LOS ANGELES -- As long rumored, Fleetwood Mac will hit the road in 2013 with a 34-date American tour. The shows will feature co-founders Mick Fleetwood and John McVie along with longtime vocalist Stevie Nicks and singer-guitarist Lindsey Buckingham.
In addition, Nicks says, Fleetwood Mac has been working on new songs and is hoping to release at least two of them before the tour. She and Buckingham spent four days in the latter's home studio in November, an interaction that hasn't happened in a decade but whose history stretches over 45 years.
"This band never breaks up," Nicks said on the phone from her home in Santa Monica. After their most recent tour in 2009 concluded, she added, the understanding was that the band would take a break, work on other projects and reconvene in a few years to do it again.
The rest of the band wanted to tour last year, Nicks said, but she'd been so happy with her most recent solo album, In Your Dreams, that she wanted to dedicate more time to supporting it.
On the phone, Nicks was chatty, offering unfiltered thoughts on planning the set design and set list, and the ways in which she prepares to get back into Mac. But she sounded relieved and most enthusiastic about reconnecting with longtime creative -- and, for a time in the '60s and '70s, romantic -- partner Buckingham to work on new material.
Before they joined Mac in 1975, the pair recorded one gorgeous, self-titled album in 1973 as Buckingham Nicks. It was this work that prompted Fleetwood, McVie and then-keyboardist Christine McVie to ask them to join the band. The rest is (a tangled, romantically complicated) history.
Jump to early 2012, when -- as Nicks calls them -- "the boys" in the band got together to work on new material. (Christine McVie departed in 1999.) Nicks had just lost her mother to pneumonia, then contracted the virus herself, and was unable to join them. Bassist John McVie, drummer Fleetwood and Buckingham soldiered on, and a few weeks ago she heard those rough tracks for the first time. Said Nicks, "I went up to Lindsey's house, he played me all of the songs, and we chose two. He said, 'I really tried hard to be you, to really see through your eyes when we were doing these songs, and make these songs that you would really like, and that you would really relate to.'"
Nicks said the songs are called Sad Angels and Miss Fantasy and will be available in the months leading up to the tour. As far as another full-length album, Nicks was more tentative. "We'll just see," she said. "If the world loves them, then we have something to gauge what's going on as far as Fleetwood Mac goes."
Die-hard fans will be excited to know that the pair also dug further into their past by recording an unreleased song by Buckingham Nicks that Nicks discovered in her archives. Nicks' hope is that it will see release as part of a CD reissue in conjunction with the 40th anniversary of Buckingham Nicks. The album has never been reissued either on CD or digitally.
Alas, that will likely be overshadowed by the 35th anniversary of Mac's Rumours, which will be marked in 2013 with a new deluxe reissue featuring outtakes.
Fleetwood Mac's 2013 tour begins April 4 in Columbus, Ohio, lands in New York City on April 8 for Madison Square Garden and moves westward from there, hitting North Texas on June 4, at the American Airlines Center.
