2011

Source: Los Angeles Times By Amy Kaufman

LOS ANGELES — Stevie Nicks was sauntering around a cavernous sound stage on the Sony lot in Culver City as her tiny dog, Sulamith, who was outfitted in a sweater, trailed behind her. It was Tuesday, only a few days before her Thursday concert at the Wiltern, which will celebrate the release of her first solo album in more than a decade, “In My Dreams,” as well as her 63rd birthday. But it was dusty in the rehearsal space. And that upset her.

“This is a massive old place, and for me, it’s hard, because it’s very, very dusty, and I’m allergic to dust,” she said, opting to sit in a stiff office chair instead of on a couch for fear that it would incite her allergies. “When I’m in here for eight hours, I get a bad feeling. It makes me feel like I’m flipping out.”

Nicks doesn’t like feeling out of control. That’s why, for years, she has refused to write music with anyone. Even as a part of Fleetwood Mac — the seminal ’70s British-American rock band that generated such hits as “Landslide,” “Gold Dust Woman” and “Gypsy” — Nicks rarely sat down and collaborated with her fellow band members.

“I would write a song, put it on a cassette, and put it by the coffee pot for Lindsey (Buckingham) and say, ‘Here’s the song. You can produce it, but don’t change it. Don’t come back to me and say you want to change the words or the melody.’ I didn’t have a very good attitude,” she acknowledged.

For the last six years, Nicks had been told by her label that she should wait to release another solo album (her last was 2001’s “Trouble in Shangri-La”) because Internet piracy was so rampant that the music industry was in decline. But when she returned to her home in the Pacific Palisades after 83 dates on the road with Fleetwood Mac, she decided she couldn’t wait any longer. So she dug up a binder with 40 pages of poems and sent them to Dave Stewart, who has produced albums for artists such as his former band the Eurythmics, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Ringo Starr. To her surprise, Stewart actually read the poems and soon showed up at her doorstep with his guitar.