“​​I think Prince wanted a romance, but I didn’t because then we wouldn’t have had a musical relationship.” Stevie Nicks on why she turned down Prince's biggest song, and how their flirty friendship influenced three hit singles

Prince didn’t take everyone’s calls, but on February 8, 1983 he took one from Sunset Sound Recorders in Los Angeles. It was Stevie Nicks, her message tumbling out in a rush. If Prince wasn’t too busy, could he come to the studio right away? Like, in a hour?

The Fleetwood Mac star was finessing Stand Back, a new song that would reach Number 5 in the US when released as a single from her 1983 solo album The Wild Heart. Stevie wanted Prince to play synth on the song – and not without good reason.

“The important back story,” she told me in 2013, “is that I had written Stand Back listening along to Prince's Little Red Corvette. I could do that – just sing my own song over somebody else's and make something new.

“I actually wrote the lyric on my wedding day. Me and my husband [Kim Anderson] were driving up to San Ysidro Ranch in Santa Barbara on our honeymoon when Little Red Corvette came on the radio and I starting humming a new melody to it.

"My husband said, ‘That's great!’ Then we pulled over to buy a portable cassette player to record my idea. Kim actually knew Prince because he worked at Warner Brothers, but I was able to get Prince’s number myself. I am Stevie Nicks, after all.”

Stevie Nicks - Stand Back (Official Music Video) [HD Remaster] - YouTube

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Two months later, Nicks made the aforementioned call, telling The Purple One why he would be getting half of Stand Back’s publishing royalties.

“I said, 'I wrote it to your song. You would never have known but because I'm very honest, I'm telling you. How do you feel about that?' He said, ‘Great.’ Then I told him how much I loved the synths on Little Red Corvette and asked him to play on my song.”

Prince was at Sunset Sound within the hour, a capable, fleeting presence who programmed some drum machine and laid down some Oberheim OB-8 synth. “Unfortunately, we couldn’t keep him there forever!” Nicks told me, smiling. “It all happened in about an hour. I remember him playing basketball outside afterwards like one of The Harlem Globetrotters, spinning the ball on his finger and throwing it backwards into the net. He shot a few more baskets and was gone.”

Naturally, Prince was also hatching wonderful new music at the time. Indeed, his follow-up to 1999, the album that had spawned Little Red Corvette, was his 1984 masterpiece Purple Rain. He and Nicks had remained good friends, seeing each other socially as their respective solo careers continued to rocket.

Nicks’s marriage to Kim Anderson had only lasted a three months and there was an element of gentle flirtation between her and Prince. Nothing, though, could have prepared Nicks for what happened next.

“Out of the blue, one day he gave me this song that he wanted me to write lyrics for,” she recalled. “It was Purple Rain! I’ve still got the cassette demo. It was the whole instrumental track and every now and again Prince would come in singing, ‘Can’t get over that feeling,' or something like that.”

Nicks was hugely flattered. Who wouldn’t be? But she also felt overwhelmed by the task being asked of her. The song was around ten minutes long and already had its famed finale, guitar-solo fireworks and all.

“It was so epic! So off-the-scale,” she said. “I told him, ‘Prince, I’m sorry, but I’ve listened to this a hundred times and I don’t know where to start.' It felt like a movie. It became a movie. It became his signature song too, and I always feel like there's a little bit of me in it. The thing is, I think Prince would have liked a romance, but I didn’t want that. If that had happened, we wouldn’t have had a musical relationship.”

And the musical relationship went deeper. In a 2020 interview with the Associated Press, Nicks revealed her influence on another Prince classic. “He was inspired by [her 1981 hit] Edge of Seventeen to write When Doves Cry. That’s really when he and I started to sort of be friends,” she said. Edge of Seventeen was subtitled 'Just Like The White Winged Dove,' a line that featured heavily in the chorus.

And after the Prince song became a hit, Stevie changed the lyrics to her song when she performed it live. “From that moment on, at the very end of Edge of Seventeen, I go: ‘I know what it sounds like, I know what it sounds like, I know what it sounds like when doves cry. It sounds like you.’”

So things panned out well. Prince wrote his own, coded, but deeply personal lyric for Purple Rain and made it a staple of his live shows from there on in. Nicks, meanwhile, went on to make her third, highly successful solo album Rock A Little, freed-up as she was by Fleetwood Mac’s lengthy hiatus after 1982’s much less successful Mirage.

Speaking in 2013 – three years before Prince’s sudden and tragic passing – Nicks had other fond memories of their time together. Was she flattered that he fancied her, I asked?

“Very flattered!” she said. “And we were good friends. I remember going to his purple house in Minneapolis. Fleetwood Mac were in town on tour. We had a day off next day and Prince came and got me right after the show. I was in my chiffon stage outfit and he was in his purple stage outfit and we got in to his purple Camaro and bombed out onto the freeway at 100mph. I was terrified but kind of excited, too!"

What did they do at Prince’s place? “He had a studio downstairs, and we did actually try to write a song together. But I was too tired by that point because I’d just done a show, so I went upstairs to sleep on the floor of his purple kitchen.

"In the morning, he came and woke me up. I had some coffee and sang a little part on the song he’d been working on all night. But I had to be at the airport at 2pm to take off with Fleetwood Mac – and you do not miss that plane!”

Did she make it? “You bet. It was into the purple Camaro again and off at 100mph! Prince drove right up onto the airfield, right beside our private jet, then he came around and opened my door.

"We both looked like crazy people. He gave me a big hug, and I said, ‘Thanks, Prince –see you later,’ then got on the plane. The rest of the band were like [drums fingers and rolls eyes].

“I was like [smiling] 'What? Nothing happened!’”