The Stevie Nicks song inspired by Prince’s ‘Little Red Corvette’
Prince was a unique talent. On his debut album, he is cited as recording 27 different instruments, and he was only a teenager at the time. Owing to this aptitude, you can quite comfortably posit that he was perhaps the greatest musician of the modern era. And as you might expect with such genius, he was also a peculiar fellow to boot.
His ideas were feverish, and he was wildly driven. He would frequently stay up all night to record songs and refuse food during these bouts because he feared it would make him sluggish. In a frenzy, he would hot-foot it from instrument to instrument in his home studio, tirelessly developing his track. ‘Little Red Corvette’ is one such masterpiece borne from maddening creativity.
The fateful thing is that this energy breezes off the song, inspiring the listener, in turn, like some mystic sonic symbiosis. One of these listeners was Stevie Nicks. She was simply driving along one day when ‘Little Red Corvette’ came on the radio, and she decided to turn straight towards the studio rather than her intended destination.
“It just gave me an incredible idea,” she writes in the liner notes of Timespace, “So I spent many hours that night writing a song about some kind of crazy argument, and it was to become one of the most important of my songs.” The result, ‘Stand Back’, was a defining moment in her solo journey, proving that she didn’t have to pull any punches just because she was on her own, and she could just let the wallop of creativity flow.
As she continued: “I’ve been doing this song for years, Fleetwood Mac does it also, and I never get tired of it. ‘Stand Back’ has always been my favourite song onstage because when it starts, it has an energy that comes from somewhere unknown, and it seems to have no Timespace. I’ve never quite understood this sound, but I have NEVER questioned it.”
Concluding: “I become a different person, and I like that because usually I make up my OWN characters, but the lady in Stand Back was not my idea. By the way, Prince did come into the studio the night I called him and told him about the song, and he played incredible synthesiser on it. And then he just walked out of my life, and I didn’t see him for a long time. It was extraordinary.”
The favour of inspiration would also be returned when Prince cited ‘Edge of Seventeen’ as the driving force behind ‘When Doves Cry’.
