Bella Donna and The Wild Heart reissues reviews

[SisterNightroad]

Stevie Nicks | Bella Donna – Deluxe Edition (Modern/Rhino)
The music on this album is hauntingly real. It proves Nicks’ prowess as a songwriter, and her vocals shine.

In 1981, rock icon Stevie Nicks took some time off from fronting the mega-successful band Fleetwood Mac to express her pent-up musical visions. Produced by the now legendary producer Jimmy Iovine, Bella Donna was born. And while Nicks was enjoying immense popularity at the time, with hits like “Rhiannon,” “Landslide,” and “Sara,” no one expected this album to do much. Basically, it was thought of as a necessary step in her musical journey. It was believed that she would record the album, perhaps do a short tour, and get it out of her system, returning to her position in Fleetwood Mac.

Had the members of The Mac known the outcome of this release, they would possibly had vetoed the project altogether. Upon the album’s release, it took a mere three months for the record to hit number one on the Billboard Charts. September of ’81 saw Bella Donna achieve platinum status in the U.S. and singles including “Leather and Lace,” a poignant ballad with Don Henley of the Eagles joining Nicks on lead vocals. The song was originally written by Nicks at the behest of Waylon Jennings, who wanted the song to be a duet between himself and his then-wife Jesse Colter. However, when the couple decided to divorce, Nicks pulled the song from them and recorded it herself. The lead single from the LP was the rock track “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,” written by and featuring Tom Petty. The song shot up the charts, making Nicks a force to be reckoned with.

This album was the start of a very successful solo career for Nicks. To date, Bella Donna has sold almost seven million copies, making it her best-selling solo effort. The third single released from the album, “Edge of Seventeen (White Winged Dove)” is a staple on classic rock stations today, while the unmistakable guitar riff from the song has been sampled and used, most notably by Destiny’s Child for the song “Bootylicious.”

The music on this album is hauntingly real. It proves Nicks’ prowess as a songwriter, and her vocals shine. Musically, the players on this recording are all top notch, including members of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers, veteran drummer Russ Kunkel, and Wardy Wachtel, guitarist and now Nicks’ musical director. From the eerie lyrics to “Edge of Seventeen,” which were written about the death of her uncle, to the murder of John Lennon, to the lovelorn prose of “Leather and Lace,” Bella Donna is the work of a true artist.

The remastered set is composed of three discs: Disc one is the album in full, completely remastered. Disc Two brings us unreleased material, such as “Gold and Braid”; “The Dealer,” later released on 24 Karat Gold: Songs from the Vault in 2016; as well as the demo version of the title track. New artwork and photos grace the inside covers, and a 24-page booklet is included.

Nicks fans will love this remastered set. It contains songs fans have always wanted released, as well as the classic music from this magnificent album. Bella Donna was just the beginning of a very successful solo career for Nicks. Just recently, she has released her eighth solo effort, 24 Karat Gold: Songs from the Vault, as well as having enjoyed a very successful tour with Fleetwood Mac. Now, we can take a look back at the album that started it all. A+ | Marc Farr



http://www.playbackstl.com/play-by-p...n-modernrhino/

[SisterNightroad]

ALBUM REVIEW | STEVIE NICKS – ‘BELLA DONNA’ AND ‘THE WILD HEART’ (DELUXE EDITIONS)
The Fleetwood Mac singer's early solo work remains a riveting listen three and a half decades later.

Fleetwood Mac’s self-styled Gold Dust Woman reissues her first two, sublime as the lady herself, solo albums in beautifully-packaged deluxe editions brimming over with bonus tracks and colour booklets boasting insightful input from the formidable chanteuse.

Stevie’s 1981 debut as a solo singer rather than Fleetwood frontwoman comes with a second CD of demos and alternate versions and a third CD recorded live in concert later that year. Mixing Mac tracks with Bella Donna cuts, it finds her on very fine vocal form but it’s the original album that really dazzles.

Just as rifts within the band inspired the almighty Rumours album, so much of Bella Donna was conceived during a tour made tense by strained relations between Stevie’s ex Lindsey Buckingham and Mick Fleetwood, with whom she’d had an affair. Out of great conflict come great songs, and the songs on Nicks’ first record without the band are truly awesome.

From the title track to album closer ‘The Highwayman’ via the Tom Petty duet ‘Stop Dragging My Heart Around’ and the Don Henley duet ‘Leather And Lace’ (the perfect lyrical approximation of Stevie’s tough exterior and softer Earth Mother sensibilities) every track is a mini masterpiece. And never more so, of course, than ‘Edge Of Seventeen’ with its propulsive guitar riff later borrowed (with Nicks’ blessing) by Destiny’s Child for their own staple hit, ‘Bootylicious’.

There’s nothing quite so memorable as that riff on her second solo record, 1983’s The Wild Heart. But coming a year after her return to Fleetwood Mac for ‘Mirage’, it’s edgier and more ambitious than that album’s soft-rock stylings, book-ended as it is by the beautiful title track and the aching ballad ‘Beauty And The Beast’.

Tom Petty returns for the rocky ‘I Will Run To You’. Prince is an uncredited musician on the dancey ‘Stand Back’, and if tracks like ‘Enchanted’ and ‘Nightbird’ straddle the musical middle of the road they do it with a wonderful melodic skill to match anything on ‘Rumours’.

The remastering makes The Wild Heart sound fresh and exciting and it comes with a second disc of alternate and unreleased tracks, the lovely B-side ‘Garbo’ and Stevie’s ‘Violet And Blue’ song from the Against All Odds soundtrack.

Bella Donna and The Wild Heart Deluxe Editions are out now on Rhino, stevienicksofficial.com.



http://attitude.co.uk/album-review-s...luxe-editions/

[SisterNightroad]

Sounds of the season for the intent listener in your life
Music for the masses


This is probably one of the easiest years on record to shop for the music obsessive(s) in your life. The vinyl and boxed-set reissue boom continues unabated all along the spectrum from superstore to cult favorite. Music books are a wide-open field, not just about superstars, although this year also saw unexpected superstar autobiographies from Bruce Springsteen and Brian Wilson, and some wild and moving music documentaries (Miss Sharon Jones, Gimme Danger). And if none of those quite work for you, just snatch them up a subscription to TIDAL (Kanye trusts it, shouldn't you?) or maybe even a gift certificate from a LOCAL music retailer (Park Ave CDs, East West, Rock N' Roll Heaven, Foundation College Park, Uncle Tony's Donut Shop have all got your back), all of which have dedicated staff waaaaay more well-versed in music than us. (The aforementioned local stores can order any of these items, if they don't already have it in stock; all prices are approximate.)

