With her fourth solo LP - THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MIRROR - STEVIE NICKS has created a classic album - a collection of 12 finely crafted songs that gradually reveal their true beauty on successive listenings.
Recorded either side of Christmas in Buckinghamshire and Los Angeles, the album features some of the top musicians from both sides of the Atlantic including saxophonist Kenny G (on TWO KINDS OF LOVE and ALICE) and Bruce Hornsby (keyboards on JULIET) who duets on TWO KINDS OF LOVE.
Although she regards her songs as her children and states, "Choosing one over another is a very painful process for me," Stevie is delighted with results achieved by producer Rupert I-line. "There was just a look in his eye and a feeling about him that I liked. I knew we might get into a row or two, but above all else I trusted him. My decision to work with Rupert was made on the basis that I liked him most. Simple as that!"
"I made two stipulations about the project," Stevie says. "The first was that I wasn't prepared to spend a year in the studio under any circumstance - I just can't do it. I get cabin fever. And secondly, I wanted my songs to sound like my songs. whether or not the finished result sells one copy or not, I wanted the qualities that are on my original demos to shine through the finished music. And to potential producers I was saying, "this is your mission, your project, if you choose to take it'. And Rupert did a brilliant job of staying close to my originals, which is the best present anyone could have given me."
And she says it is this quality of being authentic to her original songs that makes the album the most satisfying project she has yet been involved with. "At my age and after all I've been through, what I need is to really love the music that goes out," Stevie says. "I have everything I need on a living basis, so whatever the sales, I want the music to be true to me and my songs. In this case, it is."
Born in Phoenix, Arizona, Stevie Nicks had a nomadic childhood, moving from city to city through America's south-west as her father. an executive in the food business, climbed the corporate ladder. Music provided her with a constant in this changing world - by the age of four she was perfecting song and dance routines in front of the mirror. First to spot her potential was STEVIE's grandfather AJ, a C & W crooner who taught her to take' the female part in call-and-response country songs and took her along with him as pint-sized support act at his gin mill gigs.
On her 16th birthday Stevie received a guitar, a present from her parents, and used it to compose her very first song that same day, 'I've Loved and I've Lost'. within a year she had joined her first band, a folk-rock group based on The Mamas and The Papas. Her knowledge of that group's materia was to prove fateful - three years later she heard Lindsay Buckingham playing 'California Dreaming' at a church social in San Francisco and struck up a relationship with him by walking over and joining in, every word and harmony perfect.
When her father's job moved the Nicks family on to Chicago that same year, Stevie stayed behind on the coast with Buckingham, the two of them joining psychedelic rockers Fritz. on leaving the band, an inheritance of Buckingham's enabled them to buy an Amp ex 4-track and set about doing demos of their own material. They were loaned the use of a tiny room in his father's coffee plant, and would arrive each evening just as the workers were leaving, recording through the night until the first shift arrived the following morning.
Every record company in Los Angeles passed on the resultant songs, then finally Plodder took the bait and, in 1973, released the album 'Buckingham/Nicks', featuring those coffee plant demos remixed by Keith Olsen. However, the pair were unceremoniously dropped immediately afterwards, returning them to square one. Bowed but not broken, STEVIE wait res sed while Buckingham continued to work on their songs, but thoughts of a career as a duo were thrown when, following some work in Keith's studio with Fleetwood Mac, Olsen called them on New Year's Eve, 1974 to say that Hick Plateaued wanted them to join the band. within a month, they were in the studio recording what was to become the multi-million selling '1-'leetwood Hac' LP. -
That album included the worldwide hit single 'Rhiannon', written by Stevie. which marked the first public recognition of what was to become the star's reputation as one or rock's most enduring and distinctive singers and songwriters. It was the start or a run of successes for Fleetwood Mac that was to be near unrivalled during the '70's, and right on through until the late '80's, with the staggering success of 'Fleetwood Mac', 'Rumours', "Tusk", 'Fleetwood Mac Live', 'Mirage' and "Tango In The Night', she continued to exert a profound influence and direction on one of the world's top-selling bands.
While acknowledging her undying loyalty to Fleetwood Mac - a loyalty which still makes her dismiss any idea of pursuing an exclusively solo career - she began to see that there was a life beyond the band. The idea of a concurrent solo record deal became even harder to resist.
"You start to doubt yourself after seven years with Fleetwood Mac, she said at the time. "My life was completely, undeniably wrapped up with them. You stop living in the real world. You come home - you've been under this great pressure to go on stage and be wonderful - and you walk around and wonder, 'what am I going to do with myself?' They just drop you oft one day say, 'See you in three weeks or three months'. And you can't sleep. You're all dressed up with no place to go..."
The result was 1981's solo debut 'Bella Donna' which entered America's Billboard album chart at No. 12, shot to No. 1, and went on to sell over four million copies, staying in the US Top Ten for six months! It included the hit singles; 'Stop Draggin' My Heart Around' (a duet with Tom Petty), 'Leather and Lace' (a duet with Don Henley) and 'Edge of Seventeen', the latter nominated for a Grammy for that year's best female rock performance.
Two years later Stevie followed up this phenomenal solo success with the album 'The wild Heart' which yielded the major hits 'Stand Back' (also a smash on the US dance charts and again a Grammy nominee) and 'It Anyone Falls', and went platinum within three months of release. Then, in November 1985, the first single from the third solo album, 'Rock A Little' was released. Entitled 'Talk To Me', it reached No. 4 in the American singles charts, paving the way for the platinum success of its parent album and the subsequent Top 20 rating of the second single - 'I Can't Wait' - Stevie's 10th consecutive Top 40 single, representing her entire output apart apart from Fleetwood Mac.
It is a daunting track record for any artist to live up to yet, with the excellence of the first single ROOMS ON FIRE merely reflecting the quality of the entire album, there seems little question that with THE OTHER SIDE 0F THE MIRROR, Stevie Nicks is set to re-affirm her position as one of the world's most successful singer/songwriters
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