Stevie Nicks Releases her Best Album Since the Eighties

This week's slate of Rolling Stone album reviews includes a rave review of Stevie Nicks' In Your Dreams, the singer's first album in a decade. Rob Sheffield says that Nicks is in hyper-romantic mode, and has turned out her her finest collection of songs since the Eighties in collaboration with songwriter Glen Ballard and the Eurythmics' Dave Stewart.

Jody Rosen is much less fond of Jennifer Lopez's new album Love?, which he says features reasonably good tracks by top-shelf producers that are undone by her slight voice and slighter personality. Also, David Fricke heaps praise upon Seattle folkies Fleet Foxes' second album Helplessness Blues, and Rosen gives the thumbs-up to Beyoncé's new dancehall-inspired single "Run the World (Girls)."

ALBUMS

Stevie Nicks - In Your Dreams (stream one song)

Fleet Foxes - Helplessness Blues (stream full album)

Jennifer Lopez - Love? (stream one song)

Sade - The Ultimate Collection (stream one song)

Beastie Boys - Hot Sauce Committee Part 2 (stream full album)

Kate and Anna McGarrigle - Tell My Sister

SINGLES

Beyoncé "Run the World (Girls)" (stream)

Pitbull "Give Me Everything" (stream)

Cults "Abducted" (stream)

LAST WEEK: Beastie Boys Return to Form; Radiohead's New Electro-Ballads

• 
  MUSIC Exclusive Live Chat With Linkin Park and Incubus
• 
  MOVIES & TV Peter Travers: 'The Avengers' Has it All
• 
  POLITICS Matt Taibbi: Jon Corzine Is the Original Zimmerman
• 
  VIDEOS Exclusive Premiere: Tenacious D's 'Tinnitus'

Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

More Song Stories entries »

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