Stevie Nicks’s Trouble in Shangri-La sounds more like a retrospective than a studio album of new material, and that might be due to the fact that many of the copyrights date as far back as 1970. Nicks never attempts to update her sound the way other aging rockers have in recent years, and the songs are never muddled unnecessarily with electronica. Instead, Nicks has fine-tuned her craft, offering what is probably her most solid collection of songs since 1981’s Bella Donna.
Songs like the title track display Nicks’s still-bewitching lyrical talents: “You can consume all the beauty in the room…And it brings up the wind/And it rises around you in pillars of colors.” On the poppy “Love Changes,” she acknowledges how relationships can change but doesn’t necessarily embrace those changes, her ability and unmatched devotion to exposing the most vulnerable aspects of her life still on display: “I am terrified of being wrong/Well, I am not happy/I am not crazy.”
Though it was written when Nicks was only in her early 30s, “Planets of the Universe” finds her coming to grips with her mortality: “I was wrong to live for a dream/If I had my life to live over/I would never dream, no.” The song is now, perhaps, a comment on the Welsh Witch’s dedication to the art of music and sacrifice of family life, evoking images of the singer growling her way through the now-classic “Edge of Seventeen.”
Trouble in Shangri-La’s slick production and syrupy melodies beg for the raw drama of Nicks’s imminent live performances, but despite seven different producers, including pal Sheryl Crow on several tracks, the album sounds surprisingly cohesive and consistent throughout. On “Bombay Sapphires,” Nicks proclaims, “Here I am dramatic/Here I am not waiting/Here I am not listening,” but her fans have certainly waited—and with Trouble in Shangri-La, there’s certainly something worth listening to.
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