Category Archives: Stevie Nicks

Veteran Sideman Brett Tuggle on His Years With Fleetwood Mac | Rolling Stone

By Andy Greene
Oct 15, 2020
Rolling Stone Interview Series

This article only contains the Fleetwood Mac centric material, for the complete article, please click this link

THOUSAND OAKS, CALIFORNIA – FEBRUARY 10: Musician Brett Tuggle performs onstage during the ‘Music Strong’ benefit concert at Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza on February 10, 2019 in Thousand Oaks, California. (Photo by Scott Dudelson/Getty Images)


Rolling Stone interview series Unknown Legends features long-form conversations between senior writer Andy Greene and veteran musicians who have toured and recorded alongside icons for years, if not decades. All are renowned in the business, but some are less well known to the general public. Here, these artists tell their complete stories, giving an up close look at life on music’s A list. This edition features keyboardist Brett Tuggle.

Keyboardist Brett Tuggle was travelling through Europe on a 1997 tour with Toto’s Steve Lukather when he heard that Mick Fleetwood was trying to get in touch with him. “I called him from the airport and he said, ‘Brett, we’re putting the Big Five [members of Fleetwood Mac] back together,’” says Tuggle. “‘We’re going to augment the band with a couple of great musicians and you’d be great with Christine [McVie]. Are you in?’”

“Let me check my calendar,” he joked. “Of course, I’m in.”

The single television special that resulted kicked off a two-decade stint for Tuggle as the go-to keyboardist for all Fleetwood Mac tours along with solo treks by Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham in addition to the Buckingham McVie side project.

How did you first enter the world of Fleetwood Mac?
It was because of Mick Fleetwood, his majesty. I was in a band with Mick called the Zoo. We did an album in the Nineties. David Lee Roth wasn’t doing much. I think that was already over. I had gotten a call that Mick was looking for a keyboard player for his band the Zoo, which I had heard of. I didn’t know much about them, but I thought it could be interesting. It had a pretty good lineup of people. It was Bekka Bramlett on lead vocals. She’s Delaney and Bonnie’s daughter. There was also Billy Thorpe from Down Under. He was a big star in Australia. Continue reading Veteran Sideman Brett Tuggle on His Years With Fleetwood Mac | Rolling Stone

Stevie Nicks: “In Fleetwood Mac, Christine McVie and I were a force of nature” | NME

On the eve of her new concert film, the Fleetwood Mac singer talks new solo material, Trump’s response to COVID-19 and the chances of a ‘Rumours’-era reunion

SACRAMENTO, CA – DECEMBER 13: Stevie Nicks performs during her “24 Karat Gold Tour” at Golden 1 Center on December 13, 2016, in Sacramento, California. (Photo by Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images)

Nothing will slow Stevie Nicks down. When Fleetwood Mac concluded their year-long world tour at the end of 2019, the 72-year-old singer songwriter decamped to her Santa Monica home with the intention of taking the year off from touring. Like the rest of us, she didn’t expect to be holed-up for quite so long. “I’ve been quarantined solid since March,” Nicks tells NME. “I figured that I’d probably do about ten gigs and then I was just going to work on a miniseries for Rhiannon but then the door slams and we have a pandemic.”

Out of these dark days, Nicks has kept a busy schedule. ‘Show Them The Way’, worked upon remotely with the help of Dave Grohl, is her first single in six years. She has also helped produce 24 Karat Gold The Concert, a spellbinding concert film from the 2016/7 tour of the same name, which in cinemas for two nights later this month featuring staples such as ‘Edge of Seventeen’ and ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’ alongside unreleased gems and deep cuts.

Whilst a viral TikTok video may have drawn headlines and pushed her song ‘Dreams’ back into the charts recently, the two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Famer had other things on her mind when we caught up with her, including her issues with Trump, the lost ‘Buckingham Nicks’ album and why she is fatalistic if ‘Rumours’era Fleetwood Mac are to never play together again.

