I have a fondness for old vinyl album covers - there's just something about them that a CD cover or (God forbid) an mp3 album artwork file cannot capture. I'm usually not one for "holding the music in my hand" but I will admit to loving the feel of a 12" record album in my hand. Perhaps it's because I had so many of them when I was growing up. I bought vinyl long after it was on it's way out - the last vinyl album I bought new was Bananarama's The Greatest Hits Collectionin late 1988 - and even then, I'd gone almost exclusively to cassette tapes. Christmas of 1988 saw the arrival of the CD player so who in the hell needed vinyl?
I've turned a lot of the vinyl albums I have into artwork in my home office (see the post "Vinyl trim") but that's left me with a lot of vinyl albums that I can't play. Usually this is no big whoop as most everything I have on vinyl I have on iTunes. But for some reason, I've really had a hankering recently to get a record player and play some of those vinyl albums. I haven't had a record player in 20 years and although vinyl's making a comeback, I just could never justify the expense of buying a turntable to be able to play records again.
Yesterday we went down to Indianola where our friend Jeff was hosting a party for the National Balloon Classic. He has a front row seat to the Mass Ascension of the balloons. The whole thing sounds vaguely religious to me, but trust me, with the company we were keeping, it was as irreverent as ever. Last year was highlighted by the presence of the Beaver Balloon.
Attack of the killer beaver!!
This year, the Beaver Balloon was back, but it turned it's back on us. You can see it in this photo - it's the lowest balloon about 2/3rds of the way across the picture.
That's right, we were snubbed by the beaver (ironically enough, also the title of my college memoirs.) As we said, if there are any beaver jokes that are not inappropriate, we're not interested in knowing them.
But more than that, Jeff was having a garage sale of sorts - selling stuff he had painted as well as some of his personal belongings. One of those was a complete stereo system WITH TURNTABLE (and speakers) for a lousy 20 bucks. I hemmed and hawed as per my usual and then ultimately purchased it after he assured me that the turntable still worked. I set it up today and have not turned on iTunes all night. Here I sit with 21,000 songs in iTunes and I'm happy as a clam to be sitting listening to record albums, just like I did 30 years ago. No, the sound isn't like it is from a CD or an mp3, but there's just something about it.
Click to make it bigger! It's Stevie Nicks!
I've also listened to Barbra Streisand's Stoney End and it's just made me more determined then ever to get more Barbra vinyl. If nothing else, I need to get the People album and probably Simply Streisand which are both albums I had on CD in college, in addition to Stoney End. Jeez, having had all those albums in college, it's not surprising no girls wanted to date me! (not really true, but boy I sure couldn't see through the fog of self-doubt and low self-esteem enough to see it.) It's truly amazing my wife said yes when I asked her to marry me.
Barbra crimped her hair and went down the stoney end. She never wanted to go down the stoney end!
There's something about vinyl, especially the really old albums, that just seems so right. The acquisition of the turntable for the rock bottom price of twenty bucks makes me want to head to ZZZ Records in Des Moines and see if I can score some Joni Mitchell vinyl, or Laura Nyro's Eli & The Thirteenth Confession. As I've said before, if there's an album that begs to be played on vinyl, it's that one.
So everything old is new again. The only thing I wish it did is keep track of play counts. I guess you can't win 'em all. Now if you'll excuse me, I think I'll listen to some Bananarama. ON VINYL.
To paraphrase a bit from Evita, it is my sad duty to inform you that, while I like Stevie Nicks' new album, In Your Dreams, I don't love it. As a long time Stevie fan, this is hard to admit but it really is true. And because I don't love it, it is ultimately disappointing because it has been 10 years since her last solo album, Trouble In Shangri-La. It doesn't seem like In Your Dreams was worth the wait.
That said, it's about 65% a good album, 25% so-so and 10% pure awful. I really love "Secret Love" and it's gotten a lot of plays on my iPod. The fact that it's from the vault helps its cause. This was back when Stevie could write down practically anything and turn it into a song. I'm not so sure that happens like it used to. I can see the wheels turning on some of the newer songs. The bloom seems to be off the songwriting rose. Still, newer songs like "For What It's Worth" (not written by Stevie), "New Orleans" and the title track really do appeal to the Stevie fan in me. "Annabel Lee" may not be "Planets of the Universe", but it's still a very strong song. Even the song inspired by the Twilight series is pretty strong - you just have to forget the fact that it's inspired by the Twilight series. In fact, the first 7 songs are so strong, I think if Stevie had stopped there and called it an EP, she would have had something at least as good as The Wild Heart. (Sorry, nothing touches Bella Donna.)
But then there's track 8 - "Soldier's Angel" - which is so amazingly bad I am still trying to figure out what went wrong. Lindsey Buckingham is on guitar and background vocals, but the lyrics are so bad and the production so sparse that it grates from the first note to the last. How could the combination that cranked out some of the most memorable pop hits of the 70s produce something so dreary and unlistenable? The world may never know. What makes its substandardness even harder to swallow is that Stevie is apparently in love with it.
"It’s very Buckingham Nicks and I think that it’s going to be a very serious and important song to the world and I think it’s a very serious and important song for Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks because it sounds like Buckingham Nicks. Because it is."
Even the worst track on BuckinghamNicks is better than this song.
The album has a few more high points - "Ghosts Are Gone" gets points for recycling "ghost through a fog" which is one of my favorite recurring Stevie-isms and "Italian Summer" is worthy as well, even though it took a while to grow on me. The rest is not bad, it's just not very memorable which I think, is really bad if you're a Stevie Nicks song.
I think the biggest culprit for this album's lack of spark and life lies solely with the production. As my friend and fellow Stevie-phile Steve Sears says, Dave Stewart and Glen Ballard produced a version of Stevie that will appeal to a wide and older audience, and in so doing, they lost the craziness that makes Nicks so appealing to long term fans. I miss the quirks that have made even bad Stevie albums endearing. For as much as I can barely stomach Street Angel, it still contains the eccentricities that make Stevie Stevie. It's almost as if Stewart and Ballard took sandpaper to Stevie's rough edges and smoothed them over for mass consumption that I don't think is likely to happen anyway.
I think that ultimately, it's hard when your producing any piece of art. It's hard to predict what people want - will they want something new or will they want the same old thing all wrapped up in a new package? Waiting 10 years between releasing new material ups the ante significantly. I also think that part of it is me - the music is good but it's not really where my mood is right now. Perhaps I will warm to it when the leaves change color and the temperatures turn cooler, versus now when summer is just getting underway and we're 10 days away from seeing Kylie Minogue.
