About halfway into an acceptance speech at a Beverly Hills awards ceremony Thursday night, Stevie Nicks revealed that she’s recording new music. “I’m actually making a record right now,” she said. “I call it ‘The Ghost Record,’ because it just kind of happened in the last couple weeks, because you know, the [California] fires.”
She made the remarks at the Pollstar Awards, a red carpet event staged by a music industry trade magazine that covers the live-event space. Nicks was accepting the Hall of Fame award, which record exec Jimmy Iovine presented to her.
“I was sitting in a hotel for 92 days,” she continued, “and at some point during that last part of the 92 days, I said, ‘You know what? I feel like I’m on the road, but there are no shows. 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.’ And I thought, ‘You need to go back to work.’ And I did. And I have seven songs, and they are autobiographical real stories where I’m not pulling any punches for the first time in my life.” (She elocuted one of those words syllabically — “aut-o-bio-graph-i-cal” — so you know she means it.)
“They are not airy, fairy songs that you are wondering who they are about but you don’t really get it,” she said. “They’re real stories of memories of mine of fantastic men.” (Again, “fan-tas-tic.”) She turned and smiled at Iovine, saying, “You’re next.”
Nicks revealed that one of the songs is about Prince (“because we were friends”), and she recalled attending the premiere of his 1984 movie, Purple Rain. She was so disturbed by seeing his character slap Apollonia onscreen that she went to the bathroom and sat there for the rest of the movie. When she went to the afterparty, Prince was waiting to ask her what she thought of the picture, which she confessed she saw only half of (mentioning the domestic violence scene), but said she still offered him a gift: “a 24-karat necklace with little gold hearts on it.”
“And he goes, ‘I don’t want your necklace,’” she said. “And then he said — this is in the song, this is where the record began — ‘You always bring me a gift; you never bring me you.’” She shrugged onstage. “I said, ‘I am ready to write.’ So that’s what I’m doing so that I can go back on the road and do what I love the most, which is be a chanteuse somewhere out there … and have a good time.”
Nicks’ last solo album, 24 Karat Gold: Songs From the Vault, came out in 2014. The last album she recorded with Fleetwood Mac, Say You Will, was released in 2003. Although she hasn’t released an album in more than a decade, she has released occasional singles, including “The Lighthouse,” which she performed on Saturday Night Live and Jimmy Kimmel Live! last year. In the song, she reflected on her feelings about how the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
Nicks teased the idea of writing a new album last year in a Rolling Stone interview, joking that she could call it The Vampire’s Wife (though Nick Cave’s wife beat her to that one.) “I have so many ideas for songs that I want to do,” she said. “There’s some songs that I didn’t write that other people wrote that I’m going to call them on the phone and say, ‘I’d really like to sing this song with you. How do you feel about that?’ … I’ve written a song called ‘The Vampire’s Wife,’ which, I think, is one of my best songs I’ve ever written. Because it’s like ‘Rhiannon,’ a story of a character.”
