'The best year of my life': New documentary follows Stevie Nicks' collaborations with Dave Stewart

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A new documentary explores the recent collaboration between Fleetwood Mac’s Steve Nicks and Dave Stewart, of Eurythmics fame. “In Your Dreams: Stevie Nicks” premieres at the International Hamptons Film Festival and then the 20th annual Mill Valley Film Festival, both in October.

Cameras were allowed into Nicks’ home, a mansion in the Los Angeles hills, as she worked with Stewart on what would become the 2011 release In Your Dreams. As the pair compose, the film details for the first time the interesting, and heretofore largely unseen, inner workings of Nicks day-to-day life — from boisterous dinner parties, to colorful costume parties, to fantastical moments of tap dancing and frivolity.

[SOMETHING ELSE! REWIND: Fellow Fleetwood Mac alum Jeremy Spencer has returned with the rootsy ‘Bend in the Road,’ featuring a new collaborator, some old favorites and a handful of great original tunes.]

Meanwhile, there are also revealing looks into the recording sessions — between cameos from a striking, white stallion — as well as rare photos from Nick’s personal scrapbook, including shots from her childhood and backstage moments from her celebrated career in music.

Ultimately, Nicks would describe this period as “the best year of my life.”

“In Your Dreams: Stevie Nicks” will debut at the Hamptons Film Festival on October 7, 2012, then on October 12 at the Mill Valley event. For more information on the Hamptons Film Festival, please go to www.hamptonsfilmfest.org. For more information about the Mill Valley Film Festival, please go to www.millvalleyfilmfestival.com.

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Here are our recent thoughts on Stevie Nicks, Dave Stewart and 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.

DAVE STEWART, FEATURING ORIANTHI, “GIRL IN A CATSUIT” (2012): There is a droning, strangely intoxicating groove to this song, like a reckless combining of a two-on-the-tongue night of acid and some grease-popping north Mississippi blues. Dave Stewart retraces the lyric on “Girl in a Catsuit,” verse by verse, with all of the insistence of a shotgun’s report — repeating them like mantras, but dirtier, hungrier, with a carnal desire for this woman that guys like Howlin’ Wolf would have appreciated — until Orianthi bursts into the song like a thunderclap of nervy fission.

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.

Something Else!