“One of the best”: Stevie Nicks on the greatest record she ever made
Stevie Nicks has always seen her music as more than the standard pop single fodder. Every lyric she has ever written has been an extension of her soul, and even if it wasn’t the most successful thing in the world, there was no doubt that she meant every word that made it onto a record. While Nicks can claim many different classics throughout her career, she waited decades before making what would become one of her personal favourite records.
Because when looking at Fleetwood Mac’s albums, there was usually an asterisk next to all of their classic songs. Although Nicks wore her heart on her sleeve at every opportunity, I imagine it’s hard going back to an album like Rumours when half of the songs are Lindsey Buckingham singing about the dirty laundry surrounding their relationship.
And even when they managed to make one of the finest records of the 1970s, Tusk wasn’t exactly the return to form that many people thought. The double album idea may have been a good move, but when Buckingham started dominating the conversation and wrote songs that had nothing to do with the band’s rootsy rock sound, it’s a no-brainer why Nicks wanted out for a while.
Although the frontwoman had set herself up for staple releases as a solo artist, they all seemed to be told from different perspectives. Whereas her debut, Bella Donna, was the sound of her being let loose from the chains of ‘The Mac’, Rock a Little showed her at one of the worst periods of her drug habit.
None of them told the full story, but 24k Gold: Songs from the Vault may have been the most comprehensive album she had made by the 2000s. Since the Fleetwood Mac album Say You Will was filled with tunes that Buckingham and Nicks had been working on for years, this solo outing feels like a trip down memory lane for Nicks, as if she took all of the ideas for songs that she never finished and suddenly nursed them back to health.
While it’s easy to put nostalgia goggles on when looking at this kind of album, Nicks said that she wished that recording this kind of album could go on forever, saying, “I think that this is one of the best records I’ve ever made. So I can’t just let this record go. When the Fleetwood Mac tour is over, I might go straight back to Nashville and record eight or nine songs, and Warner Brothers can take it and repackage the album. I have another 10 demos.”
Considering the kind of music that she’s been working on in recent years, Nicks could easily start sprinkling in some of those old songs. If ‘The Lighthouse’ was her way of looking forward to the future, then adding in a few tunes from the vault would be a nice way of balancing the seasoned veteran that we know today with the rock and roll witch that we all fell in love with back in the 1970s.
Whether or not any of those demos see the light of day, 24k Gold is still one of the high watermarks of Nicks’s career. It might have been the most successful record, but for any songwriter, each of these tunes is a masterclass on constructing the perfect marriage between melody and lyrics.
