When you’re a legend with a rich, genre-defining discography like Stevie Nicks, you’ve earned the right to make an album every other decade. It’s been 14 years since the prolific singer-songwriter and icon released a solo album, and at long last, another is confirmed to be on the way.
“I’m actually making a record right now,” Nicks told the audience at the Pollstar Awards last week per fan-recorded footage. “I call it the ghost record.” Evocative, no? Well, that’s not all. According to Nicks, the untitled album—which is currently comprised of seven songs—is “autobiographical” and nothing but “real stories” that aren’t “pulling any punches.” Now, if you read that as an allusion to a slew of other delicious diss tracks about past lovers, you’re wrong.
“They are not airy-fairy songs that you are wondering who they’re about, but you don’t really get it,” Nicks added. “They’re real stories of memories of mine, of fantastic men!” A whole album in which “fantastic men” are the subjects, huh? In the year 2025? Who the hell are these men??? Unfortunately, save for the fact that one of them is Prince (a fantastic artist to be sure, but the jury’s out on whether he was actually a fantastic man), no other details are available at this time.
Given Nicks’ metric stick for men, I have to wonder who else might’ve ended up as one of her muses. An unknown lover? Her late friend, Tom Petty? Her loser friend, John Mayer? Lindsey Buckingham (again), perhaps? Or, hey, maybe it’s a warlock! She’s spent some time in Scotland, after all. Who’s to say? But I’ll certainly be there to learn when she’s ready to tell us, even though I have my doubts about the whole thing.
Nicks said she wrote the album during the Los Angeles wildfires earlier this year. Because her home was partially destroyed in the fires, she was confined to a hotel and, for the first time in a long time, not touring. “I’m just sitting here by myself because everybody else is at the house, doing all the remediations and everything, and it’s just me, sitting here,” Nicks said. “And I thought, ‘You need to go back to work.’ And I did.”
No disrespect to Nicks (she’s one of my favorite artists), but perhaps she was just bored??? The solitary fantastic thing about men is that they’re always there when you don’t have anything else going on. But for what it’s worth, I definitely wouldn’t hate another album about witches (or really shitty men, for that matter) instead!
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