ONE MONTH of "24 Karat Gold"...
 

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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. :sorry:

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.

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.

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.

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?" :lol:

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.

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. ;)

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.

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.:thumbsup: P.S. My kids were mortified!

Hey Dex, I completely get what you are saying; it's a very intuitive assessment. It makes sense to me. Perhaps that element is lacking due to the circumstances and manner it which it was recorded: Short time frame, stock Nashville band, and not building songs from the ground up, but using existing foundations.

But I love the approach she took, and hope we get another volume or two of vault songs or new songs in near future. If this is the process that will facilitate her to produce more solo albums at a time when time can't be wasted anymore, so be it. She seems to know that father time is not on her side.

:] Cool! That's something I would do. Taylor will not suffer for it; she's ruling the world right now.:eek:

Yes, I think I get what you mean. As with Italian Summer. Although I know some knock it as a repetitive weather report, to me it's a song that ascends and then comes to a peak at the end. That's why when I've always thought that it would make for a great Broadway showstopper, because it builds in excitement and there's a definite point where you can imagine an audience deciding to give it a standing ovation.

Wide Sargasso Sea is like that too. Like the fire in the story, there's also a climax in the song.

Regarding Target, I heard a cashier tell someone that when Taylor's album came out, every third person in his line was buying at least one copy.

Michele

So glad you posted this, Dex. I was just discussing this with someone the other day. There is no story arc in most of these songs. Stevie would hate that that sounds like something Lindsey would say in his grammar lessons, but it's true. A story should take you somewhere.. it should end, emotionally (lyrics, not just music swelling up), in a different place than where it started.

Silver Springs is the text book example of this. The singer starts out remembering all the beautiful things she had hoped for the relationship in the beginning, and then, bam, "and don't say that she's pretty…." etc… and you go whoa, this isn't gonna be a happy story after all. The arrangement supports that emotional shift by going from quieter and softer to a fuller band arrangement. But it's hurt, sad, you broke my heart with this other woman, then there's the guitar solo, and then she comes back in with angry words now.. like she had time to think about it during that guitar solo and now she's MAD. And it's like, I'm not gonna sit here and cry over you, I'm gonna get even-- "I'll follow you down til the sound of my voice will haunt you…' etc.

So by the end of the song she's taken you on a journey from shocked, devastated, to sad, to mad.

When you write a song and the words never change, just repeat and repeat and repeat, by the end you're like, yeah I know we've already been here.. twice.

Or you're just so confused because none of the lyrics really hang together that you don't know where you are. (Mabel Normand-- which I actually enjoy listening to because of the music, not really the lyrics).

Anyway, I'm glad to hear someone else say they feel the way. Sometimes it's challenging to post something a little critical when everyone else thinks it's perfection. :eek:

That was nice.Good move .I would do the same thing .I was at Walmart last night and noticed the front shelf was loaded up to the gills with Taylor's CD.Stevie's CD was nowhere to be found in the mess they had there.

Taylor is probably pissed now.LOL.......

I get what you are saying but I think songs If You Were My Love, Hard Advice and theDealer build in different ways and pack much more of an emotional impact. I humm the songs from this album. They stay with me and are more memorable. The album is also much more musical and not crammed full of lyrics.

I have to admit, i listen to this album almost every day... a few songs here and there.
It has definitely grown on me.
However, besides Mabel Normand, there's no real song that i go to and MUST play first. Which is how I listen to all the other albums.
I still don't like I Don't Care but even Hard Advice has grown on me. and Blue Water (with the DUDE)

I sometimes skip She Loves Him Still/Twisted
I always skip I Don't Care
And very rarely ... but sometimes I skip All the Beautiful Worlds

Overall it's an album I can listen to all the time and just have playing without really concentrating.

Lady/Mabel Normand/the Dealer are still my absolute faves
but If You Were My Love has become a slight addiction

It's not my favorite album but it ties with Mirror as the album with the least amount of songs I religiously skip (both win at ONE) :thumbsup:

sorcerer999 i totally agree with you. it doesn't feel like a real Stevie record and it doesn't really have an era either but it's not a compo.
i know everyone here loves the BD/WH/RAL trilogy and that's totally the vibe that this album conjures up. but also much more 70s as well... Belle Fleur reminds me of Lana Del Rey's West Coast a LOT.
whereas my favorite trilogy is RAL/Mirror/SA (yes i know, shut up) this album fits there too. which is why i think i like it as much as i do.
there are several songs that just scream SA to me ... (the good parts) the mood, her voice, the music. so even though these songs were all written much earlier than my fave "era" they don't feel out of place to my ears :D

I hardly think everybody loves Rock A Little.

Compared to IYD 24KG wins hands down, to me. Dave did not cowrite the songs so they seem more purely Stevie, and there are a good batch of slower emotive numbers on 24KG. It is the only Stevie album on which I skip nothing, except the two bonus tracks on the deluxe version. 24KG I guess is not trying too hard, like many of her other albums, which are usually marred by cowrites and tracks which are overdesigned hard to be "hits.".

Hard Advice, The Dealer, and Lady are particular exceptions to what I'm talking about, yes. It's just something I picked up on over the course of so many tracks.

I don't know, I always thought most of her studio output was taken from preexisting songs and sort of "tweaked" and reworked when the musicians and producers came in. This album never struck me as being particularly unique to her catalogue in that respect. The shortness of recording time might've been a factor, but I think it mostly has to do with how she regards her own work these days. She really talks about her demos for this record as though they were absolutely perfect to begin with and didn't need much done to them at all, which is fine, but it kind of keeps the songs at a limited level, compared to when you allow musicians and other artists to add their expertise to the mix.