4. Stevie Nicks, Bella Donna and The Wild Heart (Rhino Records)
This year saw deluxe reissues of the first two solo albums from the reigning witch-queen of pop, Stevie Nicks. Stepping out under the not-inconsiderable shadows of Fleetwood Mac's tangled mythos, Nicks dove headlong into her "ghost nymph" persona (aided by insane amounts of cocaine), but married it to ultra-slick and sleek synth-rock that still sounds weirdly modern today. Songs like "Edge of Seventeen" and "Stand Back" have lost none of their anthemic cyborg thrust.



http://www.orlandoweekly.com/orlando...nt?oid=2541881

[KarmaContestant]

Originally Posted by SisterNightroad

[B][SIZE="4"]
4. Stevie Nicks, Bella Donna and The Wild Heart (Rhino Records)
This year saw deluxe reissues of the first two solo albums from the reigning witch-queen of pop, Stevie Nicks. Stepping out under the not-inconsiderable shadows of Fleetwood Mac's tangled mythos, Nicks dove headlong into her "ghost nymph" persona (aided by insane amounts of cocaine), but married it to ultra-slick and sleek synth-rock that still sounds weirdly modern today. Songs like "Edge of Seventeen" and "Stand Back" have lost none of their anthemic cyborg thrust.

I hate reviews like this...from writers who can't talk about the art, and so end up talking about the artist or using words like "cyborg".

[SisterNightroad]

Originally Posted by KarmaContestant

I hate reviews like this...from writers who can't talk about the art, and so end up talking about the artist or using words like "cyborg".

Yes, they're very generic because they probably didn't really listen to the albums but I guess the important is that they talk about them.

[SpyNote]

Originally Posted by KarmaContestant

I hate reviews like this...from writers who can't talk about the art, and so end up talking about the artist or using words like "cyborg".

Sadly, it's style over substance when it comes to their writing. It hasn't really changed. Critics panned both albums back in the day for really stupid (usually sexist) reasons.

[SisterNightroad]

WHEN STEVIE NICKS FOUND A NEW VOICE
ON NEW REISSUES OF ‘BELLA DONNA’ AND ‘THE WILD HEART’

It’s strange to imagine now that Stevie Nicks was ever an afterthought. In 1974, she was working as a waitress in Beverly Hills, California, supporting her guitarist boyfriend, Lindsey Buckingham; the duo played together as Buckingham Nicks and had cut an album for Polydor the year before without much success. Fleetwood Mac bandleader Mick Fleetwood wanted to recruit Buckingham as the band’s guitarist, but the two were a package deal, so Stevie was in. As remarkable a band-of-equals as the Mac were, it is Nicks’s husky voice, the witchy detours of her ur-California girl image — and, most crucially, her songs, first “Rhiannon” in 1975 and then “Dreams” two years later — that became the fulcrum of the band’s massive success.

But even as she helped make Fleetwood Mac into one of the biggest bands in the world, Nicks’s full potential was arguably being stifled. As songwriters, Nicks, Buckingham, and Christine McVie fought to place as many songs as they could on each album, keeping tabs on who was getting more attention. And when the group cut Nicks’s “Silver Springs,” a song about her torrid breakup with Buckingham, from Rumours, it was not just a mistake, but an affront to a certain side of Stevie. On “Silver Springs,” a now-coveted B-side, Nicks drew out her familiar, passionate heartbreak into something almost ugly. There was real anger rising in her hoarse cries of “You’ll never get away from the sound of the woman that loves you,” an anger that felt unparalleled in Nicks-penned hits for the band like “Rhiannon” and “Landslide.”

Stevie Nicks’s brand of rock was in line with a new class of female musicians like Linda Ronstadt, Joni Mitchell, and the Wilson sisters in the late ’70s, who were gradually cracking the folkie, hippie image of the female singer-songwriter. The ballads Nicks made with Fleetwood Mac held beauty and power equally. “In Fleetwood Mac I have a persona, I call myself the Spider Woman,” Nicks said in a 1988 interview. “I try to imagine myself putting on the spider mask. I become very subdued and quieter; I don’t move so fast; I’m in a state of suspended animation.” Writing about experiences that could have been rendered harshly — a bitter breakup in many of her songs, an abortion in “Sara” — she chose to be a little more mysterious, a little softer, taking the stage in gauzy dresses and top hats. Rumors suggested that she was a witch. She never dipped into the kind of intense drama we associate with men in ’70s rock and its unsophisticated machismo. That was Buckingham’s job.

That is, until Stevie Nicks went solo with 1981’s Bella Donna. Suddenly, over the hypnotizing, chugging electric guitar riff of “Edge of Seventeen,” she sounded like an entirely different woman. “In the web that is my own, I begin again / Said to my friend, baby, nothin’ else mattered,” she sang with a sangfroid snarl, inspired by the death of John Lennon and her uncle’s recent passing. There’s a resilient fury to her grief on “Edge of Seventeen,” one that takes up serious space.

Nicks’s first two solo albums — Bella Donna and 1983’s The Wild Heart, both newly reissued by Rhino this month — paint a picture of her as an artist, a rock star, fully fleshed out in her own inspiration and muses. There is a passionate energy that animates both; here was Nicks’s voice, her words, her imagination undiluted by the competing egos and obsessive perfectionism of Fleetwood Mac. Fresh off of writing and recording the polarizing 1979 Fleetwood Mac album Tusk, a record which Nicks has said she felt she contributed very little to, she found relief from the contentious procedures of her band in her solo work. “After six, seven years of Fleetwood Mac, where I was really very much taken care of and kept away from people and very literally cloistered ... I had to really change the way I looked at the world,” Nicks said in a 1981 interview about Bella Donna. “I had to get very strong or I wouldn’t have made it through this album.”

It’s a strength you can hear in Nicks’s voice, which gains a new prominence in her solo work. On Fleetwood Mac songs like “Beautiful Child” and “Sara,” recorded just two years earlier, her languid singing was layered with her bandmates’ harmonies or, on the latter, obscured with dreamy reverb; on Bella Donna, her husky hard-rock potential was fully realized on “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,” recorded with her friends Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and the surprisingly funky unreleased track “Gold and Braid.” On the 1982 performance recordings included on the new reissue, Nicks wilds out in new ways even on older songs like “Sara” and “Rhiannon.” (Classic, subdued Stevie was still to be found on Bella Donna, though — she played against her harder songs by retreating into Fleetwood Mac territory, particularly on softer tracks like the Don Henley duet “Leather and Lace” and the Laurel Canyon–worthy, mystical throwback “Think About It.”)

