Responding to Chris Cornell’s recent hook-up with Timbaland (which didn’t really come together for me), Stevie Nicks said in a recent MTV interview that she’d be interested in taking a stab at a collab with the hip-pop producer.

I first read of Nicks’ interest in teaming with Timbaland via Paste Magazine, which prompted me to recall it’s not such an out-of-left-field combo. She wrote “Stand Back” upon hearing Prince’s 1982 hit, “Little Red Corvette.” He even played synthesizers on the song, though his contribution went uncredited.

Well, Nicks reminded MTV of that story and her R&B leanings, coming clean with the details of how “Stand Back” came to be and the conversations she had with Prince at the time:

“I call him, and I never thought he was going to answer, or that it would be him, or that I would ever find him — and he answers. I said, ‘Prince, this is Stevie Nicks, and I wrote a song to your song ‘Little Red Corvette,’ and we’re at Sunset Sound right now, and I was wondering — first of all, I wanted to tell you that I’m giving you 50 percent of [the royalties] it if it ever goes anywhere, but are you in town? If you are, how would you feel about coming down and playing on it?’ Never in a million years did I think this man would be like, ‘I’ll be right there.’ He was there in 20 minutes and he played [she mimes instrumental parts of the song] on ‘Stand Back,’ and he was there an hour and a half, and then he left.”

“Stand Back” is one of my all-time favorite singles, forever linked to the summer of 1983. Issued that May as the first single from album The Wild Heart, “Stand Back” reached #5 on the Billboard Hot 100 on August 20:

Purchase Stevie Nicks – “Stand Back” via iTunes, Amazon MP3. For an extended Nicks fix, don’t miss the “Stand Back” remixes, released in 2007.