The Ledge - Bella Donna Era Interview

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HEADLINE: For singer Stevie Nicks it's a matter of dedication

BYLINE: ALAN NIESTER; GAM

BODY:

BY ALAN NIESTER
On the back of the inner sleeve of Fleetwood Mac vocalist Stevie
Nicks' new solo album, in the lower right hand corner, rests the following
epitaph: "To Jimmy: for reminding me of a world I had forgotten, and for
giving me back my music." It's a dedication to producer Jimmy Iovine , a
man whom Miss Nicks gives a great deal of credit for getting this
album out in its current form.

"You see," stated Miss Nicks, emphatically, "all the songs I've written in the last 10 years were immediately made into demos. I went into the studio and did a real quick version of each song, which means that forever more I have the feeling of what each was like when I first wrote it. Ten years later, when I try to sing it, I at least have some thing to relate to about how I felt when I wrote it in the beginning. " When I submit a song to Fleetwood Mac, it sort of falls off the wall like Humpty Dumpty and falls into a thousand pieces, and they put it back together in their particular Fleetwood Mac way. Jimmy allowed me to stay very close to the original way in which I wrote all these songs. He didn't change them. He didn't have people come in and arrange them for me. He just let us play. That's why I say he gave me back my music." Miss Nicks was in town over the weekend to do promotional inter views for her new album, Bella Donna. Most people in the local music scene were quite surprised that she even bothered. This is, after all, the woman whose sultry tones have graced Fleetwood Mac since 1975. It was largely due to her singing that albums such as Fleetwood Mac and Rumors were the best-selling of their particular year of release, Rumors alone selling 15 mllion copies internationally. She led the group on songs such as Dreams, and her trademark Rhiannon.

With no new product from Fleet wood Mac since 1979's Tusk,
there was a huge and ready market for a Nicks solo album. On
release, crit ics and disc jockey s began hailing the LP as
one of the two or three best of the year, and one radio sta
tion, Boston's WCBN, placed it right at the top of their Most
Played Albums list the week it was re leased. Despite the album's
imme d iate success. Miss Nicks regally held court to a steady stream
of newspaper, magazine and radio people here, looking as
sultry and beautiful as her voice and album covers suggest.

Much of her time was spent denying that Fleetwood Mac had split up.
"Fleetwood Mac is record ing," she insisted. "We are recording.
The tracks are all done, and two weeks ago I spent five days solid working with Christine (McVie) on the vocals to one of her
songs. There is no problem in Fleetwood Mac. Everybody in Fleetwood
Mac is doing their own thing privately, and allowing
everybody else the time to do their own solo projects and still
work on the group album as we go along. It seems to work better
that way, because nobody's under any pressure when everybody
is doing a solo project. Nobody gets angry. If you happen to
mention that you want two months to do a solo, then everybody else
knows that they might turn around the next day and want the
same thing. So everybody's a lot more kind when it comes to
understanding what the other members are doing."
With nearly three years since Tusk saw the light of day, E one
wondered out loud why Miss Nicks chose to wait so long to release
her album. "Because now was the first time, in all the years that
we've been together, that there was a true break. We came off the
road after a solid year of touring with Tusk. Well, everybody
deserves a couple of months, after a year. Mick (Fleetwood) had
decided to go to Africa, and the day he left he claimed he wouldn't be
available for about four months. That gave everybody else a chance
to get their own projects together."

For Miss Nicks, releasing a solo album wasn't quite as
difficult as it was for the others. She is a prolific
songwriter, completing three or four new songs every month or so.
As she had no outlet for a lot of the material, the backlog began
to accumulate. In fact, the songs for Bella Donna were written over a
nine - year period, starting with a number called After The
Glitter Fades, written in 1972.

"With my bank of demos avail able, it was a pretty easy task. The
demos were really good quality. But even so, I needed that good
length of free time. Being in a band like Fleetwood Mac is
like having a jealous husband or wife. You can't just slip next
door and record. Every body, including myself, is very possessive
toward the other members of the group, so we're not all that
understanding toward each other whenever some one tries to
walk outside that circle. But in the last few months everybody
made a real effort to be free, and of course, when you let
somebody be free, the thing they do most is stay."

"I purposefully selected songs over a long period. I wanted it to
be a chronology of my own life. After The Glitter Fades was
written two years before my involvement with Fleetwood Mac. The song
foreshadows a serious knowledge of what was going to happen that
came from somewhere within me. I thought this method gave the
album a lot more variety than if I'd just included all the
songs I'd written in the last year."

Would she tour the album? "Possible, if I can get the guys, who
are all committed forever to a million other people. The dishonorable
thing to do is to beg them to quit everybody else. The
honorable thing to do is to wait til l they have the time. So
I'll have to wait. But I could very easily go out and do these songs
for six weeks. Fleetwood Mac knows, they don't care."

Incidentally, for those warm- blooded males out there who are
infatuated with Nick's Rhiannon persona, she wouldn't say what her
romantic involvements were these days. "That's something I
don't like to talk about. If I say one person, then suddenly
it's made into a lot of different people, and I read about it
everywhere."

But she did note that "I don't have much time for a relationship.

One of these days I'll have to stop everything for awhile, because I'm always going. You just can't expect very many people to understand when you're only home for two days and you're so tired that you don't even want to talk. Then you're off again, and the only thing there is is the telephone. It puts a pressure on any relationship that you might think is real, and you don't want to ruin it by dragging it over the coals of your solo career or Fleetwwod Mac 's career, because it might hurt it to the point where it might never come back."