The 1984 song Stevie Nicks gifted to her former backing singer: “That was overwhelming”
Stevie Nicks knows better than most that sometimes the kindest thing you can do with a song is to give it away to somebody else.
While she’s a songwriter who, for a time, had too many songs at her disposal than she knew what to do with despite balancing multiple projects, Nicks has always had an open mind when people have pitched songs in her direction.
When launching her solo career at the start of the 1980s, when Fleetwood Mac took a well-deserved break, her debut single was the classic track, ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’, written by Tom Petty and Mike Campbell, who also performed on it.
As a huge fan of all things Petty and The Heartbreakers, it was a dream come true to team up with them on the track, which morphed into a duet and meshed these two distinct worlds together under one musical roof.
A few years later, Nicks had great success with ‘Talk to Me’ in 1985, which was written by Chas Sandford, and like with ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’, it was brought to her attention thanks to producer Jimmy Iovine, who instantly knew what worked for the Fleetwood Mac singer.
Nicks may have benefited from charitable songwriting donations from others, but she was also more than willing to earn that good karma back by giving songs away, too.
In the mid-1980s, a song written by Nicks was worth its weight in gold. However, rather than flog ‘Sorcerer’, which she couldn’t find a home for after many years of trying, to the highest bidder, she instead gifted it to her backing singer, Marilyn Martin, who was making her way out on her own.
Again, it was Iovine who was key to the operation. At the time, ‘Sorcerer’ had been knocking around since the early 1970s before Nicks had joined Fleetwood Mac, and the producer was tasked with making the soundtrack for the movie Streets of Fire, which left him desperately trying to call in favours from friends.
Martin later explained to Rolling Stone, “We were in the studio working on Stevie’s album, Rock a Little. Jimmy Iovine was producing. The movie people came to Jimmy and said, ‘We want this song on there.’ Stevie wasn’t going to sing it, so I did. I think we sang some backgrounds on it. It was just being in the right place at the right time, really.”
Martin, who had never been a lead vocalist before, recalled, “It made me feel great since they wanted my voice on it. That was overwhelming a little. That was exciting.”
While it didn’t become a hit record, it made the bigwigs at Atlantic Records take notice of Martin, and before she’d finished working on Rock a Little, she was recruited to duet with Phil Collins on ‘Separate Lives’, which topped the charts in the US.
As starts to careers go, Martin couldn’t have asked for much better than a number one record with Collins and being given a song by Nicks.
However, after her second solo album, 1988’s This is Serious, failed to chart, Martin reverted back to life as a backing singer, touring with Don Henley for many years before quitting show business entirely, and starting a new career in real estate.
By 2016, Martin accepted that her days of performing in arenas were a whole lifetime ago and would never happen again. Until one day, when out of the blue Nicks convinced her to return as a backing vocalist, which also saw her sing with Fleetwood Mac, and to this day, the duo are still touring the world together.
The tale of ‘Sorcerer’ also has a happy ending for Nicks, too. After 30 years of trying, she eventually recorded her own version of ‘Sorcerer’ for her 2001 album, Trouble in Shangri-La, regaining rightful ownership of a song that means so much.