It is still new music from Stevie Nicks who was one of my original music loves and for that, I will be grateful, even if it's not quite what I wanted.
Thanks to Steve for providing a lot of the most intelligent things said in this post.
The interval between Stevie Nicks albums just keeps getting longer, so now's the time to celebrate the release of the album artwork for her new album, In Your Dreams, which is due on May 3rd.
I had two thoughts when I saw this album cover. My first thought was how well it fit in with a long line of classic album covers from Stevie. As my friend Matt said, they really nailed the Stevie vibe. My second thought was "Whoa! Stevie! Lay off the Photoshop!" The woman on the cover of this album doesn't look like a woman in her 60s. My armchair psychological assessment is that Stevie probably doesn't have a problem with growing old, it's looking old that she takes issue with.
This album cover vaguely recalls the cover of Heart's Little Queen - perhaps Stevie has just left a Renaissance fair, absconding with the white horse on the back cover of this album?
And at least it's better than Street Angel's cover, which I swear to God looks like it was done at the color copy machine at Kinko's.
In any event, new Stevie is always a cause for great excitement. I just hope that nine songs is enough to keep me satisfied for another 10 years. Viva la Stevie! The woman has been such an integral part of my musical development and I really wish more pop fans appreciated her. But I do recognize that she's an acquired taste and not for everyone. But for me, she's been a perfect fit.
For another great take on the album cover, visit The Middle Eight.
Winter's Bone was on last night's agenda. It was the last of the Oscar movies we had a prayer of seeing, which would have left us with only Black Swan, The Fighter and 127 Hours unseen (as far as Best Picture nominees go) as we head into next weekend's Oscar show. We bailed and watched last Monday's House instead. Honestly, I think it was a better choice because I'm just not in the mood for depressing movies. Real life, it seems, is depressing enough as it is without actively seeking it out.
The other reason it was a good choice was because it fit into what seems to be an overriding theme of the week. As House gets a bit long in the tooth, the medical mystery of the week is less and less intriguing and I'm more frequently drawn in by the secondary storylines of the episodes. As Heidi pointed out, putting House and Cuddy together really should have ruined the show, but for some reason, it works better than ever. This week's episode was really all about loneliness. The patient, who could inexplicably remember every single memory since puberty had isolated herself due to her inability to forgive anyone for indiscretions. Wilson, still burning from his breakup with Sam, gets a cat rather than jump out into the dating fray again. Taub has failed a pathology certification exam and is sentenced to having Foreman as a tutor, only to realize that, when Foreman extends the offer for him to stay at his place, living by himself in a fleabag motel in the wake of his separation was not the most ideal thing in the world.
A song played at the end of the episode that I had to go and search for the minute the credits rolled. It took a little bit of Googling, but eventually I figured out it was Wilco's "How To Fight Loneliness." I liked it because it was of the indie ilk that seems to always make the unofficial House soundtracks but don't frequently make my own personal soundtracks. I also liked how it could be interpreted in more than one way - the most obvious being that fighting loneliness is all about faking it, putting on a veneer for the world to see while inside you feel exactly the opposite. However, I think the more accurate interpretation (at least for me) is that if you smile all the time, laugh at every joke and fill your heart with smoke, you may actually end up attracting the very things that counter it, bringing more people into your orbit and taking the edge off the lonely feelings that seem to affect many of us, whether we admit to them or not. I think things like Facebook and Twitter, while helping us to connect with each other have, oddly enough, left us feeling more lonely and more out of touch. I can say for myself that there are many times I've thought about taking a week off of both FB and Twitter, just to see how I felt. Maybe I'd focus more on other things? Or would I be pushing away the things that "How to Fight Loneliness" urges you to attract?
Whatever the answer, I'm not convinced that's entirely right either. Really, the best commentary on this sort of thing comes from Stevie Nicks...like that should surprise anyone. It's another song that has been in heavy rotation recently - "Planets of the Universe." It's one of my favorite Stevie Nicks songs, one that has been around forever but finally found a home on Trouble in Shangri-La. It is angry and biting and, naturally, mostly about Lindsey Buckingham. Not having been in a relationship with LB, it has broader meaning for me. When I am at my loneliest, when it feels like the world has shut off just when I'm wanting interaction and there's just no having it, I take an incredible amount of solace in this song. Because here's what Stevie says:
And the planets of the universe Go their way Not astounded by the sun or the moon Or by the day You and I will simply disappear Out of sight But I'm afraid soon there'll be No light
What it says to me is that we are all just like those planets. Sometimes our orbits cross or approach each other, but in the end, we are all on our own path. The best that we can hope for is to share a sun and that we stay in each other's sight, because ultimately, we have to do it on our own. I think it's really easy to fall into the trap of believing that others will fill that gap that almost everyone feels. Maybe for some, it does. But I think for the vast majority of us, the other people are really like the other planets - in their own orbits. I think the best marriages are made of two people whose orbits intersect but remain their own, bouncing off an energy that encourages them to live their lives while still keeping the other in sight.
In last week's episode of House, House says to the patient who is looking at certain death without a kidney transplant, "it's ok, everyone dies alone anyway." Of course, he stole this from Cher who famously sang "sooner or later, we all sleep alone." I'm not sure if he's right or not, but I don't know if that's the point. I think the best we can do is make peace with it and welcome those that enter our orbits, no matter for how little time it might actually be. I don't think I'm there yet, but maybe someday I will be.
(I double dare anyone to find a blog post that mentions Wilco, Stevie Nicks AND Cher.)
I tried to write this post earlier today but today has been lost to sleeping and reading. I woke up at 7:15 this morning unable to breathe through my nose. Ah, allergies - how I love thee! So I was up for a bit but then I went to read in the comfy chair in the living room and fell asleep over the arm of the chair. I went back to bed and slept till 11:30! The rest of the day has alternated between plowing through City of the Dead (Brian Keene writes zombie fiction like no one else on the planet) and sleeping.
Now that it's nearly 9pm and I should start thinking about going to bed soon, I am awake. Such is life.
But here's what I really wanted to write about. Jeff and Caryle came up yesterday afternoon for Heidi's belated birthday celebration. During the morning, he had helped his sister with her garage sale and apparently, there was a crapload of vinyl for sale. He called me mid-morning and ran a few titles by me. A couple I already had, a few I wasn't interested in, but there were two that really got my attention. Here's the first:
It is, obviously, Stevie Nicks' 4th solo album The Other Side of the Mirror which I pretty much trashed here. Still, it was the only one of Stevie's solo albums that were actually issued on vinyl that I didn't have. This album was completely unopened - plastic seal still intact so whoever purchased it NEVER EVEN LISTENED TO IT. Well, because I know Stevie, I knew that the stuff on the inside would not be boring, so I ripped open the plastic, undisturbed since 1989 and sure enough, I was right!