Your first single for six years and the 24 Karat Gold The Concert film – this is turning into a very busy time for you…

“In a million years, I never thought I’d have two projects coming out within two weeks of each other. It’s been a lot of work over the last two months, let me tell you. I’m pretty excited and really proud of everything. I think the film is the closest anyone is going to get to a real, serious concert until the pandemic is over. And I think the song is ‘right now’ with what’s going on in our country. Our country is so divisive. We have gone back so far. It is very sad and very scary.” Continue reading Stevie Nicks: “In Fleetwood Mac, Christine McVie and I were a force of nature” | NME

Rock Goddess Stevie Nicks On Insomnia, Inventing Her Own Style, And Her White Knight Harry Styles | Vogue

BY KERRY MCDERMOTT
14 OCTOBER 2020

© Fin Costello

Stevie Nicks had a call from a surprising white knight during the lockdown. Just as people in the UK were offering up their spare tins of tomatoes or dropping off prescriptions for vulnerable neighbours, that same sense of community spirit was flourishing in LA. But when the Fleetwood Mac singer picked up her phone to an offer of help, it was Harry Styles on the line. “He called a couple of times and said if you guys need anything, I can drop by,” says Nicks, 72, who was isolating at her Spanish Colonial home in Santa Monica with one goddaughter, one roommate, one assistant and three dogs.

Of course, Stevie and Styles go back. She’s previously joked that the 26-year-old is “Mick [Fleetwood]’s and my love child”, while he called her “a magical gypsy godmother”. Their love-in continued last year, when the Gucci muse inducted Nicks into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (her second time), and joined her on stage for a rendition of “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around”. So perhaps it’s no wonder that, when the over-70s were instructed to stay at home in March, it was Stevie that Styles thought of on his Erewhon run.

On stage in her signature look, which she scribbled down on a “stick girl” for designer Margi Kent. © Richard McCaffrey

“He is an amazing man,” says Nicks over the phone from California. “He’s so talented, he is a really, really great artist, and he’s so funny. He could actually have a TV show, like James Corden or Johnny Carson – he could do that. When you’re with Harry Styles, you’re not with a famous person, he’s just Harry.” Continue reading Rock Goddess Stevie Nicks On Insomnia, Inventing Her Own Style, And Her White Knight Harry Styles | Vogue

Stevie Nicks on art, ageing and attraction: ‘Botox makes it look like you’re in a satanic cult!’ | The Guardian

By Jenny Stevens
The Guardian
Oct 14, 2020

At 72, the singer is still looking for adventure. She talks about her years with Fleetwood Mac, the abortion that made them possible, and her friendship with Harry Styles

Stevie Nicks: ‘I’m an independent woman, and that is not attractive to men.’ Photograph: Randee St Nicholas

Stevie Nicks has been taking the pandemic even more seriously than most. She has barely left her home in Los Angeles this year. “My assistant, God bless her, she puts on her hazmat suit and goes to get food, otherwise we’d starve to death,” she says. She fell seriously ill in March 2019, ending up in intensive care with double pneumonia; after that shock, she fears contracting Covid-19 could end her singing career: “My mom was on a ventilator for three weeks when she had open-heart surgery and she was hoarse for the rest of her life.”

What would it mean to her to stop singing? “It would kill me,” she says. “It isn’t just singing; it’s that I would never perform again, that I would never dance across the stages of the world again.” She pauses and sighs. “I’m not, at 72 years old, willing to give up my career.”

It is nearly midnight in LA when we speak on the phone; not a problem for Nicks, who is “totally nocturnal”. The night she fell ill last year, she had just become the first woman to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice – an honour that reflects her wild success as one of the lead singers of Fleetwood Mac and as a solo artist, as a writer and singer of raw, magical songs about love and freedom, including Dreams, Rhiannon, Gold Dust Woman, Landslide and Edge of Seventeen. Nicks is unabashedly funny, dry as a bone, often sidling into sarcasm.

I ask about her approach to spirituality. She says that, for all her fears about her career, “some people are really afraid of dying, but I’m not. I’ve always believed in spiritual forces. I absolutely know that my mom is around all the time.” Just after her mother died, in 2012, Nicks was standing in her kitchen with “really bad acid reflux”. “And I felt something almost tap my shoulder and this voice go: ‘It’s that Gatorade you’re drinking,’” she says. “I’d been sick and chugging down the Hawaiian Punch. Now, that’s not some romantic, gothic story of your mother coming back to you. It’s your real mother, walking into your kitchen and saying” – she puts on a rasp – “‘Don’t drink any more of that shit.’” She pauses, waiting for me to laugh, then cackles. Continue reading Stevie Nicks on art, ageing and attraction: ‘Botox makes it look like you’re in a satanic cult!’ | The Guardian

Stevie Nicks shares new song ‘Show Them The Way’ with Dave Grohl on drums | NME

By Josh Martin
9th October 2020
NME

Inspired by a dream Nicks had in 2008

Photo credit: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images.

Stevie Nicks has shared a new single, ‘Show Them The Way’, recorded with Dave Grohl on drums and produced by Greg Kurstin.