I'm with you though, PenguinHead. I liked seeing Stevie so prolific and spontaneous, and would take 10 more albums like this over a long ponderous gap without any real musical payoff prior to the next album.

GDW does this as well, which is what I think keeps it from getting stale during live performances. The movement in tempo, emotion and engagement. It holds up over the years while Dreams (still a stellar recording) doesn't.

Michele

I've tried and tried, but I just haven't connected with this album. I like 24K Gold and All the Beautiful Worlds. There is a poignancy to Lady I appreciate, but the last minute of her basically shouting the same lyric over and over should have been cut.

I think Mabel Normand is ridiculous. :sorry: Lyrically, If You Were My Love is good, but its album placement baffles me. It's a tranquilizer, and it brings the album to a halt, and it's only the second song! We didn't need another version of Twisted. Blue Water, Cathouse Blues, and I Don't Care are throwaways. I can tolerate Hard Advice, but it's so silly....life-size paper doll??! :lol:

I really think her shouting at the end of Lady does work beautifully. I know it's not "pretty" but it just matches the lyric to tremendous effect.

Other than that I kind of agree with most of your post, GS, although I actually do connect with the album on the whole. I love Mabel Normand, but it is ridiculous at the same time. That's sort of why it works for me. But I do wish she'd lay off talking about how "important" it is. It simply isn't. Someone please tell the woman.

Hard Advice is classic overly-literal modern Stevie, and although I do enjoy the song, it frustrates me at the same time. Just because you see something at the mall one time doesn't mean you should write it into a song. ;) And the ernest delivery of the final notes "Don't buy that doll" just doesn't match the words at all. I wish she'd be open to more of an collaborative editing process with some of her songs, but I'm not holding my breath. We're going to hear more lyrics like this if/when she records again.

We're mostly on the same page, Dex. Lady is the song I probably connect the most with, but it's too long. Less is more sometimes.

This extreme literalness and self-indulgence is what's plagued her music since the mid 1980s. Who can relate to seeing a cut-out of their ex in a record store?

Exactly! And she actually talked about changing the lyric "sometimes he's my best friend" from "sometime's Tom's my best friend" to make the song a little more universal. Which is such a puzzle to me because, like... why did she stop there!? :lol: I don't know whether to be encouraged to know that she does have a little bit of an editor somewhere inside her, or discouraged by the fact that she thought the rest of the song was totally good to go.

agree TOTALLY on last part.I think Stevie will be dissappointed with all-around sales.Not satisfying for "moi".....

I absolutely loved the slick vocalization of In Your Dreams but the raw vocals of 24 Karat Gold was a welcomed change. It brought out Stevie's classic sound.

:lol: shut up
more people like RAL than SA ... gimme that would ya? :thumbsup:

I don't like "don't buy that doll" either but it doesn't ruin the song for me. Mabel Normand is ridiculous but the music is terrific and it does feel totally unique. I wouldn't call it a song though and it is only important to her.

I will give you that and I think RAL is her most fascinating album.

Definitely agree with this. To me, 24 Karat Gold is the first album that sounds like a Stevie Nicks album since The Wild Heart. I love Rock A Little, and TISL and especially In Your Dreams - but those all sound like Stevie post-cocaine, which is never really quite the Stevie Nicks whose songs I fell in love with during my childhood. 24 Karat Gold feel vintage, and I love that about it.

I think there was/is a GREAT missed opportunity for RAL 2 with all the outtakes and stuff. RAL is my fave Stevie!era :D

Agreed. Just like "Bella Donna", I think "Rock A Little" was a very prolific era for her song writing. She could do a whole album based off of the outtakes from those 2 albums alone! :nod:

I could not disagree more with this assessment. There are several songs on 24KG that feature emotional builds/climaxes.

"Hard Advice" breaks away from the melodic hook woven throughout the song (not clunky at all) till it shifts gears and slams that amazing final coda in its final minute.

"Mabel Normand" amps up the intensity when the jagged, almost "Edge"-like additional guitars kicks down the door during the foreboding finale of the song as Stevie sings the final 3 verses - "so continue on your destructive road" - ending with the climactic lyrical ode "So sad. So Beautiful."

"If You Were My Love" finally gets an emotional climax in this new & imo best version ever. And it's bone chilling! It comes when Stevie woefully sings the three final "at alls' punctuated against weeping guitar wails and dreamy drum fills. Ending with a sighful standing down. Beautiful! This song is finally awash in a dreamy, practically cinematic hue. :nod:

This new version of "Twisted", even while featuring a more nuanced and relaxed vocal approach, has an undeniable, even skillfully subtle escalation of intensity going on musically and lyrically through the end.

"Starshine" builds until the final "playing with fire is...WRONG" and keeps that energy going to finish out the song.
Same with "The Dealer" - when that final chorus kicks in, the Hammond organ swells with the build-up of the music, along with Stevie singing the finale with added conviction!

Others that build in my opinion are "Belle Fluer", "All The Beautiful Worlds", "I Don't Care" and "24 Karat Gold" - which features more & more musical layers (dueling guitars, harmonies) which conclude that song with Stevie singing the chorus at wicked pace.

"Lady" -enough said!

I agree with this, but I'd also add "Rock A Little" to that list of albums that sound quintessentially Stevie Nicks - even while she didn't write the whole record, she owned every song with her committed vocals and unique style.
"In Your Dreams" did sound like a Stevie Nicks record in that it seemed Dave really tried to stay true to Stevie and meld all of her diverse musical sides on that record, plus Stevie wrote every lyric except the chorus to ELY, and of course, "Annabel Lee." But with IYD some of Stevies' idiosyncratic, eccentric, qualities are sanitized, however it is another amazing piece of work overall. "24 Karat Gold" just sounds like classic Stevie. Stevie threw down on this record! Her producer hat is represented strongly here.