While Stevie Nicks ascended to the status of musical icon with Fleetwood Mac in the ’70s, her solo career was also massively successful, as countless fans are well aware. But music lovers might be surprised to learn that one of her biggest solo hits was actually a collaboration of sorts with another legendary artist…even if he was never officially credited for his contributions.
In a 2009 interview with MTV, Nicks opened up about the fateful moment she was inspired to write her 1983 hit “Stand Back,” revealing that she was on the first night of her honeymoon to then-husband Kim Anderson at the time.
“I’m driving to my honeymoon night in Santa Barbara from L.A., and ‘Little Red Corvette’ comes on,” she said. “We’re like oh my God, it’s Prince! So I start singing all these words, and I’m like, ‘Pull over, we have to get a cassette player! And we have to record this!'”
“I’m writing in the car — here we are, newlyweds, and we get to our hotel and we’re setting up the tape recorder and I’ve made up my whole new melody to [the song],” Nicks continued. “So I haven’t really ripped off the song, because I’m admitting that I have done this. So we go into a studio in Los Angeles a couple weeks later and I track down Prince’s phone number — and because I’m Stevie Nicks, I can get it.”
Nicks went on to say that she “never thought” Prince would answer the phone when she called, but he did.
“I said, ‘Prince, this is Stevie Nicks, and I wrote a song to your song ‘Little Red Corvette,’ and we’re at Sunset Sound right now, and I was wondering — first of all, I wanted to tell you that I’m giving you 50 percent of [the royalties] it if it ever goes anywhere, but are you in town? If you are, how would you feel about coming down and playing on it?’ Never in a million years did I think this man would be like, ‘I’ll be right there.’ He was there in 20 minutes and he played on ‘Stand Back,’ and he was there an hour and a half, and then he left.”
Stevie Nicks and Prince remained good friends after ‘Stand Back’
As Nicks explained, the collaboration was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
“Prince and I became really good friends,” she said, “and he actually gave me a cassette, and said, ‘There’s a song on it, and I would like you to write.’ I take it home and put it on, and I’m listening to this like amazing song … and it’s ‘Purple Rain’! And I’m like, I can’t write a song to this! It [wasn ‘t] ‘Purple Rain’ yet, but it [was] the track that became ‘Purple Rain.'”
While Prince reportedly insisted on going uncredited on “Stand Back,” per The Things, Nicks did keep up her end of the bargain and split the royalties from the song with him for the next several decades.
This story was originally reported by Parade on Sep 17, 2025, where it first appeared in the News section. Add Parade as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com ’
