ONE MONTH of "24 Karat Gold"...

[sorcerer999]

So it's been a month and two days since "24KG" was released...well, at least the vinyl version of the album. I'd consider most of you who frequently post here on the Stevie forum to be hardcore fans, so most of you have had it for that long.

We've already posted in the thread where we've ranked this new album against her other solo records as far as favorites to least favorites go, so there's no need to do anymore comparisons there...but I guess my question to all of you is, now that we've had a good month to let this album sink into our subconscious and our own personal "Stevie world", how does this album (and each song within, both collective and individual) FIT IN to your own PERSONAL "Stevie universe" in comparison to her other solo records and work with Fleetwood Mac?

Again, I'm not asking you to rank the album against her others, since we've already done that, but just curious as to how it fits into your own personal view of her career as a whole, as well as your own playlists and likes and dislikes in regards to what makes her music special to you in the first place. Am I making any sense, whatsoever?

I'll refrain from posting my own opinions until later because I'm basically interested in hearing everyone else's point of view, first and foremost.

Go!

[Jondalar]

I love the album. She is ending her career on high points. I'm thinking about her next solo album. Will she able to do another solo album? What would Foresaken Love, Maker of Birds or Night Gallery sound like with Dave as producer? Obviously he knows how to produce her but with the lack of sales I'm just hoping she is able to make another album.

[mitzo]

I think the album is remarkable and is probably her all-round best solo effort. It has a lot of moments where you have to smile for what might have been - meaning, if only her other solo work had been as consistent as this album.

Too bad. This is the album people needed to hear after The Dance comeback.

[KarmaContestant]

I love that 24 Karat Gold gave me two more songs for what I call my 'RAL collection'. That is, my playlist of songs written for, or during the time of, the Rock A Little album, like Thousand Days, Running Through The Garden, Mirror Mirror, etc..

I love that I don't hate the new songs - Hard Advice, Carousel, I Don't Care. I still feel that Carousel did not belong on this album, but it's a great track and has taken some personal meaning for me.

I love that there is only one track I don't like.

I love that the song 24 Karat Gold is so good. It fits right up into that upper echelon of what are to me, the greatest Stevie tracks.

I love that this album fills in so many gaps in the stories told through Stevie's music.

I love that Stevie loved making In Your Dreams enough to go back to the studio as soon as she could and record another album, and I hope that 24 Karat Gold was cathartic enough for her that she does it again at the soonest possible moment.

[Jondalar]

Originally Posted by mitzo

I think the album is remarkable and is probably her all-round best solo effort. It has a lot of moments where you have to smile for what might have been - meaning, if only her other solo work had been as consistent as this album.

Too bad. This is the album people needed to hear after The Dance comeback.

This what I keep thinking too - this is the album people needed to hear.

[markolas]

I think it's good...better than TISL, but not quite as good as IYD. There are some songs on it that I don't like and probably never will. The great songs that I'll put on playlists and rank with Stevie's best are:

The Dealer
Mabel Normand
Blue Water
24 Karat Gold
All the Beautiful Worlds
If You Were My Love

It's a very solid album (I only have the standard version), even with the couple of songs I don't much care for (Hard Advice, Carousel). Like Bella Donna, Rock a Little, and In Your Dreams, I can listen to it all the way through and not feel the urge to skip a song.

[bombaysaffires]

Originally Posted by markolas

I think it's good...better than TISL, but not quite as good as IYD. There are some songs on it that I don't like and probably never will. The great songs that I'll put on playlists and rank with Stevie's best are:

The Dealer
Mabel Normand
Blue Water
24 Karat Gold
All the Beautiful Worlds
If You Were My Love

It's a very solid album (I only have the standard version), even with the couple of songs I don't much care for (Hard Advice, Carousel). Like Bella Donna, Rock a Little, and In Your Dreams, I can listen to it all the way through and not feel the urge to skip a song.

Not me. I can listen to BD and RAL pretty much without ever skipping anything. I skip a lot of IYD and a lot here.