As the ’80s progressed and rock stars like David Lee Roth and Steve Perry filled the airwaves with grandiose stadium anthems, Stevie Nicks played the same game by adding an ’80s pop sheen to her music on The Wild Heart. On “If Anyone Falls,” “Nothing Ever Changes,” and her Prince-inspired hit “Stand Back,” Nicks punched up her songwriting with synthesizers, shred-heavy guitar solos, and sax — elements that play a tad cheesy now — while roping in help from MOR rock band Toto and Prince himself. While much of The Wild Heart doesn’t hold up as well as Bella Donna or her work in Fleetwood Mac, the Nicks on record is still a welcome, aggressive incarnation of a singer unafraid to take risks and push her musicianship further. Perhaps this is why a video of Stevie Nicks singing an early version of “Wild Heart” on the set of a 1981 Rolling Stone photo shoot, unable to contain herself as she sits in her makeup chair, has over 1.4 million views on YouTube. “They labor over every detail,” Stevie Nicks said of Fleetwood Mac after she first went solo. “I care about the final feeling when you hear it on a car radio or at home on your stereo.” It makes sense, then, that Steve Nicks wrote “Stand Back” after finding Prince’s “Little Red Corvette” booming in her car.

Over the years, Nicks has described Fleetwood Mac as a soap opera, a dramatic series of events that other people watched from afar. Band members conjoined and then rejected each other, all the while fleshing out their feelings in the laborious music they were making together. It’s a marvel, then, that Nicks’s confrontations within the band always played like a slow burn. “Listen carefully to the sound of your loneliness,” she advised coolly on “Dreams.” But cool wouldn’t do for solo Stevie. Both Bella Donna and The Wild Heart play like the realization of a Nicks who was always bubbling under the surface of Fleetwood Mac: louder, harder, and, ultimately, a woman who knew her rightful place in the world.



http://www.mtv.com/news/2955135/stev...la-donna-solo/

[Andyleo]

"Bella Donna" and "The Wild Heart" (Stevie Nicks)
Fleetwood Mac frontwoman Stevie Nicks transports back to a blissful time of yesteryear with the remastered release of Deluxe Editions of her hit albums "Bella Donna" (3-disc set) and "The Wild Heart" (2-disc set). This stunning collection features all the hits you love from Stevie Nicks and some you've probably never even heard of.

The 3-disc set for "Bella Donna" charts the love affair between Nicks and Jimmy Iovine, with a photo-heavy booklet covering the romance. Best of all, the lyrics to all these tunes are included, so you can finally figure out what she's saying under all that tambourine. The first disc features the 10 singles of Bella Donna, digitally remastered. You'll enjoy the crisp sound of favorites like the classic title tracks, which features the memorable intro lines, "You can ride high atop your pony/ I know you won't fall... 'cause the whole thing's phony." She teams up with Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers for "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around," and with Don Henley for the golden standard in karaoke duets, "Leather and Lace." And don't forget about everyone's fave, "Edge of Seventeen." But as good as these cuts are, what you'll probably love more is seeing the hidden side of them. For example, Disc 2 features an "early take" version of "Edge of Seventeen" with a funkier intro than the one we all know and love. Other key cuts are the unreleased version of "Gold and Braid," with its fake start, and many alternate and unreleased versions of her hits, like the more drum-heavy rendition of "How Still My Love" and the spare, acoustic unreleased version of "If You Were My Love." There's also soundtracks, like "Blue Lamp" from "Heavy Metal," and "Sleeping Angel" from "Fast Times at Ridgemont High." Disc 3 features live remastered versions of these songs, recorded at a 1982 show. This will be a thrill for anyone who thinks they've heard every bit of Stevie there is to hear. Top hits are the gritty version of "Outside the Rain," which segues seamlessly into the tender rendition of "Dreams," where Nicks sings of her "crystal visions." And Nicks speak-sings parts of "Sara," that make it particularly poignant.

Also, new this week is the 2-disc set of "The Wild Heart." The first disc features remastered versions of tunes like "Violet and Blue," from the movie "Against All Odds," as well as an alternative version of "Sable on Blond" and a demo of "Are You Mine." The unreleased version of "Sorcerer" will blow minds. Disc Two features remastered versions of hits like "Wild Heart," "If Anyone Falls," "Enchanted," "Stand Back," and "Nightbird." It's practically a Stevie Nicks primer. Tom Petty again duets with Nicks in "I Will Run To You." Also, there's a little booklet filled with tour photos of the band circa '82-'83, when the album came out, as well as a story about that time. In other news, Fleetwood Mac is reportedly waiting on Nicks to complete their first album since 2003, and take it on tour. They say she's been focusing on her own work. Maybe now she's ready to get back to the Mac.
(Rhino Atlantic)

Dig These Discs: Alicia Keys, Sting, Emeli Sande, Olly Murs, Stevie Nicks - EDGE Media Network
https://apple.news/AaDwNHq7gO72KONkoOV9jsQ

[ricohv]

I love reading these reviews and am glad to see these re-issues getting some attention. Thanks for posting Sister Nightroad & Andyleo!
*Ricoh*

[michelej1]

Toronto Sun BY DARRYL STERDAN, POSTMEDIA NETWORK

http://www.torontosun.com/2016/11/11...eeks-new-music

Stevie Nicks
Bella Donna: Deluxe Edition/The Wild Heart: Deluxe Edition

Call it a landslide. Fleetwood Mac frontwoman Nicks has remastered and reissued her first two solo albums: 1981’s superb Bella Donna (with an all-star cast and hits like Edge of Seventeen, Leather and Lace and Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around) and the slightly lesser 1983 followup Wild Heart (boasting Stand Back and If Anyone Falls). As expected, both include a second disc of demos, alternate takes and other rarities (Bella Donna also includes a third live disc) and come in deluxe gatefold sleeves with extensive liner notes. Bella.

RATING: 4 and 3.5 (out of 5)

[SisterNightroad]

THE RESURGENT APPEAL OF STEVIE NICKS
Her generous songs provide an antidote to today’s often embattled pop music.

The cover of “Bella Donna,” Stevie Nicks’s first solo album, shows the artist looking slender and wide-eyed, wearing a white gown, a gold bracelet, and a pair of ruched, knee-high platform boots. One arm is bent at an improbable angle; a sizable cockatoo sits on her hand. Behind her, next to a small crystal ball, is a tambourine threaded with three long-stemmed white roses. Nicks did not invent this storefront-psychic aesthetic—it is indebted, in varying degrees, to Hans Christian Andersen’s Thumbelina, de Troyes’s Guinevere, and Cher—but, beginning in the mid-nineteen-seventies, she came to embody it. The image was girlish and delicate, yet inscrutable, as if Nicks were suggesting that the world might not know everything she’s capable of.

This intimation is newly germane: a vague but feminine mysticism is in. Lorde, Azealia Banks, FKA Twigs, chvrches, Grimes, and Beyoncé have all incorporated bits of pagan-influenced iconography into their music videos and performances. Young women are now embracing benign occult representations, reclaiming the rites and ceremonies that women were once chastised (or worse) for performing. On runways, on the streets, and in thriving Etsy shops, you can find an assortment of cloaks, crescent-moon pendants, flared chiffon skirts, and the occasional jewelled headdress.

