STEVIE NICKS - Enchanted box set (Atlantic)

[dot_fennel]

Miscalculation. I found this relatively cheap and figured it was about exactly as much solo Nicks as I needed: curiousity would drive me beyond the singles whether I liked them or not, but I definitely didn't need to plan on buying all the individual albums.

And this is indeed the right amount of material to get comprehensiveness without completeness, but the poor sequencing makes it a swamp. As I kind of expected, several songs whose names I didn't recognize turned out to be the subjects of inexplicably-suppressed childhood radio memories, but they were scattered over the first two discs, and I couldn't tell whether the gunk between them was immature-bad or past-peak-bad.

But my experience with the Mac canon has been that Buckingham's songs got to me faster, while a Nicks track I didn't already know often needed an extra spin. So I'd be inclined to give this another chance were it not for the awful way it ends: a seven-minute solo-piano "Rhiannon" from 1998 with the rhythm perverted into squared-off lockstep. When Nicks calls Rhiannon's name this time, she sounds like an assistant principal.