Stevie Nicks looks back on shimmering 24 Karat Gold

125-gram black vinyl double LP in gatefold jacket with insert

Album download included

"It's a good thing she dug through her back pages and finished these songs, as she's wound up with one of her strongest albums." — AllMusic

Stevie Nicks is a multi Grammy Award winner and Rock And Roll Hall of Fame inductee. Her extraordinary career as a solo artist, songwriter, live performer and member of Fleetwood Mac is legendary.

Now that young bands such as Haim and One Direction are reviving the polished pop-rock of Fleetwood Mac, it seems only right that Nicks, the group's iconic frontwoman, would look back as well, writes the Los Angeles Times.

As its title suggests, 24 Karat Gold: Songs From the Vault offers new recordings of tunes Nicks wrote as long ago as 1969; the most recent is from 1995. You can tell the material is old too. In the aching "Hard Advice" she sings about listening to the radio and hanging out in a record store. (Remember those?)

But Nicks has always found fresh drama in the past — think of "Rhiannon," loosely inspired by an ancient Welsh legend — and here she sounds no less energized chewing over bygone resentments in the throbbing title track and pondering bad decisions in "The Dealer," which rides a silky groove reminiscent of the one in the Mac's indelible "Dreams."

For "Mabel Normand" she reaches back further, sympathizing with a real-life silent film star thought to have struggled with cocaine.

Recorded mostly in Nashville with Nicks' longtime guitarist Waddy Wachtel and Dave Stewart (who also produced Nicks' excellent "In Your Dreams" from 2011), 24 Karat Gold makes room amid the retrospection for some new sounds. "Cathouse Blues" touches unexpectedly on ragtime, while "Blue Water," with backing vocals by Lady Antebellum, shimmers with traces of country and soul.

Whatever the arrangement, though, Nicks’ voice — that signature drone that’s gotten only more appealingly imperious with age — defines the music here. Her singing dominates as easily now as it ever did.

Track Listing
Side 1
Starshine
If You Were My Love
Mabel Normand
Twisted

Side 2
24 Karat Gold
Belle Fleur
All The Beautiful Worlds
Lady

Side 3
I Don’t Care
Watch Chain
Hard Advice
Carousel

Side 4
Blue Water
Cathouse Blues
The Dealer
She Loves Him Still