That picture on the inner sleeve is one of my favorite Stevie photos of all time. I always figured it was from an earlier Stevie era, but I guess the poster of it I had in college was a promo for Mirror so it makes sense. Was it included in the Mirror CD artwork? I can't remember and I am too lazy to go look. And I love how Modern had all the vinyl labels for her solo albums be something that tied into the album cover. In this case, it's the black-and-white checkerboard floor.
I'm pretty sure that my Stevie vinyl collecting days are over because I would be shocked to find out that either Street Angel or Trouble in Shangri-La had been released on vinyl.
Jeff also found this - less exciting than the Stevie find, but still a quintessential album of the 80s.
Nothing exciting on the inside of this - all the pictures here were included in the CD release.
Sometimes I really miss vinyl. Sure it started wearing out the minute you started playing it, but I love how big the artwork is. I really need to get myself a record player.
In an attempt to jump start myself back into more regular blogging, I thought I'd do the old "seven songs you're into right now" meme. Some of these are what you might expect me to be listening to right now, others may surprise you. And only one of these is a current release.
1) You're Nothing Without Me / Belinda Carlisle Reading the Belinda Carlisle book got me on a Belinda kick (or was it the other way around? Really, it hardly matters.) This little-known track from her little-known album Live Your Life Be Free is one of my favorite Belinda tracks. I always think of my friend Jeff when I hear this song - "you're nuttin' without me...you're nuttin' without me."
2) It's Here / Kim Wilde Kim Wilde is dramatically underrated. Her output is also amazingly uneven, but when she is good, she is oh-so-good. I had never heard this song until just recently - and it has vaulted into my top 5 Kim Wilde songs. Infectious in a way that only pop songs from the late 80s/early 90s can be, it has a soaring chorus and a killer middle eight. As XO so rightly put it, great albums are full of songs with great middle eights.
3) Snowbird / Mark Eitzel It's no secret that I'm a bit of an Anne Murray fan (more on that later.) Guess what, I am so over the mockery, I can't even tell you. Her voice is pleasant and I have fond memories of hearing her songs from my youth. Mark Eitzel's take on her first hit, "Snowbird," slows it down some, but it certainly doesn't detract. It does what any good cover should - put it's own stamp on the song while making you appreciate the original all over again.
4) Come On Come On / Mary Chapin Carpenter Truth be told, I never much liked this Mary Chapin Carpenter song. The last song on the Come On Come On album, it ended the album with a whimper rather than a bang. But as a friend of mine put it, "songs arelike clothes, not always great when they're brand-new, a bit too stiff and shiny. After you've worn them a while, you can realize all of a sudden how nicely they fit." This is certainly true of "Come On Come On" - it suits my 38 year-old self so much better than my 21 year-old self. It's a perfect example of a sad song that really leaves you a little bit better off than when you started.
5) Alone In New York / Chatham County Line I'm not a huge fan of roots music or Americana, but I recently discovered Chatham County Line via my friend Jason and boy am I glad I did. Don't get me wrong - I enjoyed the O Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack and Dolly's bluegrass albums were top notch (it's Dolly, what do you expect?) but apart from that, I just have never really gotten around to listening to much of it. This is a standout track fromt he Wildwood album, it's a sober and melancholy affair, setting itself apart from the pop frenzy that has really characterized this summer. Much like October Project, I wish I had discovered them in the fall because, really, this is autumn music through and through.
6) Trouble in Shangri-La / Stevie Nicks Stevie shimmered back in 2001 with her most classic-Stevie-Nicks-sounding song since who knows when. Obtuse lyrics + great melody = Stevie at her best. It almost makes me wonder if this song wasn't from the vaults - with Stevie, anything is possible. But it is latter day Stevie that didn't just not disappoint, it made you think that maybe she still had some spark and fire left in her after all. Props to Matt for putting this song back on my radar for reasons well known to him. 7) Who's Leaving Who? / Anne Murray So about this Anne Murray thing. I discovered this song, as I have blogged before, when two friends independently of each other sent me a link to a download of the long out of print vinyl 12" single of this 1986 Anne Murray song. Talk about getting out of your pop-country rut - she is positively synth-tastic on this song. It's almost, as Heidi put it, "disco Anne Murray" (which ranks a close second to her comparing Debbie Harry at the True Colors Tour to "Anne Murray gone hard.") And then, I discovered the video. It's non-embeddable (bastards) but seriously click the link. The crowd at the Anne Murray show I went to was nowhere near that animated.
And guess what? This is my 1,400th post. As Cher would say, follow this you bitches!
All my Stevie Nicks listening last week caused a song I had nearly forgotten about to bubble back up to the surface. The great thing about being a Stevie Nicks fan is that you can double your pleasure so-to-speak because not only do you get solo songs from her (well, we USED to, anyway) but you also get songs from her when she's working with Fleetwood Mac. It's kind of like when Phil Collins was recording solo and with Genesis, which led to a pretty much uninterrupted onslaught of Phil Collins music, only Stevie produces music that I actually like. (that's harsh, I listened to and enjoyed a fair amount of Genesis and Phil Collins back in the late 80s.)
The song in question is Fleetwood Mac's "Sweet Girl" which was recorded for The Dance live album in 1997 and featured on the subsequent tour. I am fond of saying that it is one of the best Stevie Nicks songs of the last 15 years, and I stand by that assertion. Despite the brilliance that is shown on Trouble in Shangri-La, especially when you compare it to the previous two solo albums, there is something about "Sweet Girl" that sounds like classic Fleetwood Mac. Listen.
I don't know if it's the fact that you can hear all three voices, or if it's that Stevie sounds so damn good (and looks so good too - the Street Angel days were definitely behind her at this point) or what, but it's such a solid song. I was talking to my friend Matt about it the other day who I can always count on when I'm in a decidedly Fleetwood Mac mood. Our passion for Fleetwood Mac was one of the first things we discovered we had in common, but as we've discussed frequently, we see the band through decidedly different lenses. His is Lindsey-centric whereas mine is, naturally, more Stevie focused. We do agree on "Sweet Girl" though - it comes together just perfectly in the end. The harmonies, the guitar work, the production, Stevie's vocals - everything just works.
