Stand Back

The synthesizer that announces this song is unmistakably Prince — he co-wrote it, and his influence saturates the production, giving a Stevie Nicks song a funkier, more electric skeleton than anything in her catalog. But her voice bends it back toward her own world, that place of velvet darkness and romantic mythology she has always inhabited. The track pulses and shimmers, full of layered keyboards and a drumbeat that insists rather than drives, and the effect is almost trance-like, a song you can lose yourself inside for its entire length. Nicks wrote it about hearing a song on the radio and feeling it unlock something in her — there is a recursiveness to that origin that suits the music perfectly, a song about the power of music, built partly from borrowed musical DNA. It arrived in 1983, when she was at the height of her commercial reach, and it sounds exactly like that moment: expensive, confident, slightly over-the-top in the best possible sense. The emotional register is one of yearning and arrival simultaneously, the feeling of recognizing something you've always wanted but only just found the words for. You reach for this when you want to feel glamorous in a specifically melancholy way, when the night outside is cold but the inside of your car is warm.