Stevie Nicks got candid about her relationships with Prince and Tom Petty, and how she continues to mourn their deaths.
Stevie Nicks was close friends with both Tom Petty and Prince, and she recently spoke about their deaths. Here’s what the Fleetwood Mac singer previously said about her relationships with the iconic musicians and her recent words about trying to move on after they died. (Showbiz.com)
In an interview with the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the singer recalled Prince sending her a 10-minute instrumental version of Purple Rain, asking her to write lyrics for it. After hearing his demo, she described it as "overwhelming". “I listened to it and I just got scared," she said.
In 2014, the Toronto Sun asked Petty to summarize his relationship with the Fleetwood Mac star. “Have you got a couple of hours?” the “Free Fallin’” singer responded. “She’s a good friend. I’ve known her since 1978 and she’s insisted on being in my life. Some of my best musical memories of her are sitting on the couch and just playing the guitar while she sings.”
As I was growing up, the friendship Tom Petty had with Stevie Nicks was a model of mutual respect and encouragement. Much love to him pic.twitter.com/HEN38vxBUo
— Kevin Carr O'Leary (@kevincarroleary) October 2, 2017
Nicks echoed Petty’s sentiment on stage in December 2015. “Every once in a while, whenever I could, I would go to Tom’s house, and we’d record stuff, and write stuff and just sing – which was my favorite thing in the world,” she said (per Ultimate Classic Rock).
Stevie Nicks said that if Prince had his way, they would have been lovers. “Prince and I were just friends,” she told Harper’s Bazaar. “I think he would have been happy to have had a relationship.”
But the “Gypsy” singer said she cherished their musical connection and didn’t want to ruin that with a love affair. “I really wanted a musical relationship, and I had smartened up, even then,” she explained. “You’ll break up and never speak again. But he wasn’t interested in just that.”
Nicks said that Prince used to warn her about her drug use. “I’d talk to him every once in a while on the phone, and we’d talk for hours, and he’d go, ‘You gotta be careful, Stevie.’ And I’d go, ‘I know, I know.’”
She was shocked when Prince accidentally overdosed on fentanyl at age 57. “Prince was very not into drugs,” Nicks told The New Yorker. “And the fact that he ended up being on a lot of pain medication just blows my mind, because he was so against it, and he gave me so many lectures about it.”
“Tom was one of my best friends in the world,” Nicks said on The Zane Lowe Interview Series podcast (via Grateful Web). “… He and I were really, really dear friends until he passed away.”
She explained why she performs some of Petty’s songs on tour. “It’s like I don’t know, I think I just want to keep him with me. I just want to keep him here as long as I can,” Nicks said. “Sometimes I’m in tears, sometimes I can smile with a little bit of the remembrance of the hysterical person he was.”
She added, “I was a really close friend of his. It’s hard for me every day and probably always will be.”
Nicks also spoke of her relationship with Prince, and how they were close until he died. “Prince and I were good friends,” she said. “… The connections are all there, and very real, and very alive today, as they always were. So, losing Tom and Prince, in the same time, was… I mean, very close to each other, was very weird.”