I don't skip:

24karat gold
mabel normand
watch chain

I sometimes skip:
belle fleur
starshine
lady
all the beautiful worlds
the dealer
i don't care
cathouse blues (skip most of the time but not always)

I always skip:
carousel
blue water (like the demo)
hard advice
if you were my love (love the demos)
she loves him still (love the demo)
twisted (prefer the box set version)


It's clear on many of these songs why they didn't make it onto an album long before now. I enjoy getting new stuff from her, but this is far, far, from being her best album ever. This isn't the album I would give to someone who knew nothing about her or that I would want to stand as sole testament to her legacy. This is very much an insider's collection.

[tabruns]

Nicks is truly one of the best modern rockers we have. The quality of her music with Mac from the white album through Mirage, and as a solo artist, Bella Donna and The Wild Heart, was nothing short of amazing.

Her coke addiction started to affect the quality of her music on Rock A Little, and even more so on Tango In The Night, but then she temporarily came back with The Other Side Of The Mirror.

Then klonopin muffled her muse and her work became very pedestrian - Street Angel and Behind The Mask weren't nearly the quality of her previous work, and I feared her muse had left her.

But then "Sweet Girl" on The Dance showed promise. I think it's been long enough now that few of us remember what a "wow!" moment Trouble In Shangri-La was when it came out. It was truly a return to form, and it both outsold Street Angel by a factor of three and achieved overwhelmingly positive reviews.

In Your Dreams has gotten both better and worse reviews than Trouble In Shangri-La did. Some see In Your Dreams as being the first solo album where Nicks reached some Mac-in-their-prime levels, whereas others seem to feel that the album was more MOR than ROCK. I personally think both Trouble In Shangri-La and In Your Dreams are stellar albums.

Now we have 24 Karat Gold, which I think is Nicks' third consecutive excellent album. It is also the album that most closely resembles Bella Donna, which is why some (like Jondalar) are so enamored with it. I don't disagree with that - it IS an excellent album. I also think that the Trouble In Shangri-La/In Your Dreams/24 Karat Gold era has been more consistently excellent work than the Bella Donna/The Wild Heart/Rock A Little/The Other Side Of The Mirror era.

The BEST thing about 24 Karat Gold is that it's opened up for Nicks the possibility of quickly putting out a quality album to get her vast vault of work finally released.

[SpyNote]

I find this album to be the perfect hit of nostalgia for me. It doesn't sound current, but that's the charm of it. It sounds like it's from a different era, namely Bella Donna, and that's exactly what I want as a fan today. I don't want new and experimental, which is just jarring to my ears. I want more of the sound, the warm tones and harmonies, that I've grown to love and expect. So it's nice that Stevie's found a producer who will do exactly that: replicate her classic sound.

[BLY]

I Love this album. This is a great follow up to a classic (IYD) I'm so impressed with what Stevie is doing. I'm sure her contribution to the MAC album is going to be stellar.

[sorcerer999]

Thanks to everyone for the great responses. It's been interesting, based on various posts from previous threads, as well as this one, to read that there is basically 75% praise, and about 25% indifference/dislike for this album.

I hope that more of you will respond to this thread. I enjoy all of your input.

In order to answer my own question, I guess I should first preface that Stevie Nicks has been the "be all and end all" to me in the world of Rock music since I was a wee child. Her music is everything to me. As someone who has suffered from depression, abandonment and homophobia ALL OF MY LIFE, her music (and her voice) has ALWAYS been my security blanket.

When she accepted her Billboard Music Award for songwriting back in 2001, she stated that, in her songwriting, she has always tried to "create little worlds" for all of us to come into, just for a little while. I thought that was the PERFECT statement, because THAT is what her songs have been to me, personally. When I'm sad, there's a world to go to. When I'm driven, there's another world to go to. When I'm angry, fascinated, in love, discouraged, etc, etc. You get the point. I am a music aficionado and I have a gazillion other favorite artists, but no one else does what her music does for me.