In a recent interview with Associated Press, Nicks said the song was inspired by a dream she had in 2008 where she played at a political benefit attended by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., John Lennon, John Lewis, John F. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy. The inspiration is reflected literally in the lyrics.

I was ready for the Kennedys/ I don’t know if it was 1960 or 1963,”

Everything was timeless, even me/ I wasn’t old, I wasn’t young, I was just part of their dream/ A shadow walked with me down the hall, it was Martin Luther King.”

Nicks sings on the track.

Listen to ‘Show Them The Way’ and an acoustic piano version below.

A music video directed by Cameron Crowe will be released soon. Continue reading Stevie Nicks shares new song ‘Show Them The Way’ with Dave Grohl on drums | NME

Chatting with Stevie Nicks: The Reigning Empress of Rock and Roll | Digital Journal

By MARKOS PAPADATOS
October 3, 2020

Two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Stevie Nicks chatted with Digital Journal’s Markos Papadatos about her “24 Karat Gold” concert film, her live album, upcoming single on October 9, and she shared the key to longevity in the music industry.

Track and field legend Wilma Rudolph once said: “Never underestimate the power of dreams and the influence of the human spirit. We are all the same in this notion: The potential for greatness lives within each of us.” Stevie Nicks is a woman that embodies this wise quotation.

Nicks has been hailed by this music aficionado as the perennial “Empress of Rock and Roll,” and rightfully so. She possesses one of the most significant and powerful voices in the music business; moreover, she has had an illustrious music career that has spanned well over five decades. She scored six Top 10 albums, eight Grammy nominations for her solo work, and she has sold in excess of 140 million albums collectively as a solo recording artist and as part of the iconic rock group Fleetwood Mac.

She earned several Grammy Awards as a member of the Fleetwood Mac: their seminal studio album Rumours won the Grammy for “Album of the Year” in 1978, and two Fleetwood Mac albums have been inducted into the coveted Grammy Hall of Fame: Rumours in 2003 and Fleetwood Mac in 2016 respectively. Last year, she made music history because she was the first woman inducted into the coveted Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice.

This interview delves into the conscience of Stevie Nicks as a prolific songwriter, vocalist, poet, storyteller, and a song stylist. Continue reading Chatting with Stevie Nicks: The Reigning Empress of Rock and Roll | Digital Journal

The moonlight confessions of Stevie Nicks | Los Angeles Times

AMY KAUFMAN
SEP. 30, 2020

“It makes me very, very sad,” says Nicks of the split with her former romantic partner and bandmate Lindsey Buckingham.(Christopher Buzelli / For The Times)

Stevie Nicks was in her early 30s when her father told her she’d never get married.

She had just released her solo album, 1981’s “Bella Donna,” embarking on a second career that would fill any time she wasn’t spending with Fleetwood Mac. Her music, Nicks’ dad said, would always consume her.

She considered the possibility. She certainly was not a woman who liked to be told what to do. Still, the words stung: “No man would be happy being Mr. Stevie Nicks for very long.” Had he doomed her to a life of solitude simply by speaking the thought into existence?

“Nobody,” she laughs now, decades later, “dooms me to anything but myself.”

Steve Nicks on life after the pandemic: “I want to be able to pull up those black velvet platform boots and put on my black chiffon outfit and twirl onto a stage again.”(Randee St. Nichols)

At 72, Nicks has had a few great loves. Some we know about — Lindsey Buckingham, Don Henley, JD Souther — and many we don’t. She did get married once, back in 1983, an ill-fated three-month relationship with the husband of her best friend, who had just died of leukemia. She would have considered taking another spouse, had she met the right person — someone who wasn’t jealous of her, who got a kick out of her crazy girlfriends. But ultimately, her father pretty much got it right: She has yet to feel more devoted toward a man than her muse.

Which is why, in part, this pandemic has hit her so hard. Two projects due out this month have, she says, offered a vestige of normalcy: “24 Karat Gold: The Concert,” a cinematic version of her 2017 solo show, and a politically minded new single, “Show Them the Way,” which will be accompanied by a Cameron Crowe-directed music video. She’s also decided that she wants to make another solo album and plans to spend the rest of quarantine turning the poetry from her journals into lyrics.

But with touring on hold, she’s bored and depressed, conditions she’s claimed to never before suffer from. She’s cripplingly afraid of catching the coronavirus, fearing that going on a ventilator would leave her hoarse and ruin her voice.

“I have put a magical shield around me, because I am not going to give up the last eight years — what I call my last youthful years — of doing this,” she vows. “I want to be able to pull up those black velvet platform boots and put on my black chiffon outfit and twirl onto a stage again.”

