Happy Birthday to Stevie Nicks, who celebrates her 75th birthday today (May 26th)!!! Nicks kicks off her next string of tour dates on June 16 at Philadelphia’s Lincoln Financial Field where she’ll play a double bill with Billy Joel.
Back in the fall of 2020, Stevie Nicks released the double-disc live album and film, Live In Concert: The 24 Karat Gold Tour. The collection features 17 tracks including such classics as “Stand Back,” “Gypsy,” and “Edge Of Seventeen,” as well as the first ever live recording of the pre-Fleetwood Mac, 1973 Buckingham Nicks favorite “Crying In The Night,” among other live rarities.
That same month, Nicks released a new socially charged solo single, tilted “Show Them The Way,” featuring Dave Grohl on drums and a video directed by Cameron Crowe.
Nicks recently revealed that she was busy working on a multimedia project based around her 1975 Fleetwood Mac classic “Rhiannon,” telling Rolling Stone in 2020, “Last year I made a pitch to everybody that when this Fleetwood Mac tour is over. I’m taking next year off because I want to work on my Rhiannon book/movie (based on the original Welsh myth that inspired her song). And I want to maybe work with some different producers. I don’t know what I want to do! I just know that I don’t want a tour! So I think it’s not as hard for me as it is for the bands that had a tour coming up this year. Because they’d be getting ready to go into rehearsal right now. So not only is your tour canceled and your rehearsal cancelled, but you’re quarantined to your house?”
She went on to explain, “I have some Rhiannon poetry that I have written over the last 30 years that I’ve kept very quiet. I’m thinking, ‘Well here I have all this time and I have a recording setup.’ And I’m thinking I’m going to start doing some recording. I’m going to start putting some of these really beautiful poems to music, and I have the ability to record them.”
2019 marked the year that Stevie Nicks finally entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist, and was inducted by Harry Styles. During her four-song performance, old flame Don Henley took the stage and duetted with Nicks on their 1981 classic, “Leather And Lace.”
Out now is Stand Back: 1981-2017, the 50-track, triple-CD Stevie Nicks solo compilation. Among the highlights on Stand Back are Nicks’ collaborations over the years, including “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” with Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, “Whenever I Call You Friend” with Kenny Loggins, “Magnet & Steel” with Walter Egan, “Leather And Lace” with Don Henley, “You’re Not The One” with Sheryl Crow, and “Beautiful People Beautiful Problems” with Lana Del Rey.
The set also features a pair of Fleetwood Mac classics from the 1981 Bella Donna tour — “Dreams” and “Rhiannon,” and from her 2009 live album The Soundstage Sessions, a live take of the Tusk classic “Sara” and a cover of Dave Matthews Band‘s “Crash Into Me.”
In October 2014, Stevie Nicks released her latest album, 24 Karat Gold – Songs From The Vault. The tracks are re-recordings of her long unreleased and unfinished demos — many written in the early-’70s, while The album, which hit Number Seven on the Billboard 200 album charts, was co-produced by Nicks, Dave Stewart, and Waddy Wachtel.
That fall, Nicks launched her first photo exhibit in New York City. The show, featuring a selection of Nicks’ formally lit and posed Polaroid photographs, ran for a week at Manhattan’s Morrison Hotel Gallery in SoHo.
Stevie Nicks was the 2014 recipient of the prestigious BMI Icon Award and honored at the 62nd Annual BMI Pop Awards held at L.A.’s Beverly Wilshire Hotel. BMI.com posted that over the course of her career, Stevie Nicks received 12 BMI million-performance citations, along with 12 BMI Pop Awards, a BMI Urban Award, and a BMI Country Award for such hits as “Landslide,” “Rhiannon,” “Dreams,” “Leather And Lace,” and “Gypsy,” among others.
Nicks’ 2011 album, In Your Dreams, entered the Billboard 200 chart at Number Six, selling 52,000 copies during its first week of release, and marked her first Top 10 album in a decade. Her documentary on the album — also called, In Your Dreams — played at over 50 theaters across North America and is now out on DVD. The film showcases the “inner life of Nicks — including costume parties, elaborate dinner feasts, tap dancing, fantasy creations and revealing songwriting and recording sessions, all of which are captured on film.” The doc also features cameos by Lindsey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood, and Reese Witherspoon, alongside several “home-movie” style music videos.