Lyrically, this is in between some of Stevie's more straight forward songs and her so-spaced-out-not-even-she-knows-what-it's-about songs. It is a bit obtuse in places, but a Stevie Nicks song without at least some degree of hazy lyrical meaning is no Stevie Nicks song at all. It has a wonderful bittersweet tone that characterizes many of my favorite pop songs. And what's better is that it reprises the "track a ghost through a fog" lyric that originally appeared in Tusk's "Angel." It is one of my favorite examples of Stevie recycling her lyrics. From a lesser songwriter, it would seem lazy. From her, it is endearing.
And speaking of, Matt and I were also discussing the "dramatic conversational moment" in "Sweet Girl" - the point at which Stevie descends into a bit of speak-sing and says "Come down here for a minute" only to follow it up with a patented Stevie wail "Weeeeelll, come down here for a minute." It starts at right about 2:50 in the above video. It works so well, and so few artists can get away with that and actually make it work. According to Matt - and I agree with him - it ends up sounding cliched. But with Stevie, she always makes it work. Examples are littered through her solo work, my favorite being the breakdown of "Some Become Strangers" where she mutters "I don't really need this in my life!/Why don't we forget about it." Mentioning this to XO, he brought up the baby-talk "do it for yourself" in "Has Anyone Ever Written Anything For You?" You could do a whole blog post on it, but it would likely be only interesting to me.
I saw The Dance tour a month in the Quad Cities a month after Heidi and I got married. Little did I know that it would be the last time that version of the band would ever tour. My biggest wish for that band is that they can coax Christine McVie out of retirement for one more album. They don't even have to tour (which is why she quit the band.) Just one more album of that lineup and I would be quite happy.
Sadly, I think it's a pipe dream, but one can still dream.
Last week at work, I was on a huge Stevie Nicks kick. I listened to her pretty much non-stop all day long, catapulting her up over a hundred plays this week on my last.fm page. I listened to almost everything of hers I had on my iPod, listening to 5 of her 6 solo albums, even playing Rock A Little twice. The only album I didn't manage to listen to was 1994's mess of an album, Street Angel.
When writing about Street Angel, I'm reminded of that scene in Straight Talk where Dolly Parton is talking to James Woods about the book he's writing. She asks him what his book is going to be about and he lists off this litany of awful things - corruption, greed, etc. She says to him "Why don't you write about something you love rather than something you hate?" That's kind of how I feel about this post, although "hate" really is too strong of a word for how I feel about Street Angel. Rather than hate it, I mostly feel sorry for it because contained therein are glimpses of what might have been. And really, if we don't look at our favorite artists honestly and recognize them as human, capable of making missteps, we're not doing them (or ourselves) any favors.
Five years had passed between The Other Side of the Mirror and Street Angel, and Stevie's life seemed to be a mess, although we didn't know the half of it at the time. There was a Fleetwood Mac album-of-sorts (Behind the Mask), her hasty departure from Fleetwood Mac in a fit of rage, a best-of album that had her singing songs written by Jon Bon Jovi and Bret Michaels and a few one-off soundtrack cuts from things like "Party of Five" and Boys on the Side. So to say it was a dry period for Stevie Nicks fans is putting it mildly.
I first heard of Street Angel through a fellow Stevie Nicks fan I met on the ISCABBS back in the spring of 1994. He lived in Boston and went by the online handle TheWildHeart. After talking online for several weeks, he offered to share with me a bunch of rare Stevie tracks with me. So I sent him a cassette tape and a couple weeks later, I got not one cassette tape full of Stevie rarities, but TWO. I still have those around here somewhere, although I managed to find most of those tracks on Napster & Audiogalaxy during the Wild West days of music on the internet. He had offered to send me tracks from the new album, but I chose not to have him send them. Rather, I decided to wait for the album. Those cassette tapes, along with Basia's The Sweetest Illusion, really define the last few weeks of that school year and as the semester wrapped up, I prepared to go back to my folks' house to work over the summer break.
A week or so after I arrived back home, I got a postcard in the mail (how, I'll never know!) that was a promo for Street Angel. It had this image of Stevie and I was horrified.
What happened? Where was the wonderfully curvaceous Stevie that I had come to know and love? She looked like death warmed over in this photo. I thought, surely her health must not be great. Stevie's weight had always yo-yo'd around a lot, but this was ridiculous! Still, I eagerly awaited the album, which came out the first week of June 1994 - right around my birthday.
Much like I did with The Other Side of the Mirror, I tried to talk myself into liking it. It's not hard to do when it's a long-awaited release by a what amounts to a core artist in your listening habits, but there was something niggling at the back of my brain. "This isn't that good..." it seemed to say. "Stevie really doesn't sound like she's even there." And as it turns out, it was true. When the album was in production, Stevie was back in rehab, AGAIN, this time trying to kick the Klonopin habit that had started with her finally and completely kicking of the cocaine habit in the late 80s. Stevie's songs and voice are pretty much the only thing authentically Stevie on the album. The production, the album art, everything else has the feel of something cobbled together by committee. I swear that given the opportunity, even with the limited technology of the day, I could have come up with a better album cover than what the record company did! What's contained in the album is nearly as amateur. There's an ill-advised cover of Bob Dylan's "Just Like A Woman" and an obtuse song about Jane Goodall. The production is very generic and blah - living up to neither the acoustic greatness of Bella Donna or the synthy-goodness of Rock A Little. As an album, it fails, completely and utterly.
But all is not lost. I've been listening to this album while I write this post and there are several good songs. Not surprisingly, many of them are songs written by Stevie for the first three albums and ultimately rejected for whatever reason. The first time I listened to the song "Greta" I had what basically was a deja vu moment - it sounded just like classic Stevie, complete with the spoken "Oooh, she's got a movie star view..." moment. Well, "Greta" was originally recorded for The Wild Heart - no wonder it sounds like 80s Stevie! The "Greta" demo from that time period is circulating on the internet and is astounding for both its similarities and differences to the version that eventually ended up on Street Angel. Lyrically, it's pretty much identical, but the 80s version is faster and has an 80s groove that is notably absent on the Street Angel version.
Another standout is one of my favorite Stevie tracks, "Blue Denim."(embedding disabled? Seriously!?) A classic Stevie rocker co-written with Heartbreaker Mike Campbell, it kicks the album off in fine form and was even released as the second single. Even though Stevie does sound a bit bored through parts of it, singing the "blue grey eyes they change with the color" chorus in practically a monotone, there's a urgency in the song that even Stevie's Klonopin use couldn't douse. By the time we hit the last minute of the song and she wails "Yes I'm going away for a little while to remember how to feel!/And if I find the answer, I promise you/I'll come back and get you," you can just see Stevie on a concert stage, her chiffon dress billowing out as she twirls as only Stevie can. She hit the talk show circuit to promote "Blue Denim", appearing on David Letterman with a crimped hairdo and very overweight - so much so that upon viewing it, she vowed to retire unless she could lose weight.
