Quote:
Originally Posted by Black_Moon
I agree to an extent about your assessment of her later work. It did become a lot more feminist, and softer. But, people mellow with age. She'd hit her thirties by then, she couldn't keep on dancing in silver space suits and making donkey noises forever.  I love The Sensual World though. |
I like those albums, too. Plenty of moments of pop brilliance, like the title track.
Her main strength, in my opinion, is essentially Lindsey Buckingham's main strength: a real talent for orchestrating using multitrack technology. You can study a Kate Bush track score in much the same way you can study the score of a Halvorsen or a Barber symphonic work. Her orchestrations don't have that level of complexity, but they would certainly reward textual analysis -- & you can't say that about most pop record-makers.
That sort of rococo orchestrative texture is something that Stevie Nicks's music outside Fleetwood Mac completely lacks. She hires a bunch of guys & they just wail away. There isn't anything innovative or texturally interesting going on in the music tracks on her albums. For example, I doubt that anyone has ever had to make horn charts or string charts for any of her songs, the way Tom Scott & Rickie Lee Jones charted the intricate horns for "Traces of the Western Slopes" -- Paul Buckmaster arranged the strings for "Beauty & the Beast," but that old pro (who used to work on Elton John albums) probably did "Beauty" in his sleep. There isn't anything complex about it at all. It's child's play for anyone who knows string writing.
All you can hope for on a Stevie Nicks solo album is that the support doesn't get in her way (as vocalist or songwriter), & that it is at least engineered with a pleasant clarity (which it sometimes is not).