Sorry to be so longwinded...so to ANSWER MY OWN QUESTION, "24 Karat Gold" is like no other Stevie solo album. I've mentioned many times before that there IS no specific ERA here. The songs, all having been written in the past 4 decades, retain the spirit of the time period in which they were written...so many years in the future, when I hear one of them, I don't think I will say, "Oh this is TOTALLY from the 24KG era", like I do whenever I hear, say "Juliet" or "If I Were You" and think back to TOSOTM and RAL, respectively. "All The Beautiful Worlds" will always take me back to The Wild Heart, "Watch Chain" will make me think of Rumours/Tusk era, "Belle Fleur" and "IYWML" will ring with the best of Bella Donna and "24 Karat Gold" will ALWAYS take my musical "child soul" back to late 70's/early 80's classic rock. These songs already meld and flow extremely well in my personal (and very LONG) playlists. They were meant to be there.

And going back to the notion that this album doesn't have an "era" ~ BECAUSE of that, it really doesn't feel like a REAL Stevie Nicks record...and yet it doesn't feel like a compilation album, or "Lost Demo Greatest Hits" either. Much like how a lot of you have described "Night Gallery" or even "Mabel Normand" ~ to me, this album is a collection of "atmospheric moments" and "newly discovered paintings" that were MEANT to either be scattered throughout our own unique "Stevie worlds" or to be used as puzzle pieces to fit into (and make some sort of headway/progress) in the completion process of "all these beautiful worlds".

I apologize if none of this makes any sense whatsoever. It does to me...but I can imagine most of you reading this and scratching your heads and thinking, "what the hell is this guy talking about?"

[desertangel]

I have to agree with Daniel/Spynote. This feels like the vintage Stevie I fell in love with many moons ago and I love it, probably more than any recent album in a long time. IYD had some stand out songs like Annabelle Lee, which I adore, and so did TISL, like Sorcerer and a couple others, but both those albums had such modern overtones, which is great, but it's just so refreshing to have a new vintage Stevie album. I'm already singing along to many of the songs and will likely try and start recording a couple of them in the near future. I think of Jazzmen Flowers when I hear Lady. Some wonderful offerings on this album for serious NOTS Stevie-oake folks.

My hats off and thumbs up to the direction they took with the production of the whole album... it's almost like a rip in the time-space continuum. The background vocal arrangements, many of the piano and keyboard parts, lots of vintage Stevie vocal inflections and tones, it's just fabulous! I'm moving it up there with Bella Donna and Wild Heart.

[On Ice]

I've found myself randomly humming some of these tunes over the last month and I take that as a good sign of the quality of the music. This is definitely THE album a lot of us have been waiting for Stevie to make although I can agree she has been on a bit of a roll, although not as prolific as she is capable of since TISL. The best part of 24K is by far her voice. She has not displayed these tones consistently in a very long time and it's music to my ears. She's maintaining good voice in what I've heard of the tour and her performance of Lady last night shows she is overcoming some of the confidence issues that stopped her in her tracks in the 90's. I love this record and look forward to subsequent issues as she empties out that vault that holds the bulk of her best work.

[Dex]

I was hoping this album would showcase Stevie's songwriting at its most mature. But the sheer clunkiness of I Don't Care and Hard Advice (much as I do enjoy that one) squelched that dream for me. I now view it as a very competent and pleasant solo album with a few skippers. Pretty much par for the course from solo-Stevie. It fits right in with everything else, for me. I don't really consider the retrospective angle of it much at all.

The one thing I do think this album lacks that IYD had in spades is songs with an emotional build to them. I'm not sure how to describe what I mean in a way that makes sense, but I feel like most of the songs on 24k simply come in, do their thing, and leave. There's no build or climax to most of these pieces, and as such I never got that lump-in-the-throat sensation that I do upon listening to a lot of her best work. (Almost) Everything is very pleasant sounding, I just wish more of it had a bit of oomph to it in that way.

[annabellee]

I love this album. This morning in Target, I took 4 of the 24KG CDs that were hidden in the back section and put them in front of the Taylor Swift CDs that were prominently displayed up front. Hopefully it will turn someone, even if its just one person, on to the new music. P.S. My kids were mortified!