Continue reading The moonlight confessions of Stevie Nicks | Los Angeles Times

Stevie Nicks Announces ’24 Karat Gold’ Concert Film, Live Album | Rolling Stone

By Brittany Spanos
September 16, 2020
Rolling Stone

Event will screen in cinemas for two nights only in October

Stevie Nicks fans can relive her 24 Karat Gold tour with a special concert film, Stevie Nicks 24 Karat Gold the Concert, which will screen in theaters for two nights only this fall via Trafalgar Releasing.

Joe Thomas directed the film, which was recorded during Nicks’ 2017 stops in Indianapolis and Pittsburgh. Tickets will go on sale on September 23rd through the movie’s official site and screen on October 21st and 25th at select cinemas, drive-ins and exhibition spaces around the world. The film will also feature exclusive stories about both new and classic songs Nicks has written throughout both her solo career and as a member of Fleetwood Mac.

On October 30th, Nicks will release the accompanying live album as well in both physical and digital formats. The two-CD version will be available exclusively at Target, while Barnes & Noble will be selling a “Crystal-Clear” two-LP vinyl version. A black vinyl version will be available at all other record retailers. The live version of Nicks’ Fleetwood Mac classic “Gypsy” from the concert film and album is streaming now.

UPDATE: Amazon UK are listing the “Crystal-Clear” two-LP vinyl version as well as the CD version

“The 24 Karat Gold Tour was my all-time favorite tour,” Nicks said in a statement. “I not only got to sing my songs but I was able to tell their stories for the first time. I love having the opportunity to share this concert with my fans.” Continue reading Stevie Nicks Announces ’24 Karat Gold’ Concert Film, Live Album | Rolling Stone

Stevie Nicks would ‘probably never sing again’ if she contracted coronavirus as she warns about importance of wearing masks | The Independent

Isobel Lewis
August 12, 2020
The Independent

‘I don’t have much time, I am 72 years old’

Stevie Nicks has shared fears that she would never be able to sing again if she contracted coronavirus.

Seventy-two-year-old Nicks, who is best known as the frontwoman of Fleetwood Mac, shared an emotional Facebook post on Tuesday (11 August) warning her fans about the continuing severity of the virus.

Stressing the importance of wearing social distancing, Nicks said that wearing a mask was not a political statement, but protection from a “silent killer hiding in the shadows”.

Listing the symptoms of Covid-19, she wrote: “If I get it, I will probably never sing again. Put me on a ventilator and I will be hoarse for the rest of my life. I don’t have much time, I am 72 years old.

“This virus can kill you. It can kill me. Kill my chances of pulling on those boots and hitting the road. Kill the chances that any of us in the music community will ever get back to the stage, because we would never put you in danger, never take you and your life for granted.”

Nicks performing in 2019 at her Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame induction ceremony (Getty Images)

Nicks, who last released music in 2014, revealed in March that she had been inspired to start writing songs again in lockdown thanks to Harry Styles.

“I know you are doing everything you can to help the situation we are all in,” she tweeted.

“I am getting all my paintings and drawings out, listening to music (mostly Harry Styles’Fine Line) and being inspired by him to write some new songs and poetry. Way to go H – it is your Rumours.”

Stevie Nicks on Her Life in Isolation: ‘We Have to Believe’ | Rolling Stone

April 30, 2020
Rolling Stone
by Brian Hiatt

Group chats with Fleetwood Mac, listening to Harry Styles and more snapshots from Nicks’ quarantine life

Mandatory Credit: Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP/Shutterstock (10182025e)
Inductee Stevie Nicks performs at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony at the Barclays Center, in New York
2019 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony – Show, New York, USA – 29 Mar 2019

Stevie Nicks had always intended 2020 to be a relatively quiet year, but not quite this quiet. She’s been battling a case of Epstein-Barr virus since January, and has been safely holed up in one of her California properties with three friends and her dog Lily for weeks now. She was in good spirits in a late-night phone conversation not long ago, where she answered our quarantine questions and more. “You really do start to understand, maybe, what our parents went through in World War Two,” she says. “You start thinking of all the things that have happened that have caused people’s lives to just turn upside down.”

How are you holding up emotionally through all this?
I had planned to take this year off. We’ve been on the road one way or another, whether it was me or whether it be with Mac, since basically since 2009. I had seven months off in 2016. That’s the only vacation I had, and I worked at home doing all kinds of different stuff during that seven months. It’s been solid touring ever since. So 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? Continue reading Stevie Nicks on Her Life in Isolation: ‘We Have to Believe’ | Rolling Stone