An aside - Stevie has been criticized for her weight for the better part of 30 years, but the biggest problem for her is that ANY extra weight on her 5'2" frame is going to be noticeable. Someone like me that has the benefit of a 6'2" body has A LOT more places to put the extra weight, but Stevie's just not that lucky. And I never thought she looked bad during the Street Angel years, weight-wise. She certainly looked better than she did during the first Clinton inaugural. Combine that with seeing that shocking picture of her on that promo postcard, I was glad to see that she wasn't at death's door after all, although there's no doubt her weight at the time was not particularly healthy for her. During high school, I was always so worried about Stevie, that she would suffer a premature death from a drug overdose and I would be teased mercilessly by kids at school because I made no secret of my Stevie fandom. Fortunately, I never had to endure that and won't because the chances of her ODing are pretty much at zero these days.
But back to the music. Even lesser songs like "Maybe Love Will Change Your Mind" and the title track have aged better than they should have. But most of the rest of it is a forgettable train wreck. It's a train wreck like only Stevie can do it and because it's Stevie, it's still moderately listenable for me. As I said earlier, I have been listening to it while I write this post and at several points, I've had to stop and ask myself if I'm being too hard on it. Well, as a friend of mine said to me once, "Don't kid yourself, Dan. That album is ASS!" And yeah, for the most part it is. It is on par with The Other Side of the Mirror and doesn't hold up even remotely when compared to Bella Donna, The Wild Heart and Rock A Little. Clearly, when given a choice between the two, the cocaine was a better muse for Stevie than the Klonopin, although I'd prefer she had neither.
It wouldn't be until 2001 - seven years later - that we'd get another solo album from Stevie Nicks. Finally free of the grips of Klonopin and reinvigorated by a reunion with the classic Fleetwood Mac lineup, she produced an album that deserves a spot in the Stevie Nicks canon next to the triumphant first three albums, something Street Angel can't even come close to claiming. In fact, after listening to so much Street Angel this morning, let's all cleanse our palates with "Blue Lamp."
I'm fond of saying that being a fan of Stevie Nicks' solo work would be so easy if her solo output had stopped after three albums. If any set of albums really represents a trifecta, it's her first 3 solo albums: Bella Donna, The Wild Heart, and Rock A Little. While this is not strictly true - 2001's Trouble In Shangri-La came closer to the brilliance of those first three album than anything in the interim - there is something about that set of albums that just really hits the mark. There was a natural trajectory from the acoustic folk of Bella Donna to the synth-laden Rock A Little, with The Wild Heart being an amalgam of the two, almost as if it were the offspring of those two very different albums.
The trouble comes with the albums between Rock A Little and Trouble In Shangri-La. The Other Side of the Mirror (1989) and Street Angel (1994) are really hard to love. As a fan, I feel like I end up making more apologies for them than anything else. They have only a handful of good songs between them, but as albums they really miss the mark to the same extent that the first three hit the mark.
The Other Side of the Mirror is the first of Stevie's albums that I experienced in real time. I remember hearing about it while eating breakfast over MTV on January morning in 1989, with Kurt Loder reporting that it would be released "sometime this year." In podunk Iowa, our primary music retailers were K-Mart, Pamida and the local department store chain (now defunct) Sernett and none of them were ones that you could count on for accurate information on new releases. This was pre-internet and the information was not simply at your fingertips! It was eventually released in May of that year after great anticipation on my part.
Maybe it was the anticipation, but I have always been less than crazy about this album. It's WORK to like The Other Side of the Mirror. In a word, the album is overbaked, a victim of the worst of cliched 80s production. Whereas Rock A Little has aged well despite its completely 80s production, Mirror barely sounds like a Stevie Nicks record. She is spaced out and not really engaged in the songs at all. The lead single, "Rooms On Fire" is uninspired, buried underneath layer after layer of turgid production. Sub-par songwriting doesn't help her case either. And what in the world is Kenny G doing on a Stevie Nicks album? For me, TOSOTM is to Stevie Nicks as Hard Candy is to Madonna in that it's an album I really tried to talk myself into liking. Both albums have some strong songs but do not hold together as albums very well.
It's not all bad though. "Long Way To Go" rocks pretty well and despite the fact that it's relatively tuneless, I do still like the song "Juliet" which found a home on this album after being rejected from Fleetwood Mac's Tango In The Night. I think it's the reference to the blue lamp that pushes it over the edge for me. And I have a soft spot for "Fire Burning" even though it sounds like she's barely present.
Years later, we'd find out why she was barely present. Instead of being strung out on cocaine or some other illegal substance, Stevie was growing more and more dependent on the prescription drug Klonopin. She's on record as saying that she really has no memory of the Mirror tour due Klonopin use. As she herself said "The fabulous Stevie that everyone knew just disappeared."
But if you thought Klonopin colored The Other Side of the Mirror, just wait till you listen to Street Angel. You ain't seen nothing yet. But that's the next post.
After a winter of nearly constant snowfall and cold temperatures, we've finally managed to thaw out. A solid week of 50 degree weather has pretty much decimated our snow cover and I don't think you'll find anyone that has a problem with that. Spring really feels like it's in the air, and while we're not out of the woods yet as far as the freakish April snowstorm goes, we're all breathing a little bit easier.
I was headed to a late afternoon appointment the other day when spring really hit me. It was a combination of things - the smell in the air, the lack of snow, and the feeling of having been released from prison. Yesterday, as I was leaving work and it was 58 degrees outside, it hit me again. The warmer weather is part of it, but it's more than that. It's a feeling that I can't describe.
Naturally, it made me want to listen to Bella Donna, which is exactly what I have been doing.
Stevie Nicks is such a "spring" artist to me and of all her albums, nothing says March or April more than Bella Donna. I've told the story of how, in the fall of 1987, I became infatuated with Stevie Nicks. The reason for this was twofold - Fleetwood Mac had released their first album in 5 years that spring, Tango In The Night, and Madonna was headed into a year long dry spell which would end with Like A Prayer in the spring of 1989. As a consequence, Stevie pretty much had my undivided attention. My mom had the Rock A Little record album and I bought both Bella Donna and The Wild Heart in October or November of 1987. I listened to them throughout the winter to the exclusion of so many other things I shudder to think of what I might have missed. I remember coming home from school and going up to my room to soak up the music and ponder the impossibly high heels that Stevie was wearing on the cover of the album. But even with those heels, she probably would still only come up to my chest.
