3 Songs You Didn't Know Stevie Nicks Wrote For Other Famous Musicians

Over her long and illustrious career, Stevie Nicks has occasionally allowed other musicians to have first crack at her songs. Whether she is a leading creative force in Fleetwood Mac or working on her own, the one constant is that she comes up with her own material. An unparalleled songwriter and musical poet, she has created resonant anthems and haunting ballads about life's big challenges, questions, and mysteries. 

Stevie Nicks is a rock 'n' roll role model, and most of the time, she quickly turns compositions into hits for her band or for herself — like "Landslide," "Sara," and "Edge of Seventeen." Others she deemed not quite appropriate for her, or at least not right away. Before recording and releasing them herself, she offered them to other performers across a variety of genres. Here are three standout tracks from some lesser-known rock, pop, and country singers, all of which originated in the mind of Stevie Nicks.

Comfortable in the folky, singer-songwriter lane of the 1970s, singer and pianist Louise Goffin was virtually born into that scene. Her mother is the legendary Carole King, and as a teenager she served as Jackson Browne's opening act. Nevertheless, her handlers urged her to debut with a rock album, 1979's "Kid Blue," which features uncredited backing vocals from Stevie Nicks. When Goffin regrouped with a second, self-titled record in 1981 that was more her style, she got Nicks to contribute a bit more.

In the same year that Nicks launched her solo career with the "Bella Donna" album, she ceded one original track, "If You Ever Did Believe," to Goffin. The song finds its narrator full of remorse and loneliness after their lover has departed and left them emotionally broken, yearning for just one more chance to connect and hoping that they haven't been altogether forgotten. Nicks also contributed background singing to the album track, but she took the lead when she recorded it for the soundtrack to the 1998 film "Practical Magic."

Singing on the No. 1 hit duet "Separate Lives," Marilyn Martin helped prove that 1985 was the best year of Phil Collin's career. Before that breakout success under her own name, Martin supported another superstar, singing as a support vocalist for Nicks in the early 1980s. Martin was subsequently invited to participate in the soundtrack of the 1984 movie "Streets of Fire." She sourced her spotlight song from her former boss — Nicks gave her a piece that she'd written in 1972, around her time in Buckingham Nicks, the duo she was in before she became famous with Fleetwood Mac. That song: "Sorcerer."

Firmly in the canon of Nicks' songs that allude to spiritual, mystical, and supernatural things, "Sorcerer" finds its narrator demanding the attention of a wizard-like figure whom they adore and emulate. "Man and woman on a star stream / in the middle of a snow dream," Martin sings. "Sorcerer, show me the high life." "Sorcerer" wasn't a single, so it wasn't a big hit on its own, and Nicks revisited it on her 2001 LP "Trouble in Shangri-La."

A little bit country and a little bit rock 'n' roll, Rusty Wier managed to bring in some major music industry talent for his fifth studio album, 1977's "Stacked Deck." Placed deep in the second half of the LP came a song called "Think About It," with Stevie Nicks writing the lyrics and getting an assist in the music from Roy Bittan, piano player in Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band. The acoustic guitar-powered country rocker is a love song and a break-up song, with lyrics about one person giving their about-to-be-ex-partner words of comfort, promising that the pain will lessen as time goes on and that splitting up is the correct choice in that moment.

"Think About It," as recorded by a relatively little-known '70s musician, wasn't issued as a single. Lucky for Nicks, it didn't have so much of a reputation or a following that she couldn't try it herself. She included "Think About It" on her solo debut, 1981's "Bella Donna," and utilized it as the B-side of the single "After the Glitter Fades."