Gold Dust Woman

Starred review from April 23, 2018
For the audio edition of Davis’s authorized biography of Fleetwood Mac singer Stevie Nicks, Delaine doesn’t impersonate Nicks’s distinctive voice, but she captures enough of the singer-songwriter’s essence to complement the material nicely. When quoting Nicks or reading anecdotes from her life, Delaine finds just the right tone to match a particular facet of the superstar’s complex identity: a breathy, ethereal quality in relation to her creative life, a take-no-prisoners delivery in matters of business, and a vulnerable sisterly cadence with regard to her close friends and family and the wounded soldiers who have become her greatest philanthropic passion and the motivation behind the Stevie Nicks Soldier’s Angel Foundation. Delaine also channels the turbulence inside Fleetwood Mac, particularly in regard to Nicks and her boyfriend turned personal and professional nemesis, Lindsey Buckingham. British bandmates Mick Fleetwood and Christine McVie, meanwhile, are voiced with a convincing accent. It’s hard to imagine a better performance for this audiobook. A St. Martin’s hardcover.

Starred review from July 10, 2017
Drawing on interviews with Stevie Nicks, her family, friends, and music associates, Davis (who cowrote Fleetwood with Mick Fleetwood) offers a captivating portrait of the singer whose songwriting and stage presence gave the faltering British blues band a boost in the mid-1970s. He traces her early years in Arizona, where her parents discovered that she was a natural harmony singer, and California, where she tried her hand at songwriting. She met guitarist Lindsay Buckingham when she was 22 and at that point decided on a life in music. In the early ’70s the pair formed Buckingham Nicks and released an album to modest success in 1973. One year later, Mick Fleetwood stopped in the studio where the duo was recording, was taken with Buckingham’s guitar playing and Nicks’s beauty, and invited the couple to join his band. Davis chronicles the band’s now-well-known cocaine-fueled days and nights, extravagant tours, bitter in-fighting, and sexual betrayals, and illustrates the toll this tumult took on Nicks. Ny the early ’80s, she had embarked on a solo career, working only sporadically with Fleetwood Mac thereafter. Davis’s candid, energetic book reveals the life of the woman who’s arguably one of rock’s greatest singer-songwriters.