So by the time we got to the spring of 1988, I was a goner and completely obsessed with Stevie's music, particularly Bella Donna. Is there any better album for a shy and introverted teenager with a streak of unnecessary melancholy? Stevie pushed all the right buttons. With her vague lyrics that could be applied to nearly any situation, she seemed like a kindred spirit, like the wiser and older aunt that was so much cooler than your own parents. I must have listened to the song "Think About It" a zillion times that year alone, always entranced by the lyric "Even when you feel like your life is fading/I know that you'll go on forever, you're that good/Heartbreak of the moment is not endless/Fortune is your life's love." It reverberated inside my 15 year-old head like nothing else, when the world seemed to be crashing down (it wasn't) and my teenage angst felt as big as a mountain, even though it really could have been measured in angstroms. 23 years later, it still resonates, for no other reason than it's true. Heartbreak of the moment is not endless. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The thing about Stevie's music is that you're on the ride with her. To truly have the Stevie experience, you have no other choice but to feel what she does. I feel Bella Donna contains her most vivid examples of balls-out honesty (pardon the expression) in a career littered with what from other artists would have amounted to an uncomfortable overshare. You experience her disillusionment with fame on "After The Glitter Fades" and her internal struggle with relationships on "Leather & Lace." The album really is her, something that is only hinted at in her work with Fleetwood Mac.
But it's the title track that I've been coming back to over the last week or so. The opening 5 piano chords are part of the soundtrack of my life. The structure of the song defies conventional description. There's really no bridge and no concrete refrain. But the melody is very strong and it doesn't take 30 bars to complete. Stevie talks about how the song "Bella Donna" is "about getting a little bit of my normal life back." I also liked this interpretation I found online:
I definitely see how this song is kind of a letter to yourself. "Bella donna...my soul..." This song conveys sort of an understanding and compassion with the lowest parts of yourself and presents a sort of crossroads mood; you've taken stock of your situation and now you're ready to take a step towards a direction.
Well, no wonder it hit my teenage self like a ton of bricks. Talk about a time in your life when you're making steps in new directions.
I also find it telling that they should mention writing a letter to yourself, because there are so many times over the years that found myself wishing I could either write to or go talk to the 15 year-old version of me. In years past, I have wanted to go back and slap him silly. But the older I've gotten, the more at peace I've become with that part of me because, like it or not, that adolescent me is still in there. And what I've found is that I have to treat that part of me with a liberal dose of kindness. It's nowhere near as equipped to deal with the world as my current version is, which probably makes me less equipped than I think I am.
But I'll always have Bella Donna, and I doubt that even 25 years from now it will resonate any less. It's just a feeling I have.
I was thinking today about how much Stevie Nicks' The Wild Heart needs a remaster. The version that I have is so soft and muted. While turning up the volume of the individual tracks inside iTunes has helped some, it just doesn't sound as crisp as her later recordings. Even Bella Donna sounds better!
I've always maintained that The Wild Heart is the bridge between the acoustic/classic rock of Bella Donna and the full-on synthesized sound of Rock A Little, blending both elements with great success. I appreciate both of these aspects of Stevie's solo career and so, as you might imagine, have a great deal of fondness for The Wild Heart. I have purchased it three times - twice in high school (once to replace my lost first copy) and then eventually on CD when I was in college. I also, many years later, managed to acquire a copy of the vinyl, so I suppose I've actually purchased it four times.
I always loved "Nightbird" which rounded out side one. A loving tribute to her friend Robin who died from leukemia, it is classic Stevie in that it is part poetry and part head-scratcher. It was one of the first places where I noticed a recycled lyric ("just like the white-winged dove") and while many could interpret that as lazy, I prefer to look at it as hooking the songs together.
Anyway, here's "Nightbird" from the early 80s. I love the comment on the YouTube site that says that Stevie manages to mix the serenity of an angel with the challenging expression of a porn star - a comment that could apply to so much of her career and not just this isolated video.
One of the ways that an iTunes library will always be inferior to physical CDs, records, tapes, etc. is that songs are much more likely to get lost in a sea of music when they are digital files. Even on my iPod, which contains about 25% of the music on my computer, I really favor probably a 10% chunk for frequent listening. There are so many hidden gems in my iTunes library that have simply been lost in the shuffle.
Anyway, I found a song this morning that I had forgotten about and I immediately added it to my favorites list. It is The Williams Brothers "Some Become Strangers". Actually, in my world, it's their cover of Stevie Nicks' "Some Become Strangers", but that is not really accurate as they wrote it, even though Stevie recorded it before them. I have spent the last 15 minutes looking for an embeddable version of their video for the song, but I can't - a state of affairs I always find utterly ridiculous. Anyway, I think it's gorgeous, moody and very autumnal. Watch it here. Seriously. Do it.
What I think is funny about this is how similar and different it is from Stevie's version, which she recorded for Rock A Little in 1985. Listen to Stevie's after you listen to theirs and you'll see what I mean.
I can't decide which I like more - obviously I have much more history with Stevie's version. I think it's funny how there's differences in nearly ever line of the first verse between the two versions. Plus I love the Stevie stamp of "I don't really need this in my life! / Why don't we forget about it?" at the end of the bridge which the Williams Brothers wisely did not use.
I am trying to find a copy of the album this song came from but - to no one's shock, it is not available for download on either Amazon or iTunes. The only copies for sale are used copies. I will NEVER understand why anything is out of print now. The artists will not make money off of sales of used copies, whereas if they put it up on iTunes for $7.99, I would have already purchased it and they would have my money. But the record companies are too busy going after 30 second song samples to actually be paying attention to what consumers want. (Earth to the music industry, that's called FAIR USE!)
Anyway, this is a perfect song for this gray weekend. Hopefully I can find some more of their music. (I found their second album, The Williams Brothers, on iTunes hidden amongst the discography of the gospel group of the same name!)
This morning while I was getting ready for work, I heard Fleetwood Mac's "I Don't Want To Know." I thought to myself, "I should really write about this song" as it has always been a Fleetwood Mac favorite of mine. I kind of forgot about it until I heard it again at work this morning, on the radio no less, and I figured "this must be a sign." So here I am.