While Nicks’s sartorial choices have been widely mimicked, it’s rare to hear echoes of her magnanimity in modern pop songs, which are frequently defensive and embattled, preaching self-sufficiency at any cost. It’s difficult to imagine Nicks singing a lyric like “Middle fingers up, put them hands high / Wave it in his face, tell him, boy, bye,” as Beyoncé does in “Sorry,” a song from her newest album, “Lemonade.” Nicks’s default response to betrayal is more introspective than aggressive. Her music has long been considered a balm for certain stubborn strains of heartache; her songs are unsparing regarding the brutality of loss, yet they are buoyed by a kind of subtle optimism. It’s as if, by the time Nicks got around to singing about something, she already knew that she would survive it.

This month, “Bella Donna,” from 1981, and Nicks’s second solo album, “The Wild Heart,” from 1983, are being reissued. Nicks was thirty-three when “Bella Donna” was released. Though its cover might not suggest an excess of reason, in its songs she is a sagacious and measured presence. Her acknowledgment of the heart’s capriciousness is gentle, if not grandmotherly. There’s surely no kinder summation of love’s petulance than the chorus of “Think About It,” a jangling folk song about taking a breath before hurling yourself off a metaphorical cliff. “And the heart says, ‘Danger!’ ” Nicks sings. She pauses briefly. “And the heart says, ‘Whatever.’ ” For anyone busy self-flagellating over an error in judgment, this can feel like a rope ladder thrown from above—an invitation to scramble up and out of despair. It is generous and knowing, and offers a clear-eyed conclusion: some things can’t be helped.

In 2012, Tavi Gevinson, the young founder of Rookie, an online magazine concerned chiefly with the complexities of teen-age girlhood, ended a tedx talk with some blunt advice: “Just be Stevie Nicks. That’s all you have to do.” What does it mean to be Stevie Nicks? To understand loss and longing as being merely the cost of doing business? To acknowledge the bottomless nature of certain aches, yet to know, in some instinctive way, that you’ll keep going? Nicks evokes Byron, in spirit and in certitude: “The heart will break, but broken live on.”

Nicks was born in 1948, in Phoenix. Her paternal grandfather, A. J. Nicks, Sr., was a struggling country musician, and he taught Nicks how to sing when she was four years old. She was given an acoustic guitar for her sixteenth birthday, and immediately wrote a song called “I’ve Loved and I’ve Lost and I’m Sad but Not Blue.” The title is a surprisingly succinct encapsulation of Nicks’s lyrical alchemy: a combination of acceptance (I am hurting) and perspective (I will not hurt forever).

In 1966, when Nicks was in her senior year of high school and living in Atherton, California—her father, an executive at a meatpacking company, had been relocated there—she met the guitarist Lindsey Buckingham at a party. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor—bearded, curly-haired, and strumming the Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin’.” Uninvited, she joined him in harmony. (“How brazen!” she later said.) Buckingham asked Nicks to join his band, Fritz. By 1971, the two were romantically involved. They eventually took off for Los Angeles, where they tried to make it as a duo, called Buckingham Nicks, releasing one album, in 1973, to very little acclaim. Not long afterward, Buckingham was asked to join Fleetwood Mac, a British blues band featuring the singer and keyboard player Christine McVie, the bassist John McVie, and the drummer Mick Fleetwood; the group was being rebooted as an American soft-rock act. Buckingham insisted that Nicks be invited, too. She ended up writing two of the band’s biggest early hits, “Landslide” and “Rhiannon.”

Extraordinary success often leads to spiritual dissolution, and Fleetwood Mac had its share of psychic turmoil. In 1975, Fleetwood divorced his wife, the model Jenny Boyd, after she had an affair with one of his former bandmates. Nicks and Buckingham broke up the following year. Around the same time, John and Christine McVie’s marriage collapsed. There was an ungodly amount of brandy and cocaine on hand to help nullify the despair. Still, in 1977, Fleetwood Mac—now five wild-eyed, newly single people—released “Rumours,” a collection of yearning songs about love and devotion. The record spent thirty-one weeks at the top of the charts, and is one of the best-selling albums in American history.

“Tusk,” which the group released two years later, was a bombastic double LP that cost a million dollars to produce. The critic Stephen Holden, in his review of the album for Rolling Stone, suggested that Nicks sounded “more than ever like a West Coast Patti Smith.” Superficially, at least, Nicks and Smith aren’t obvious analogues. Nicks is hyperfeminine, intuitive, and bohemian; Smith is androgynous, cerebral, and gritty. But both are unusually perceptive chroniclers of their time and place.

If Smith is obliged to the Lower East Side of Manhattan—and the punk scene that included the Ramones, Television, and Suicide—Nicks’s debt is to Laurel Canyon, and to the sentimental, silky-voiced artists who emerged from L.A. in the late sixties and early seventies. Some of those acts—James Taylor, the Eagles—are now considered, fairly or not, irrelevant to the Zeitgeist: too mellow, too affluent, too sexless, too white. Candles and incense and macramé plant hangers; wistful thoughts about weather. Nicks’s lyrics often worry over domestic or earthly concerns—gardens, mountains, flowers, the seasons—and how they might affect the whims of her heart. “It makes no difference at all / ’Cause I wear boots all summer long,” she sings in “Nightbird.” When compared with the dissonant and provocative music coming out of downtown New York, the California sound could seem limp. But the scene in Laurel Canyon was tumultuous. Many of its artists—including, at various times, Nicks—were wrecked by drug addiction. Nicks’s voice, a strange, quivering contralto, gives her songs unexpected weight. Its tone reminds me of the gloaming—that lambent, transitional moment between night and day.

“Bella Donna” was produced by Jimmy Iovine, a Brooklyn-born audio engineer who worked on Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” and produced the Patti Smith Group’s “Easter” and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ “Damn the Torpedoes.” Iovine spent time in California, but his sensibility was tougher and more plainly that of the East Coast. He later became a co-founder of Interscope Records, where he helped to establish the career of the rapper Tupac Shakur, and, for a period, he oversaw the hip-hop label Death Row Records. Iovine was aware of concerns that Nicks was too coddled and immature to make a solo record as good as the records she’d made with Fleetwood Mac. Regardless, there was romantic chemistry. “This record was our love story unfolding,” she has said.

“Bella Donna” reached No. 1 on the Billboard chart, and produced four hit singles: “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,” a duet with Petty; “Leather and Lace,” with Don Henley; “Edge of Seventeen”; and “After the Glitter Fades.” The last, a country song about the travails of stardom—Nicks wrote it just after she and Buckingham moved to Los Angeles, long before she had a record deal, showing either hubris or prescience—contains organ, pedal steel, and reassurances. “The dream keeps coming even when you forget to feel,” she sings.

