In an interview to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Stevie Nicks is revealing that she almost helped Prince to write Purple Rain.
The two stars became friends in the early 80s, as she was driving in Los Angeles, she started singing along his song ‘Little Red Corvette’ that was played on the radio, pulled over to write down words she was composing and called Prince, to tell him the story of how she wrote the song to his melody:
‘Don't even ask me how I found his number but I did. I told him: 'I'm recording this song and I wrote it to ‘Little Red Corvette’ and I'm giving you 50 percent of it and I want to know if you'd like to come play on it on one of the next three nights.' He was there in an hour, and he was there for about an hour and a half. And we became friends.’
The song was ‘Stand Back’ from her 1983 album The Wild Heart, and it became a major success. Then Prince sent her a cassette of instrumental music he was working on and asked her to write lyrics, but she explained why she refused:
‘It was so overwhelming, that 10-minute track, that I listened to it and I just got scared, I called him back and said, 'I can't do it. I wish I could. It's too much for me.' I'm so glad that I didn't, because he wrote it, and it became 'Purple Rain.’
Glad she didn’t do it? Purple Rain went platinum 13 times over and sold more than 20 million copies worldwide.
But she also revealed to Harper’s Bazaar magazine earlier this year that Prince wanted to push the collaboration a little further:
‘Prince and I were just friends. I think he would have been happy to have had a relationship.
But I really wanted a musical relationship, and I had smartened up, even then. You'll break up and never speak again. But he wasn't interested in just that.’
So who knows what she is glad for at the end.