BY HOWARD COHEN
27th Oct, 2016
For fans craving something fresh on the concert stage, Stevie Nicks’ new 24 Karat Gold Tour is truly golden.
She rehearsed 30 songs with her band to come up with the 20 that made the cut for the tour, which comes to Sunrise’s BB&T Center on Nov. 4 with opening act The Pretenders. Her goal was to include tunes she has never (or rarely) done live in a career that dates to the 1973 “Buckingham Nicks” album with then-boyfriend Lindsey Buckingham.
Fleetwood Mac’s recently reissued “Mirage” album from 1982 includes a disc of outtakes. One of the songs, Stevie Nicks’ “If You Were My Love” is featuring for the first time live on her current 24 Karat Gold Tour.
Rarities like “Bella Donna” and “Wild Heart,” the title tracks of her first two solo albums that are also being reissued in expanded versions this coming Friday, are in the set. So is “Crying in the Night” from “Buckingham Nicks” that predates the couple joining Fleetwood Mac.
Fans will also appreciate the live debuts for a couple of tracks from her most recent solo album, “24 Karat Gold: Songs from the Vault” — “The sex, drugs, rock and roll glory songs between 1969 and 1987,” Nicks said of demos she polished and recorded anew in Nashville in 2014.
“I can never write those songs again. Those were songs I am very proud of. I pulled them off Stevie Nicks and Fleetwood Mac records. The reasons were I didn’t like the production or I didn’t like the way they were recorded. I considered those to be my best songs so what I am going to do is go out with those songs and songs off “In Your Dreams” [her 2011 solo album] I didn’t do live, and it will be really fun.”
Such familiar hits as “Stand Back,” “Edge of Seventeen” and “Rhiannon” still figure in the set. The Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde steps in to sing Tom Petty’s part on “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around.” The show even opens with a rocking outtake from 1981’s “Bella Donna” — “Gold and Braid” — which Nicks hasn’t performed live since 2000.
After more than a year on the road with Fleetwood Mac on a worldwide reunion tour that grossed almost $200 million in the U.S., Nicks has been promising a radical departure from the same old for this tour and a late 2017 return with the Mac.
“Maybe when Fleetwood Mac does our last tour, maybe if I have anything to say about it, we’ll definitely go through the catalog and do a very different set. People have heard the set we’ve had to do all these years. Now they deserve to hear all the great stuff through all of these records,” she said. “I will put my foot down. I’m not going back on the road to do the same things we did on those 220 shows.”
The September release of Fleetwood Mac’s 1982 album, “Mirage,” as an expanded boxed set and the “Bella Donna” and “Wild Heart” reissues have put Nicks in a reflective mood. (The group’s 1987 album, “Tango in the Night” is also forthcoming in deluxe fashion.)
The outtakes discs from “Mirage” and “Bella Donna” include versions of “If You Were My Love,” a song re-recorded for “24 Karat Gold” that she’s premiering live on the tour.
Meantime, the other members of Fleetwood Mac have recorded new songs and want to release a studio album, but Nicks is reluctant to participate. Listening to such classic tracks as “Gypsy” from the “Mirage” sessions hasn’t quite convinced her to go back into the studio with the others.
“When you listen to that song you wish Fleetwood Mac could make those kinds of records now, but it’s just not possible,” Nicks said. “It was such a different world then, and everything was done so differently and everyone was more on the same page. As the years went by, not really everybody, but mostly Lindsey and I, just went such different ways. It’s really hard to come back together.”
Stevie Nicks and The Pretenders perform at 7 p.m. Nov. 4 at BB&T Center, 1 Panther Pkwy., Sunrise. Tickets: $45.25-$320. Ticketmaster.