Nicks, like most artists, culls inspiration from disparate sources. She is prone to saying things like “ ‘Edge of Seventeen’ was about Tom Petty and his wife, Jane, my uncle dying, and the assassination of John Lennon.” But her personal life—a tangle of love affairs, often with her collaborators—informs her work in explicit ways. “Heartbreak of the moment isn’t endless,” she sings, in “Think About It.” This might seem like a billowy platitude, but if you are someone who does not think that every flubbed decision is fodder for personal growth, it is comforting to hear someone assert that nearly all mistakes can be neutralized, if not conquered. If “Bella Donna” contains a single directive, it’s to love freely, love fully, and hang on.

In 1981, Iovine flew with Nicks to the Château d’Hérouville, in northern France, where Fleetwood Mac was recording its next album, “Mirage.” Iovine left almost immediately, to escape the interpersonal conflicts that roiled the band. Iovine and Nicks’s relationship foundered. The following fall, while Fleetwood Mac was on tour, Nicks’s childhood friend Robin Anderson died, of leukemia, at the age of thirty-three. “What was left over was just a big, horrible, empty world,” Nicks has said. Days before her death, Anderson had prematurely given birth to a son. Nicks, operating under the savage logic of grief, married her friend’s widower, Kim Anderson, thinking that she would help raise the child. They divorced three months later.

By 1983, Nicks was ready to make another record. Her relationship with Iovine was strained, but Nicks asked him to produce the record anyway. “The Wild Heart” is inspired in part by the unravelling of that relationship, and in part by her mourning for Anderson. Nicks frequently cites as a guiding influence for the recording sessions the 1939 film adaptation of Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights,” which depicts an undying, almost fiendish love. Mostly, the songs are about bucking against the circumstances that separate us from the people we need.

The artist Justin Vernon, of the band Bon Iver, uses a brief sample of “Wild Heart” (a track from “The Wild Heart”) on the group’s new album, “22, A Million.” Nicks’s voice is sped up, pitch-altered, and barely discernible as human—just a high, grousing “wah-wah,” deployed intermittently. Vernon pinched it from a popular YouTube video of Nicks, in which she sits on a stool having her makeup done, wearing a white dress with spaghetti straps. She begins to sing. Soon, someone is messing with a piano; one of her backup singers joins in with a harmony. The makeup artist gamely tries to continue with her work, before giving up. While the studio recording of “Wild Heart” is saturated, almost wet, this version is all air, all joy.

What affects me most about the video is how profoundly Nicks appears to love singing. Her voice has an undulating, galloping quality. It is as if, once it’s started up, there’s no slowing down, no stopping; the car is careering down a mountain, with no brakes. You can see on her face how good it feels just to let go.

“Stand Back,” the first single from “The Wild Heart,” was inspired by Prince’s “Little Red Corvette,” which Nicks heard on the radio while driving with Kim Anderson to San Ysidro Ranch, in Santa Barbara, for their honeymoon. (Prince played keyboards on the track, though he’s not credited in the album’s liner notes.) The song was produced in accordance with the style of the era, with lots of synthesizer and rubbery, overdubbed percussion. The lyrics describe a deliberate seduction followed by an acute betrayal. “First he took my heart, then he ran,” Nicks sings. The chorus is appropriately punchy: “Stand back, stand back,” she warns. Nicks is capable of going fully feral before a microphone, perhaps most famously at the end of “Silver Springs,” a song intended for “Rumours” and one of several that she wrote about Buckingham. (It ends with Nicks hollering, “Was I just a fool?”) On “Stand Back,” she erupts briefly, on the middle verses, but for the rest of the song she is more characteristically sanguine. “It’s all right, it’s all right,” she concedes. “I did not hear from you, it’s all right.”

Nicks went on to make six more solo albums, and three more with Fleetwood Mac. Following her divorce from Kim Anderson, she never married again, or had any children, though a rich maternal instinct runs through all her songs. This, more than anything else, may be the reason that Nicks’s work has endured—why listeners turn to her for consolation, especially now, when many feel wounded and the radio remains rife with confrontational whoops. To be Stevie Nicks is to offer shelter. ♦



http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...f-stevie-nicks

[Andyleo]

Pop Music
November 28, 2016 Issue
The Resurgent Appeal of Stevie Nicks

Her generous songs provide an antidote to today’s often embattled pop music.


By Amanda Petrusich














Nicks’s music has long been considered a balm for stubborn strains of heartache: her songs are unsparing about the brutality of loss, yet buoyed by a kind of subtle optimism.

Nicks’s music has long been considered a balm for stubborn strains of heartache: her songs are unsparing about the brutality of loss, yet buoyed by a kind of subtle optimism.
Photograph by Neal Preston

The cover of “Bella Donna,” Stevie Nicks’s first solo album, shows the artist looking slender and wide-eyed, wearing a white gown, a gold bracelet, and a pair of ruched, knee-high platform boots. One arm is bent at an improbable angle; a sizable cockatoo sits on her hand. Behind her, next to a small crystal ball, is a tambourine threaded with three long-stemmed white roses. Nicks did not invent this storefront-psychic aesthetic—it is indebted, in varying degrees, to Hans Christian Andersen’s Thumbelina, de Troyes’s Guinevere, and Cher—but, beginning in the mid-nineteen-seventies, she came to embody it. The image was girlish and delicate, yet inscrutable, as if Nicks were suggesting that the world might not know everything she’s capable of.

This intimation is newly germane: a vague but feminine mysticism is in. Lorde, Azealia Banks, FKA Twigs, CHVRCHES, Grimes, and Beyoncé have all incorporated bits of pagan-influenced iconography into their music videos and performances. Young women are now embracing benign occult representations, reclaiming the rites and ceremonies that women were once chastised (or worse) for performing. On runways, on the streets, and in thriving Etsy shops, you can find an assortment of cloaks, crescent-moon pendants, flared chiffon skirts, and the occasional jewelled headdress.

While Nicks’s sartorial choices have been widely mimicked, it’s rare to hear echoes of her magnanimity in modern pop songs, which are frequently defensive and embattled, preaching self-sufficiency at any cost. It’s difficult to imagine Nicks singing a lyric like “Middle fingers up, put them hands high / Wave it in his face, tell him, boy, bye,” as Beyoncé does in “Sorry,” a song from her newest album, “Lemonade.” Nicks’s default response to betrayal is more introspective than aggressive. Her music has long been considered a balm for certain stubborn strains of heartache; her songs are unsparing regarding the brutality of loss, yet they are buoyed by a kind of subtle optimism. It’s as if, by the time Nicks got around to singing about something, she already knew that she would survive it.

