Stevie Nicks‘ “Stand Back” is a song that has been highlighted by Nicks as a favorite from her discography. It might not be as well-known as songs like “Edge of Seventeen” or “Landslide”. However, in my opinion, “Stand Back” definitely gets the award for the Nicks song with the most interesting backstory.
Nicks was actually getting married to Kim Anderson the day she wrote the track. From there, the origins of “Stand Back” start with a Prince song, a cassette player, and a dream.
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“I got married the day I wrote this song,” Nicks said in the liner notes of Timespace. “We were driving to Santa Barbara, and a new song by Prince came on, so we pulled over somewhere and got the tape. It just gave me an incredible idea, 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.”
According to Nicks, Prince’s song “Little Red Corvette” gave her the idea for the melody of “Stand Back”.
“So I start singing all these words,” she told MTV. “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].”
If you think the story ends there, you would be mistaken.
How Prince Contributed To ‘Stand Back’
A few weeks after her wedding, Nicks went into a studio in Los Angeles to record “Stand Back”. While she was there, Nicks called Prince himself and invited him to play on it. It didn’t take but 20 minutes for the pop icon to show up at the studio.
“Never in a million years did I think this man would be like, ‘I’ll be right there,’” Nicks admitted. “He was there in 20 minutes, and he played [imitates instrumental part] on ‘Stand Back’, and he was there an hour and a half, and then he left.”
Using a synthesizer, Prince came up with an instrumental part for “Stand Back” in about twenty-five to thirty minutes.
Nicks eventually told Timothy White in 1991, “[Prince] was so uncanny, so wild, he spoiled me for every band I’ve ever had because nobody can exactly re-create – not even with two piano players-what Prince did all by his little self.”
Photo by: Richard E. Aaron/Redferns
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