'Next year, so far': Stevie Nicks confirms (sort of) a reunion for Fleetwood Mac in 2013

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Stevie Nicks this morning confirmed — well, almost — that Fleetwood Mac will reunite next year. Details about whether that could mean a new studio album, or simply a tour, remain unclear.

Longtime drummer Mick Fleetwood has chalked up the band’s inactivity lately to solo ventures by both Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. Nicks issued In Your Dreams) in 2011, and has been touring in support of it ever since, most recently in a concert pairing with Rod Stewart. Buckingham also issued his own solo album in 2011, and has been appearing in a series of well-received one-man shows.

[SOMETHING ELSE! REWIND: S. Victor Aaron remembers early Fleetwood Mac member Bob Welch, who left behind an interesting legacy of his own before tragically committing suicide this summer.]

The group last mounted a tour in 2008, and did so both without Christine McVie — who was also absent from Fleetwood Mac’s most recent studio effort, 2003’s Say You Will — and without a new album. Titled “Unleashed,” that tour featured many of the band’s greatest hits, as well as key deep cuts like “I Know I’m Not Wrong” and “Storms.”

As recently as April, however, Fleetwood — who co-founded the band in the late 1960s with bassist John McVie and departed guitarist Peter Green — was still expressing doubts that the group would ever reunite.

Nicks, in an interview today with CBS This Morning, said a Fleetwood reunion will happen “next year, so far. … It’s the plan. Because that’s what we do. I do my thing. And Lindsey is out doing his thing now.”

Here are our recent thoughts on Fleetwood Mac. Click through the titles for complete reviews …

STEVIE NICKS – IN YOUR DREAMS (2011): Stevie Nicks is, I’ve always thought, one of those ingredients that only tastes completely right in concert with other things. Those things being the rest of Fleetwood Mac in general — and, more specifically, Lindsey Buckingham. Sure, she’s had her own hits, away from the band. But they never could mimic the recipe of finish-their-sentence symbiosis, not to mention revenge-screw sexual tension, found in her best work with Buckingham. Same here, despite a gristly new attitude in the songwriting and the presence of the really very talented Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics.

LINDSEY BUCKINGHAM – SEEDS WE SOW (2011): You keep waiting for Lindsey Buckingham, the old rebel, to soften into middle-aged acceptance, to conform. This isn’t that record. Credit Buckingham for never trading true emotion for sentiment. Seeds We Sow is as hard eyed as it is musically ambitious — beginning with its abruptly confessional album-opening title track. “In Our Own Time” follows, as Buckingham reminisces about a lost love amidst an almost mathematical cascade. “This time I think she’s gone for good,” Buckingham says, then adds: “But I never really know.” Then all of the implications, all of those hurt feelings, all of the still-burning confusion, are echoed in his frenetic, contradictory chording. It’s a triumphal marrying of words and music, and not the last one.

PETER GREEN SPLINTER GROUP – BLUES DON’T CHANGE (2012): fter years of ups and many more downs, Peter Green — the deposed co-founding member of Fleetwood Mac, one-time British guitar hero, and former member of John Mayall’s Bluebreakers — has rediscovered the curative powers of the blues. And it is here, playing very old tunes (scalding in their honesty, ageless in their sense of community, brutal and beautiful in their intense simplicity) that all of Green’s late-1960s promise comes rushing back.

MICK FLEETWOOD’S ZOO – I’M NOT ME (1983; 2012 reissue): This home-recorded Mick Fleetwood project, never before issued on compact disc, is neither a solo effort nor a Fleetwood Mac knockoff — though, admittedly, there are moments when I’m Not Me can sound like his main group. Instead, more often than not, this short-lived quartet has its very own feel — well, a bunch of them, really. Of course, Fleetwood Mac diehards will want to pick up this up because it includes “I Want You Back” — a lost minor hit that Lindsey Buckingham co-wrote and shared lead vocals on. But Zoo, in fact, had three of its own credible frontmen — and each of them adds his own texture and personality to the proceedings.

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