Trouble In Shangri-La

As far back as ten years ago, any non-partisan listener might have greeted the new Stevie Nicks record as a kind of relic, a hark back to an age of champagne, coke and frilly lace chokers.

More recently though, California dreamin’ got rehabilitated in a way that was half kitsch, half genuine fondness for Ms Nicks’ wistful croak on the soap-op romance of tunes like ‘Edge Of 17’. For a start, she somehow became a kind of peer figure for Natalie Merchant, Sarah McLachlan and the rest of the Lilith fillies. Then rootsy radio rock returned with The Wallflowers and Sheryl Crow, The Corrs covered the sublime ‘Dreams’, and Courtney Love staged a brilliant reupholstering of the ruined high life and LA noir of Rumours with the sorely underrated Celebrity Skin.

In fact, Crow, Courtney and McLachlan plus Macy Gray all get credits here (the former produced five of the tunes, wrote one and co-wrote another). Other familiars include Tom Petty, credited with giving Nicks an earful over dinner back in ’95, thus generating the impetus for this comeback, and his fellow Heartbreakers Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench also contribute, alongside hardened sessioneers like Waddy Wachtel and Lenny Castro.

The result is exactly what you would expect a Nicks record to sound like in 2001. A couple of token nods to the Pro-Tools age, but mostly traditional AOR sounds offset by the singer’s white witch lyrical shtick – titles like ‘Sorcerer’, ‘Bombay Sapphires’ and ‘Planets Of The Universe’. All of which would sound rather anomalous if not for two saving graces: Nicks’ delicious voice and a melodic instinct that transforms even the most cringe-worthy of West Coast clunkers into something more memorable, best represented here by the nagging chorus of the title tune.