As much as I really do love "I Don't Want To Know", as Fleetwood Mac songs go, it is definitely the bastard at the family reunion. It is impossible to talk about "I Don't Want To Know" without talking about the song that it replaced on Rumours, fan-favorite, Stevie-favorite and Lindsey kiss-off song "Silver Springs." Stevie tells the story best, you can read it over here. The basic gist of the story is that "Silver Springs" was all set to be on Rumours, but then it was dumped at the 11th hour for "I Don't Want To Know." Stevie was devastated, "I Don't Want To Know" went on the record and "Silver Springs" was relegated to B-side status (of "Go Your Own Way" which is the Stevie kiss-off song. Talk about adding insult to injury.)
Since then, "I Don't Want To Know" has been persona non grata. To my knowledge, it has never been performed live. It was not a single and has not appeared on any Fleetwood Mac compilations, not even The Chain box set, but "Hold Me" wasn't on that one either, which is an even more unbelievable omission. Well, I am going on record here and now as saying that I prefer "I Don't Want To Know" to "Silver Springs." And not by a razor-thin margin either. By a lot.
It's not that I dislike "Silver Springs" - far from it. It is certainly one of Stevie's best realized songs as a songwriter. It is lyrically and musically strong. The imagery is vivid. The vocals are solid. I can understand why she wanted it on the album. I tend to think that Mick's "it's too long" reason is bullshit - it's only 4 minutes something, but I suppose that vinyl might have had more significant time limitations. I just prefer the fun of "I Don't Want To Know" over the why-so-serious of "Silver Springs." I have always said that if I were in a band, "I Don't Want To Know" is the Fleetwood Mac song I would cover. If I ever learn how to play guitar, I want to learn how to play this song.
Stevie is on record as saying that it was just a fun guitar song she wrote, and honestly, she's right, but what's wrong with that? I just can't help but love it. It's one of those songs that she wrote that was perfect for Fleetwood Mac if for no other reason than the tight harmonies. I just could not imagine this song on one of her solo albums. It is also one of her more "down to earth" songs in that it is not all mysterious and witchy and what-the-hell-is-she-singing-about? Also, it just simply makes me feel good when I hear it. There is a lot of raw emotion in "Silver Springs" but "I Don't Want To Know" is a little subtler, adding a spoonful of sugar to the nastiness that was Stevie & Lindsey's relationship back then.
So even though I really do prefer "I Don't Want To Know", I'm willing to let the songs coexist. I am, however, absolutely militant in my opposition to attempts to shoehorn "Silver Springs" on to Rumours re-issues, as if it were part of the original album. Put it on a bonus disc, record it live a zillion times, but DO NOT try to alter a classic album. Period. Really, I'm kind of opposed to all those "expanded editions" of albums anyway, especially when they are blatant cash grabs. I didn't buy the Fleetwood Mac re-isssues in 2005, but apparently Rumours is getting the deluxe treatment this year, so we'll see if they do anything with "I Don't Want To Know."
That song will always be special to me, even though Stevie will likely never ever sing it.
Meanwhile, I found this picture that I have never seen before. I think it is Mirage era (based upon the look Stevie has going) but it's hard to tell.
I have gone on a lot about how I don't think Madonna is growing old with any kind of grace. Stevie Nicks, on the other hand, is showing everyone how to do it. And considering how she's pretty damn lucky that she's made it to 60, I don't think it could have come from a more unlikely source.
Her "new" CD and DVD is out today. I lack the funds to purchase it this week, but I did buy the AmazonMP3 exclusive track, "Enchanted." While her voice does not have the youthfulness of her 80s solo records, she is in probably the finest live vocal form I have ever heard for her - probably the best live vocals I have heard since The Dance in 1997.
Rock on, Stevie. Your music has always inspired me, even when it has been not-so-good and laced with Klonopin. Now please, PLEASE, record some new material! Lindsey has released 3 albums since you released Trouble In Shangri-La.
PS - That top hat is just about the sexiest thing I have seen all day. Just sayin'.
I have not done the 7 songs meme in a while - and there have been several songs I have been REALLY into recently, so it felt like time to revisit it. Links to YouTube videos where I could find them.
List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they're not any good, but they must be songs you're really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they're listening to. 1)Help Me (Live in Cadogan Hall) / Will Young This is currently my favorite cover song out there. Originally found on Joni Mitchell's Court & Spark, "Help Me" is deceptively simple, but the melody and lyrics are actually quite complex. I also love his androgynous voice, especially in the beginning when you can't decide if it's a male or female singing and as it hits some of the higher notes. I think Joni Mitchell would be proud of this version of the song.
2) A Fool In Love / Tina Turner I have had a huge Tina Turner renaissance over the last few weeks. Even before I rewatched What's Love Got To Do With It, I was really loving this song. I have not heard Tina's original vocal on this, but rather, it is the rerecorded version that she did for the movie that has got my attention right now. What I love about it is how Tina's gruff vocals are such a contrast to the back-up singers on the chorus. That and the "you know you love him/you can't understand/why he treats you like he do/when he's such a good man." That lyric can really get stuck in your head. 3) Say You Love Me / Fleetwood Mac This has probably always been one of my favorite Christine McVie songs in the Fleetwood Mac catalog. The version I am really into right now is the one from The Chain boxset which puts guitars over the piano opening and makes them more prominent throughout. It just seems to have more meat on the bones of the song. Plus the ending harmonies are just classic. Too bad that McVie is not joining Fleetwood Mac on their current tour.
4) Never (Heaven on the Floor Mix) / Kristine W.(stream it) Kristine W. is one of those artists that you really don't need to own a whole album of. A few choice tracks here and there should satisfy most people. This (along with "Lovin' You" from the Queer as Folk soundtrack) is what I would qualify as essential Kristine W. After getting over my initial disappointment in finding out it was not a Heart cover, I really came to appreciate this song. It came on my iPod at the gym today and it is a PERFECT gym song. It's probably going on my year end best-of list, so you heard it here first. 5) If I Were You / Stevie Nicks One of my most favorite of all of Stevie's album tracks, it pretty much never leaves the "Dan's Favorites" playlist on my iPod. The best part of the whole song is the "Every boy must learn to be a man/Well, I think I can help you/Yes I can" part. It takes me back to January of 88, playing The Bard's Tale on the Apple IIe and being sucked into the web of Stevie in which I am still stuck to this day. I never would have thought that 21 years later, it would still be in such heavy rotation.
6) We Connect / Stacey Q Speaking of a song I would have never thought would be in heavy rotation on my iPod in the year 2009, this minor hit for Stacey Q is one of them. But for whatever reason, here I am, nearly 37 years old and I'm listening to this bubble gum stuff. I can't help it. It is so infectious plus it has the "tion" rhymes that get me every time. "It's no exaggeration/not imagination/You're the finest boy in town/Playing with temptation/overnight sensation/With a boy from the wrong side of town." It really is kind of scary the kinds of things that appeal to me.
