7th May 2001
Stevie Nicks and Destiny's Child may have released brand new albums last Tuesday, but collaboration, rather than competition, is on their minds.
Nicks, in Toronto yesterday to promote her first solo disc in seven years, Trouble In Shangri-La, returns to L.A. today after Destiny's Child requested she play the guitar in the video for their next single, Bootylicious, which samples Nicks' 1982 solo hit, Edge Of Seventeen.
"We're trying to attempt this wild collaboration -- really we've only spoken for five minutes," said the 52-year-old singer, whose mystical songs, throaty voice and distinctive style helped propel the popularity of Fleetwood Mac's 1977 landmark album, Rumors, and her own successful solo albums.
"I can only get there Monday night and go Tuesday and see if I want to do it. I can play guitar. I just don't play it in front of people, so it's an interesting concept for me to actually stand up there and be the Led Zeppelin girl."
Nicks whose high-heeled suede boots, flowing dresses and feathered hair inspired generations of wannabes, already has her wardrobe picked out: "I think I'm going to wear pants, long, long, and really high shoes and a little velvet tunic that's real fitted you know, so I'll look just totally wild. I hope it happens -- I really do."
Nicks also confirmed some other major news yesterday: Fleetwood Mac, who regrouped for a successful reunion tour in 1997, are heading back into the studio in the fall sans keyboardist-vocalist Christine McVie. They will follow the new album up with another band tour. But Nicks, who begins her own solo tour on July 6 in Pittsburgh (so far there's no confirmed Toronto date), probably won't be able to join drummer Mick Fleetwood, bassist John McVie and guitarist Lindsay Buckingham in the studio until December.
"I gave Lindsay 17 demos from 1970 to 1999, basically," she said. "I had two songs that were going to go on this record that I pulled for Fleetwood Mac because I felt they were better Fleetwood Mac songs than they were Stevie Nicks songs. So that's a very exciting premise for all of us because if you take Chris out of the mix and you also take her out of the trio, it leaves us with Buckingham-Nicks. And it leaves Mick and John and Lindsay in a much more of a guitar-oriented thing."
Despite relationships with both Buckingham and Fleetwood -- among others -- Nicks never married or had any children. She said she got close a couple of times but in the end her songs -- and now a Yorkshire terrier named Sulamith, who greeted visitors at the door of her panoramic-viewed presidential suite yesterday -- became her offspring. Ultimately, she didn't want to be an absentee mom.
"I didn't even get a dog until two-and-a-half-years ago and raised her myself and that's when I really realized that I had really made the right decision. And she is really my baby and she's the light of my life. So I know if I had a little girl or a little precious boy, you know, I would have stopped doing this and I wouldn't be here now."
And if Trouble In Shangri-La doesn't sell, Nick said she'll simply move into animated features and children's books. "I'm a very creative person, so there's so much more that I want to do before I die," she said. "So in order for me not to be hurt, I have to look at it that way because this record is really my heart. So if it were to be a huge bomb, then I would have to not look at it that my work was terrible. I would have to go, 'Well, this is just not the right time.' "
Nicks, who has certainly been a major influence on younger female artists, has many of them on Trouble In Shangri-La. Among them are Sheryl Crow, who Nicks met years ago at the premiere party for the film Boys On The Side. Crow co-produced six tracks and wrote It's Only Love. There's also a piano-playing Sarah McLachlan who appears alongside her producer Pierre Marchand on Love Is. Nicks wound up in Vancouver for a week after Marchand couldn't get into the U.S. due to green card problems.