This month, “Bella Donna,” from 1981, and Nicks’s second solo album, “The Wild Heart,” from 1983, are being reissued. Nicks was thirty-three when “Bella Donna” was released. Though its cover might not suggest an excess of reason, in its songs she is a sagacious and measured presence. Her acknowledgment of the heart’s capriciousness is gentle, if not grandmotherly. There’s surely no kinder summation of love’s petulance than the chorus of “Think About It,” a jangling folk song about taking a breath before hurling yourself off a metaphorical cliff. “And the heart says, ‘Danger!’ ” Nicks sings. She pauses briefly. “And the heart says, ‘Whatever.’ ” For anyone busy self-flagellating over an error in judgment, this can feel like a rope ladder thrown from above—an invitation to scramble up and out of despair. It is generous and knowing, and offers a clear-eyed conclusion: some things can’t be helped.

In 2012, Tavi Gevinson, the young founder of Rookie, an online magazine concerned chiefly with the complexities of teen-age girlhood, ended a TEDX talk with some blunt advice: “Just be Stevie Nicks. That’s all you have to do.” What does it mean to be Stevie Nicks? To understand loss and longing as being merely the cost of doing business? To acknowledge the bottomless nature of certain aches, yet to know, in some instinctive way, that you’ll keep going? Nicks evokes Byron, in spirit and in certitude: “The heart will break, but broken live on.”

Nicks was born in 1948, in Phoenix. Her paternal grandfather, A. J. Nicks, Sr., was a struggling country musician, and he taught Nicks how to sing when she was four years old. She was given an acoustic guitar for her sixteenth birthday, and immediately wrote a song called “I’ve Loved and I’ve Lost and I’m Sad but Not Blue.” The title is a surprisingly succinct encapsulation of Nicks’s lyrical alchemy: a combination of acceptance (I am hurting) and perspective (I will not hurt forever).

In 1966, when Nicks was in her senior year of high school and living in Atherton, California—her father, an executive at a meatpacking company, had been relocated there—she met the guitarist Lindsey Buckingham at a party. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor—bearded, curly-haired, and strumming the Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin’.” Uninvited, she joined him in harmony. (“How brazen!” she later said.) Buckingham asked Nicks to join his band, Fritz. By 1971, the two were romantically involved. They eventually took off for Los Angeles, where they tried to make it as a duo, called Buckingham Nicks, releasing one album, in 1973, to very little acclaim. Not long afterward, Buckingham was asked to join Fleetwood Mac, a British blues band featuring the singer and keyboard player Christine McVie, the bassist John McVie, and the drummer Mick Fleetwood; the group was being rebooted as an American soft-rock act. Buckingham insisted that Nicks be invited, too. She ended up writing two of the band’s biggest early hits, “Landslide” and “Rhiannon.”




Extraordinary success often leads to spiritual dissolution, and Fleetwood Mac had its share of psychic turmoil. In 1975, Fleetwood divorced his wife, the model Jenny Boyd, after she had an affair with one of his former bandmates. Nicks and Buckingham broke up the following year. Around the same time, John and Christine McVie’s marriage collapsed. There was an ungodly amount of brandy and cocaine on hand to help nullify the despair. Still, in 1977, Fleetwood Mac—now five wild-eyed, newly single people—released “Rumours,” a collection of yearning songs about love and devotion. The record spent thirty-one weeks at the top of the charts, and is one of the best-selling albums in American history.

“Tusk,” which the group released two years later, was a bombastic double LP that cost a million dollars to produce. The critic Stephen Holden, in his review of the album for Rolling Stone, suggested that Nicks sounded “more than ever like a West Coast Patti Smith.” Superficially, at least, Nicks and Smith aren’t obvious analogues. Nicks is hyperfeminine, intuitive, and bohemian; Smith is androgynous, cerebral, and gritty. But both are unusually perceptive chroniclers of their time and place.
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If Smith is obliged to the Lower East Side of Manhattan—and the punk scene that included the Ramones, Television, and Suicide—Nicks’s debt is to Laurel Canyon, and to the sentimental, silky-voiced artists who emerged from L.A. in the late sixties and early seventies. Some of those acts—James Taylor, the Eagles—are now considered, fairly or not, irrelevant to the Zeitgeist: too mellow, too affluent, too sexless, too white. Candles and incense and macramé plant hangers; wistful thoughts about weather. Nicks’s lyrics often worry over domestic or earthly concerns—gardens, mountains, flowers, the seasons—and how they might affect the whims of her heart. “It makes no difference at all / ’Cause I wear boots all summer long,” she sings in “Nightbird.” When compared with the dissonant and provocative music coming out of downtown New York, the California sound could seem limp. But the scene in Laurel Canyon was tumultuous. Many of its artists—including, at various times, Nicks—were wrecked by drug addiction. Nicks’s voice, a strange, quivering contralto, gives her songs unexpected weight. Its tone reminds me of the gloaming—that lambent, transitional moment between night and day.

“Bella Donna” was produced by Jimmy Iovine, a Brooklyn-born audio engineer who worked on Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” and produced the Patti Smith Group’s “Easter” and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ “Damn the Torpedoes.” Iovine spent time in California, but his sensibility was tougher and more plainly that of the East Coast. He later became a co-founder of Interscope Records, where he helped to establish the career of the rapper Tupac Shakur, and, for a period, he oversaw the hip-hop label Death Row Records. Iovine was aware of concerns that Nicks was too coddled and immature to make a solo record as good as the records she’d made with Fleetwood Mac. Regardless, there was romantic chemistry. “This record was our love story unfolding,” she has said.

“Bella Donna” reached No. 1 on the Billboard chart, and produced four hit singles: “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,” a duet with Petty; “Leather and Lace,” with Don Henley; “Edge of Seventeen”; and “After the Glitter Fades.” The last, a country song about the travails of stardom—Nicks wrote it just after she and Buckingham moved to Los Angeles, long before she had a record deal, showing either hubris or prescience—contains organ, pedal steel, and reassurances. “The dream keeps coming even when you forget to feel,” she sings.

Nicks, like most artists, culls inspiration from disparate sources. She is prone to saying things like “ ‘Edge of Seventeen’ was about Tom Petty and his wife, Jane, my uncle dying, and the assassination of John Lennon.” But her personal life—a tangle of love affairs, often with her collaborators—informs her work in explicit ways. “Heartbreak of the moment isn’t endless,” she sings, in “Think About It.” This might seem like a billowy platitude, but if you are someone who does not think that every flubbed decision is fodder for personal growth, it is comforting to hear someone assert that nearly all mistakes can be neutralized, if not conquered. If “Bella Donna” contains a single directive, it’s to love freely, love fully, and hang on.

In 1981, Iovine flew with Nicks to the Château d’Hérouville, in northern France, where Fleetwood Mac was recording its next album, “Mirage.” Iovine left almost immediately, to escape the interpersonal conflicts that roiled the band. Iovine and Nicks’s relationship foundered. The following fall, while Fleetwood Mac was on tour, Nicks’s childhood friend Robin Anderson died, of leukemia, at the age of thirty-three. “What was left over was just a big, horrible, empty world,” Nicks has said. Days before her death, Anderson had prematurely given birth to a son. Nicks, operating under the savage logic of grief, married her friend’s widower, Kim Anderson, thinking that she would help raise the child. They divorced three months later.