7) Asleep / The Smiths I am not a big Smiths fan, although I have been dallying with them a bit recently. What set it off was the song "Asleep" which featured prominently in The Perks of Being a Wallflower. It is the song that Charlie listens to and at that moment "feels infinite." I meant to blog that book, but I'm afraid that ship has sailed. However, it was a great book. And as Smiths songs go, this one is just heartbreaking - and there are a lot of heartbreaking, melancholy Smiths songs.
Not tagging anyone, but consider yourself tagged if you so desire.
We have had a crazy few days that culminated last night in taking Heidi to the ER. Long story short, she will be fine but I have not one single regret that we took her in last night. She is 100% more herself today than she has been since well, probably last weekend!
So one more day of work and then I work Tuesday and Friday this week and that's it! I was listening to Stevie Nicks' "If I Were You" (which really should have made my Top 12 Stevie songs post I did earlier this year) and it reminded me of this photo, which is one of my all time favorite Stevie photos.
I used to have a poster of this, but it was trashed after moving so many times in college.
As Sophia Petrillo might say: Picture it. Des Moines, IA. 1988. A 15 year old Dan, recently immersed in Fleetwood Mac is busily buying up all the albums from the Stevie-Lindsey-Christine line up. On this particular day, the purchase was Tusk, the sprawling double album that was the follow-up to Rumours. It is also the last of that set of albums that he had yet to acquire. A stop at Merle Hay Mall left him with exactly what he needed and he held the cassette tape proudly in his hands. Once back at the car, he climbed in the back seat and his folks popped the tape into the car. Christine McVie's "Over & Over" started things off on a nice note. Then "The Ledge" came on and his WTF reaction commenced.
I have been listening to a lot of Tusk these days. As is the case with most of these kinds of things, I can't really put my finger on what brought it on. Tusk is certainly not my favorite Fleetwood Mac album. Because of this, I don't really feel qualified to talk about it -- I don't know that I've ever given it a fair shake. But I have been listening to Fleetwood Mac for 20 years now, so I figured, what the hell? In many ways, I feel like Tusk is a Lindsey Buckingham solo album that the rest of the band was invited to do guest spots on. It's not like Lindsey does the lead vocal on every song and yes, Christine and Stevie get a fair amount of the spotlight, but for some reason, it has always felt like Lindsey's record. Tusk is not a bad album. However, it is chronically misunderstood and also ultimately collapses under its own weight. Very few double albums avoid this fate.
My favorite story surrounding the Tusk album is about how the head honchos at Warner Bros. "saw their Christmas bonuses flying out the window" when they heard Tusk. Certainly, if they were expecting Rumours II, they did not get it. It is big and bold and experimental and self indulgent and only periodically commercial. That has always been my problem with it - it doesn't really sound like Fleetwood Mac. Oh, it does in places, but I think with this record, we saw what Lindsey truly wanted to do in the studio, and he has continued in this vein for most of his solo work.
It is easy to fault Lindsey for Tusk being a big behemoth of an album, but really, he is also key to its success. Lest Matt stop speaking to me, I will say that he does contribute a lot of strong songs, even if the production seems a bit batshit crazy in a lot of places. I have always been fond of "Not That Funny" and I have vivid memories of riding on a charter bus through the night on the way to the Ozarks for a school trip listening to "I Know I'm Not Wrong." Even though I initially reacted very negatively to it, I have come to really appreciate "The Ledge" despite the fact that I couldn't understand a single word of it for the longest time. And although I think the production on his own songs is insane, his production of Stevie is stellar, reminding us that he is without a doubt the producer she needs the most.
It is no secret that I have always had a very Stevie-centric view of Fleetwood Mac, and her five contributions to Tusk are among her best work, in or out of Fleetwood Mac. I will never forget that day in the spring of 88, listening to "Sara" for the very first time. I can't get my head around the fact that there was ever a time in my life that I did not know "Sara." Years later when I was in college, I had a mix tape that collected those five songs from Tusk so that I could listen to them one after another. "Beautiful Child" is arguably her best contribution to Fleetwood Mac, and "Storms" with its key line "never have I been a blue calm sea/I have always been a storm" was one of those songs that I kept coming back to during my adolescence and college years as I grew into who I am today.
Tusk is chock full of memories for me, even though as an album it never got nearly the rotation that Rumours, Mirage or Tango in the Night got. The spring of 1988 was a real watershed time for me, and the music associated with it is indelibly stamped into my brain. I will always be able to summon those feelings and images while listening to Tusk. Perhaps that's why I dug it out after all this time. As I get older, those times become much like Stevie's famous ghost through the fog. The music reminds me of where I've been and helps me figure out where I'm headed.
For all its foibles and indulgences, Tusk sounds better today than the first time I heard it nearly 20 years ago. Time has vindicated it to some extent. It will never be Rumours, but I don't think that was ever the intention.
The other day, an odd looking package arrived in the mail addressed to Heidi. I couldn't figure out what it was and, to my knowledge, we were not expecting anything. It was from Grand Rapids and I only know a couple people that live there, but thought that certainly they would not be sending us anything in the mail! Amazingly, I did not make my standard joke that any unexpected package likely contains anthrax. What can I say? I was off my game that day.
Anyway, we opened it up and it contained a treasure.
It is my very own vinyl copy of Bella Donna! As it turns out, my friend Mario had read my post on The Wild Heartwhere I was lamenting the fact that the only one of Stevie's first three albums that I did not have on vinyl was Bella Donna. He had a few in his store and sent me one. The note inside (addressed to Heidi) was to save the album for a special occasion, but unfortunately, it did not work out that way!
However, I love it and it is in great condition. It is probably my favorite of all of Stevie's album covers, if for no other reason than those impossibly high-heeled boots she is wearing. The album is a classic. I have written about it before, but am probably due to revisit it sometime soon. Which means I'll write about it in 3 years.
Also in that package was another surprise, no doubt inspired by my music meme post I did a while back where I revealed my fondness for the music of Helen Reddy.
So, thanks to Mario, I am now in the indefensible position of owning three of Helen Reddy's studio albums! ;)
Thank you Mario! You made my day utterly and completely!!
Attack of the killer beaver!!
Click to make it bigger! It's Stevie Nicks!
Barbra crimped her hair and went down the stoney end. She never wanted to go down the stoney end!