Stevie Nicks was contemplating quitting music in December 1974 when she and then-boyfriend and bandmate Lindsey Buckingham got the break of a lifetime when Mick Fleetwood was checking out Sound City Studio in Los Angeles, where he was considering recording the band’s next album. Staff producer Keith Olson played Fleetwood a Buckingham Nicks track called “Frozen Love” that had been recorded at the studio, with Fleetwood deciding upon first listening that he wanted Buckingham to join Fleetwood Mac. Buckingham told Fleetwood he would join the band — but not without Nicks, and the rest is, as they say, history.
Although it’s been over 45 years since Buckingham and Nicks parted ways as lovers, estranged bandmate Lindsey Buckingham told us the public at large can’t really grasp how tough it was for him to continue being a bandmate and producer with his former longtime live-in girlfriend: “For me personally, it was difficult to continue to produce songs for Stevie, and to do for her — do the right thing, obviously — but in the context of her moving away from me. And it was painful. Obviously, I think the same would be true for John and Christine (McVie).”
Stevie Nicks said that the emotional trauma of everyone in the band suffering through a romantic breakup during the sessions for 1977’s Rumours pushed the group towards cocaine — which kick-started a decade-long addiction that nearly killed her. As cocaine took over the industry, Nicks says that most people believed it was entirely non-addictive: “Y’know, I thought as I was going through the ’70s and cocaine was introduced into everybody‘s life, and told that it was recreational, and that it was not dangerous. But, y’know, that’s what we were told, really. On the other side of that, we were also told, ‘Don’t ever do heroin, because if you do it once, you’ll have to do it every day, because you’ll never feel that good again, and you’ll be chasing that, that high for the rest of your life.’ So, it was like, I was told not to do heroin and told why and didn’t. But cocaine, we were all told was cool — that’s why we did it. Of course, then we all got extremely addicted to it.”
Sheryl Crow told us that Stevie Nicks was her ultimate hero during her teen years: “I thought she was the one young rock n’ roll woman I could relate to and see myself being like. And up until that point I really only had Mick Jagger and people like that, Robert Plant to sort of look at and think, ‘God, I´d like to be like that.’ I never really related to Janis Joplin so much. She was sort of not, in my mind, she wasn’t very together even though she was definitely an artist. When Stevie came around, that rang a real clear bell with me.”
The Eagles‘ Don Henley and Stevie Nicks were romantically linked back in the late-’70s, and scored a 1981 Top Ten hit with their duet “Leather And Lace.” The pair went on to tour with each other in 2005. Henley shed some light on his deep friendship with Nicks: “We go back a long way. We don’t see very much of each other these days. I mean, she’s got her life and I’ve got mine, and there’s certainly nothing going on here on a romantic level. But we’re friends. We feel like we’ve been through a lot of the same things in our careers.”
Stevie Nicks has been a solo superstar for over four decades now. We asked her how she feels about juggling two very high-profile careers over the years: “A solo career and Fleetwood Mac are a really great thing to go back and forth to. Because, y’know, you can do your solo work and then you could do Fleetwood Mac, and then you can go back to your solo work and then you could do Fleetwood Mac. It really is kind of a blessing in many ways. You never get bored, so you can do your thing until you start to get bored and then you can go to the other thing. (Laughs) And then you can do that until you start to get bored and go back to the other thing. And it really makes for staying in a much more excited and uplifted humor for everything that you do when you’re not just doing one thing.”
Despite her many personal and creative changes over the years, Stevie Nicks told us a while back she’s essentially remained the same as she was as a teen in Northern California back in the 1960’s in high school with Lindsey Buckingham: “As I say to Lindsey sometimes, when we talk about how we’ve changed; in a lot of ways, I’m not really very different than the girl I was when I first met him. How I perform has not changed very much. I mean, I saw Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and Grace Slick and I watched carefully and I took from them what I wanted from my own stage performance. And I pretty much stuck with that.”