‘It’s never left my head’: For Stevie Nicks, 24 Karat Gold: Songs From The Vault has transportive quality

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“Lady,” the strikingly emotional advance track from Stevie Nicks’ forthcoming 24 Karat Gold: Songs From The Vault project, is something that’s been following her around for decades, it seems.

Nicks says its the first song she wrote when she got a new piano, right after moving to Los Angeles with Lindsey Buckingham, her then-boyfriend, musical collaborator and future Fleetwood Mac bandmate. And, though “Lady” was never released, she wasn’t often without it for very long. “Sometimes, I’ll find myself humming it, or whistling it,” she says in an advance talk focused on 24 Karat Gold. “This has been going on since I wrote it in 1971. So, it’s never left my head. That’s why I sing it so exactly like I did on the demo — because the demo is pretty perfect.”

24 Karat Gold: Songs From The Vault, which is due October 7, 2014, finds her taking similar trips back to older, underheard music. In this way, much of the album has the same transportive quality found on “Lady.” Even if the sessions are new, the sentiments speak to an earlier period, back when Nicks’ future as a budding singer-songwriter was frighteningly uncertain.

“During that first couple of months, when I wrote that song,” Nicks says, “we were like, ‘Is this right? Should we have stayed in San Francisco?’ So, when it says, ‘I know that things have gotta change, but how to change them isn’t clear; tired of knocking on doors, when there’s nobody there,’ it really was — ‘what is to become of us?’ We’re unsure; we can’t find our way.”

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