By Jane Ratcliffe

What’s blonde and black and glittery and gauzy and full of complicated, tripped-out sentiments that have been getting under the skin of teen-agers (and now parents) since as far back as you can remember?

Why, Stevie Nicks, of course — the high priestess of everything troubled and beautiful and other-worldly that we want to touch, but don’t know how. Which is why, it would seem, we had her.

To say Nicks — who’ll be performing at Pine Knob Friday night with Boz Scaggs — is back is old news. She’s been back, with the music and fashion world kissing her high-heeled platforms. Billy Corgan and Courtney Love have both covered tunes, and Anna Sui and Isaac Mizrahi, to name a couple, have brought her prancing-gypsy look to the runways.

But what is new is her storybook three-CD extravaganza released earlier this month and titled The Enchanted Works of Stevie Nicks.

Rolling Stone says, “Nicks has spent a career turning her private fantasies into an elaborate pop mythology,” and this collection takes you on a jaunt through some pretty quixotic daydreams.

Enchanted combines material from her six solo albums, “B” sides and live rarities with radio hits, plus a 64-page booklet chock full of fanciful photos and whimsical words.

Like Frank Sinatra, say, or Tony Bennett, Nicks has held steady to her look, her sound, her unapologetically feminine vision, and taken some hits from critics and fans for this unrelenting consistency. “People have come into my career,” Nicks tells Billboard, “and wrongly told me, ‘Change your music, reinvent yourself!’ I just stayed what I am.”

And while the world around her crept away from her spell-weaving melodies and into nooks and crannies like grunge and heavy metal and indie-rock, in the end — like any tantalizing treat that comes from the heart and not a record exec’s index card on what trend to follow next — we always came back.

Not that her path has been easy. She has battled drug addictions, serious eye surgery, the Epstein-Barr virus, a three-pack-a-day cigarette habit and a daunting weight problem (at one point the 5-foot-11/2-inch singer had ballooned up to 175 pounds).

But she’s transformed her nasty habits into more helpful ones like treadmills and reruns of Miami Vice.

“I am religious,” Nicks tells Billboard, “I wasn’t raised in any religion, because we were always moving when I was a kid and didn’t get involved in any church. But I believe there’ve been angels with me constantly through these last 20 years, or I wouldn’t be alive.

“I pray a lot. In the last few years I’ve asked for things from God, and he’s given them to me. And there were things I thought were gonna kill me, and he fixed them.”

She goes on: “I felt that because I was fat I wasn’t talented anymore; I was destroying this gift that God gave me and asked for help. Now I’m happy, even outside my music, and enjoying my life.”