By 1983, Nicks was ready to make another record. Her relationship with Iovine was strained, but Nicks asked him to produce the record anyway. “The Wild Heart” is inspired in part by the unravelling of that relationship, and in part by her mourning for Anderson. Nicks frequently cites as a guiding influence for the recording sessions the 1939 film adaptation of Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights,” which depicts an undying, almost fiendish love. Mostly, the songs are about bucking against the circumstances that separate us from the people we need.

The artist Justin Vernon, of the band Bon Iver, uses a brief sample of “Wild Heart” (a track from “The Wild Heart”) on the group’s new album, “22, A Million.” Nicks’s voice is sped up, pitch-altered, and barely discernible as human—just a high, grousing “wah-wah,” deployed intermittently. Vernon pinched it from a popular YouTube video of Nicks, in which she sits on a stool having her makeup done, wearing a white dress with spaghetti straps. She begins to sing. Soon, someone is messing with a piano; one of her backup singers joins in with a harmony. The makeup artist gamely tries to continue with her work, before giving up. While the studio recording of “Wild Heart” is saturated, almost wet, this version is all air, all joy.

What affects me most about the video is how profoundly Nicks appears to love singing. Her voice has an undulating, galloping quality. It is as if, once it’s started up, there’s no slowing down, no stopping; the car is careering down a mountain, with no brakes. You can see on her face how good it feels just to let go.

“Stand Back,” the first single from “The Wild Heart,” was inspired by Prince’s “Little Red Corvette,” which Nicks heard on the radio while driving with Kim Anderson to San Ysidro Ranch, in Santa Barbara, for their honeymoon. (Prince played keyboards on the track, though he’s not credited in the album’s liner notes.) The song was produced in accordance with the style of the era, with lots of synthesizer and rubbery, overdubbed percussion. The lyrics describe a deliberate seduction followed by an acute betrayal. “First he took my heart, then he ran,” Nicks sings. The chorus is appropriately punchy: “Stand back, stand back,” she warns. Nicks is capable of going fully feral before a microphone, perhaps most famously at the end of “Silver Springs,” a song intended for “Rumours” and one of several that she wrote about Buckingham. (It ends with Nicks hollering, “Was I just a fool?”) On “Stand Back,” she erupts briefly, on the middle verses, but for the rest of the song she is more characteristically sanguine. “It’s all right, it’s all right,” she concedes. “I did not hear from you, it’s all right.”

Nicks went on to make six more solo albums, and three more with Fleetwood Mac. Following her divorce from Kim Anderson, she never married again, or had any children, though a rich maternal instinct runs through all her songs. This, more than anything else, may be the reason that Nicks’s work has endured—why listeners turn to her for consolation, especially now, when many feel wounded and the radio remains rife with confrontational whoops. To be Stevie Nicks is to offer shelter. ♦

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...f-stevie-nicks

[SisterNightroad]

Going to Stevie Nicks’ St. Paul concert? Check out her latest record, reissues

Time, it seems, is a relative concept to Stevie Nicks.

On Sept. 30, 2014, she released her eighth solo album, “24 Karat Gold: Songs from the Vault.” On that same day, she kicked off a Fleetwood Mac tour — the first in 17 years with Christine McVie back in the fold — in front of a sold-out crowd at the Target Center in Minneapolis.

The fully reunited Fleetwood Mac was such a hit that the tour extended to fill much of 2015, including another Twin Cities stop at St. Paul’s Xcel Energy Center. Now, more than two years after the release of “24 Karat Gold,” Nicks is back on the road as a solo act, performing a set that draws from the record. She headlines the X on Tuesday with support from the Pretenders.

To prepare for the show, here’s a look at her latest album, along with some new top-notch reissues from her back catalog.

’24 KARAT GOLD: SONGS FROM THE VAULT’

In 2011, Nicks issued “In Your Dreams,” her first solo effort in a decade. She wrote the first single, “Secret Love,” back in 1976 and it was considered for Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours,” but didn’t make the final cut. Her re-recorded version helped generate buzz for “In Your Dreams” and clearly inspired Nicks for the follow-up.

“24 Karat Gold” consists almost entirely of new takes on songs Nicks wrote, but never fully recorded, in the past. Most date from between 1969 and 1987 and several will have fans wondering why she sat on them for so long. It opens with the terrific rocker “Starshine” and then settles into a more sedate, but still bewitching, mood. She recorded it mostly in Nashville and country music influences pop up throughout, most obviously on “Blue Water,” which features Lady Antebellum on backing vocals.

With a running time of more than an hour, “24 Karat Gold” does drag at times, particularly near the end, but it will be a delight to hear some of this material live on stage.

‘BELLA DONNA’ AND ‘THE WILD HEART’

Nicks’ first two solo albums just got the deluxe reissue treatment from Rhino, with much-needed remastered sound and bonus discs full of demos and other unreleased material.

“Bella Donna” still stands as Nicks’ finest album on her own, with its best material able to stand toe-to-toe with her Fleetwood Mac classics. Released in the summer of 1981, Nicks began writing the songs for it two years earlier, during sessions for Fleetwood Mac’s “Tusk.” She recorded it with an all-star cast of musicians, including members of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the Eagles and the E Street Band.

The singles “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,” “Edge of Seventeen” and “Leather and Lace” helped turn “Bella Donna” into a smash hit that sold four million copies in its first three months, far more impressive sales than those achieved by solo albums from her Fleetwood Mac bandmates Lindsey Buckingham and Mick Fleetwood.

“Bella Donna” deserved the success. There’s barely a bum moment on the 10-track album, and the sessions were so productive that two great songs got shuffled off to soundtracks: “Blue Lamp” (which was used for 1981’s “Heavy Metal”) and “Sleeping Angel” (a high point in the following year’s “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”). Another three numbers from the era ended up on “24 Karat Gold.” The deluxe version features the two soundtrack contributions and a live concert from 1981 that includes most of the record interspersed with some key Fleetwood Mac songs (“Gold Dust Woman,” “Dreams,” “Rhiannon”).

“The Wild Heart” doesn’t live up to the high standards of Nicks’ debut, but it does feature her memorable smash “Stand Back.” As the story goes, she was on her honeymoon when she heard Prince’s “Little Red Corvette” on the radio. She started humming along and was inspired enough to write her own Prince-like song, “Stand Back,” which she recorded that night on a tape recorder in her honeymoon suite. Later, while fleshing out the song in the studio, Prince stopped in and played uncredited synthesizer on the track. As she once said: “(Then) he just got up and left as if the whole thing happened in a dream.”

