it at 14, and we want it at 60. Taylor is writing
for the universal woman and for the man who wants to know her. The female
rock-'n'-roll-country-pop songwriter is back, and her name is Taylor Swift. And
it's women like her who are going to save the music business."
Talk about it on The LegBoard
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