Stevie Nicks finally reveals her 'Secret Love'

LOS ANGELES — Stevie Nicks found inspiration everywhere before digging into her first solo album in 10 years.

She sat down at a piano in an Australian hotel and declared: "I'm ready to make a record now."

"I really don't care if anybody buys it, and I really don't care if everybody steals it," she says during an interview at her Pacific Palisades home. "What I need is to make a record for me, the artist. I need to create something now. So I am going to close my eyes to the music business and its problems, and go forth with a good heart and great belief and make a record."

The result, "In Your Dreams," was released this week.

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The album features a song Nicks wrote in 1975, right after joining Fleetwood Mac. She never shared it with the band, "which is crazy because this is a very easy, simple, precise song that Lindsey Buckingham would've loved, and Fleetwood Mac would've loved," she says. "I put it away right after I joined the band, and for some reason, I never put it on any of my records either."

Last year, she remembered the track that she'd stuffed into a box in her parents' Phoenix home: "Something in my head, I saw the cassette in my head with the little ink that said, 'Secret Love.'"

It's the first single from "In Your Dreams."

Another song on the album was co-written with Eurythmics guitarist Dave Stewart (also a producer of the album) and titled by Reese Witherspoon.

The actress offered her Nashville home to Nicks and Stewart for a brief stay, noting that nothing is "cheaper than free."

"Cheaper Than Free" is the album's closing track. Sharing the writing process was new for Nicks, and also a happy surprise.

"I really had that light, epiphany, where I realized why people wrote together," says the 62-year-old, who previously considered songwriting a solo pursuit. "I suddenly understood why (John) Lennon and (Paul) McCartney wrote together. I understood why other famous songwriting teams wrote together, because they each had something that the other person didn't have. For Dave (Stewart) and I, I have books of poetry and he has thousands of chords."

Nicks was forced to cancel recent promotional appearances in New York after coming down with pneumonia and flu, but she plans to join Rod Stewart for the 16-city Heart & Soul Tour, which is to have its first stop on March 20 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.