‘MIRAGE’

Fleetwood Mac’s 1982 album “Mirage” is often overlooked among the band’s works. Many fans, and even sometimes Lindsey Buckingham himself, have dismissed it as an overproduced, underwhelming attempt to re-create the magic of “Rumours.”

It also stood in stark contrast to the group’s previous effort, 1979’s “Tusk,” a divisive, angry and sometimes mean double album driven by Buckingham’s desire to experiment with Fleetwood Mac’s sound. “Mirage” offers a dozen deceptively simple pop songs dressed with some of the most elegant, restrained guitar work of Buckingham’s career.

In September, Rhino reissued “Mirage” as a deluxe edition, adding a revealing clutch of demos (Buckingham’s initial version of “Empire State” feels more like a “Tusk” outtake) and a live disc drawn from the band’s relatively brief 1982 tour, which stopped by the old Met Center in Bloomington that September.

Nicks’ sad, nostalgic “Gypsy” was one of the big hits from “Mirage,” and it has blossomed into one of her signature tunes. Even better, though, is “That’s Alright,” a bittersweet country lament that stands among her finest work. It also includes a line that may well be a mantra for Nicks: “Well, I never did believe in time.”

If you go:

Who: Stevie Nicks, with the Pretenders
When: 7 p.m. Tuesday
Where: Xcel Energy Center, 175 W. Kellogg Blvd., St. Paul
Tickets: $150-$49
Information: 800-745-3000 or xcelenergycenter.com


http://www.twincities.com/2016/12/01...cord-reissues/

[SisterNightroad]

Stevie Nicks
Bella Donna
Rhino

Stevie Nicks' debut solo album was conceived at a time of change within her main band, Fleetwood Mac. The group had recently released Tusk, the most varied and unconventionally sounding album of the Buckingham-Nicks incarnation, and had embarked upon an extensive and wide-reaching tour supporting the release. It was the very early 1980s. The musical landscape was changing around the juggernaut band and it was trying to adapt. The dates for Tusk were exhaustive and exhausting, and inter-band tensions were at a high. Within this maelstrom of circumstance, Bella Donna was conceived.

With some songs in tow, Nicks requested Jimmy Iovine to produce what would become her first solo effort based on his work with Tom Petty. Iovine and Nicks became a couple. Iovine hand-picked musicians for the project, including Roy Bittan from Bruce' Springsteen's E Street Band, Benmont Tench, Stan Lynch, and Mike Campbell from the Heartbreakers, Don Henley and Don Felder from Eagles, Waddy Wachtel and Russ Kunkel from Linda Ronstadt's band, Davey Johnstone from Elton John's band, and Billy Payne of Little Feat. And with background vocalists Sharon Celani and Lori Petty, the supergroup of sorts began recording.

Bella Donna yielded four singles and three monster hits: lead single, the Tom Petty-penned "Stop Dragging My Heart Around," the Don Henley duet "Leather and Lace," and Nicks' signature solo piece, "Edge of Seventeen." The fourth single, "After the Glitter Fades," didn't fare as well on the charts, but might be the most exciting of the bunch to revisit all these years later.

Rhino's extensive Fleetwood Mac reissue series continues here with this revisiting of Bella Donna in a three-disc set that, in addition to the album proper, explores its creation and a concert from the short solo tour that followed its release. The reissue first presents the album in its entirety. The shame of relistening to Bella Donna 35 years on is that the album as a whole gets lost in what was the '80s omnipresence of the singles. Those songs were played so often that one can still practically hear them in one's sleep. A few things that stick out among the radio-friendly fray are "Think About It," the melodic masterpiece written for Mac's Christine McVie, urging her to not quit Fleetwood Mac, and the California country of "After the Glitter Fades," a beautiful melody accentuated by session player Dan Dugmore's whining pedal steel guitar.

The second disc of the package includes demos, alternate versions, and a couple soundtrack cuts from the era. Unreleased versions of "If You Were My Love" and "The Dealer" from the Bella Donna sessions are of special interest for their later re-emergence on Nicks' 2014 album 24 Karat Gold: Songs from the Vault. A spare Nicks-only version of "Leather and Lace" is included, as is a beatific piano-only demo of the album's title track.

A third CD documents Nicks' final show from her brief Bella Donna solo tour, on December 13, 1981 at the Fox Wilshire Theatre in L.A. The 14-song set, some of which was previously released on Nicks' In Concert VHS, documents Nicks just before she had to cut her tour short at two weeks to decamp to France where Fleetwood Mac had already begun work on 1982's Mirage. The concert finds Nicks at the peak of her newfound solo fame, in brilliant voice and with band in perfect form. Yet a tinge of melancholy oversees the affair, as Nicks was being pulled back to earth. Fleetwood Mac would be looking back with Mirage, trying to recapture the magic of 1976's smash Rumours, while Nicks' solo superstardom was organically growing outside of her main band's confines. One can hear every emotion in Nicks' delivery.

Aside from the music, the Bella Donna reissue hits a home run with comprehensive liner notes that are essential, providing context and content to explain all of what Bella Donna was and is, where it came from and where it ultimately led Stevie Nicks, to a long and proficient history as a solo artist apart of one of history's most famous bands. As Fleetwood Mac's commercial star was falling, Nicks' was skyrocketing. This reissue is an essential document of that time. (www.stevienicksofficial.com)

Author rating: 7.5/10



http://www.undertheradarmag.com/reviews/bella_donna/

[SisterNightroad]

CD review: Stevie Nicks, Bella Donna Deluxe 3 CD (Rhino)****; Wild Heart Deluxe 2 CD (Rhino) ****

IN between duties with her full-time job in Fleetwood Mac, Stevie Nicks delivered a brace of iconic rock albums, now lovingly remastered and repackaged.

Nicks wrote the lion’s share of Bella Donna during the Tusk sessions, repeating the task for Wild Heart on the Mirage Tour. Both albums present a master-class in the AOR genre, supplying a soundtrack to the early Eighties.

Indeed, Bella Donna spawned four substantial hits: the Tom Petty-penned duet Stop Dragging My Heart Around, Edge Of Seventeen, After The Glitter Fades and the Don Henley collaboration Leather And Lace. Interestingly, Toto’s Steve Lukather and Prince contributed to Wild Heart’s biggest hit, Stand Back, while the truly wonderful power ballad If Anyone Falls and Nightbird charted too.

Both albums are complemented with alternate versions, B-sides, demos, unreleased tracks and soundtrack rarities. Of these, Sleeping Angel came from Fast Times At Ridgemont High, a truly shocking movie with a wonderful soundtrack that also featured Donna Summer.

A live concert recording from 1982 accompanies the Bella Donna collection, with selections from the parent album and Fleetwood Mac's Dreams, Sara and Rhiannon.



http://www.yorkpress.co.uk/leisure/m...__Rhino______/