Stevie Nicks Says She May Have Inspired the Prince Song ‘Raspberry Beret’
Stevie Nicks and Prince were close friends for many years and inspired some of each other’s best music. The Fleetwood Mac star claims she may have inspired Prince’s popular song “Raspberry Beret.” Here’s what Nicks said about their friendship and the famous track.
Stevie Nicks and Prince were close friends
Prince and Stevie Nicks were just friends, but the Fleetwood Mac star has said she thinks the “Purple Rain” singer wanted them to be lovers. “Prince and I were just friends,” Nicks told Harper’s Bazaar in 2011. “I think he would have been happy to have had a relationship.”
But Nicks said she avoided a romance with him because she wanted to maintain their musical connection.
“I really wanted a musical relationship, and I had smartened up, even then,” the singer explained. “You’ll break up and never speak again. But he wasn’t interested in just that.”
The two musicians collaborated on the song “Stand Back” from her second solo album, The Wild Heart. “‘Stand Back’ was inspired by ‘Little Red Corvette,’” Nicks told Rolling Stone. “I called him and said, ‘Can you come to the studio and listen to this song? I’ve sung over your song and written another song and you may hate it and if you do, I won’t do it.’ He came over to Sunset Sound and he loved it – he played piano and guitar on it.”
Stevie Nicks said she may have inspired the Prince song ‘Raspberry Beret’
The Stevie Nicks song “Edge of Seventeen” inspired Prince’s “When Doves Cry.” And, according to the Fleetwood Mac singer, she may have inspired another Prince song.
“Prince and I were good friends. It’s like he and I inspired each other back and forth,” Nicks said on The Zane Lowe Interview Series podcast.
“It is said that the raspberry beret was somewhat inspired by me, not the part about walking around with nothing but the beret on, but the fact that I had a raspberry velvet beret, and he had seen it and liked it,” “So, it’s little things that we both did inspired us. The connections are all there, and very real, and very alive today, as they always were.”
Some of the most famous images of Nicks depict the singer wearing a beret.
Both musicians wrote songs about vintage clothing stores
Stevie Nicks and Prince may have inspired each other to write songs about vintage clothing stores. “Raspberry Beret” tells the story of a young man captivated by a woman who visits the shop where he works. The lyrics even describe the hat as “the kind you find in a second-hand store.”
And in the Fleetwood Mac song “Gypsy,” Nicks sings about a San Francisco clothing store called Velvet Underground. The lyrics go, “So I’m back, to the velvet underground / Back to the floor, that I love / To a room with some lace and paper flowers / Back to the gypsy that I was.”
The song references the time before Nicks was famous, when she lived with her then-boyfriend Lindsey Buckhingham. Their mattress was on the floor of their apartment, and they shopped at second-hand stores.
