Stevie Nicks – Edge of Seventeen
Stevie Nicks lost her uncle and John Lennon in the same week of December 1980. The song she wrote out of that double grief took its title from a phrase she had simply misheard.
“Edge of Seventeen” was born from a single terrible week. In December 1980, Stevie Nicks lost two people in quick succession. Her uncle Jonathan — known to the family as Bill — died after a long battle with cancer. And on December 8, 1980, John Lennon was shot and killed outside his apartment building in New York City; Nicks was in Australia when the news reached her. The two losses, falling so close together, left her with a grief she did not know how to process. “It was a period of time that I just didn’t know what to do,” she later said, “so I just sat down and wrote about it.” What she wrote became “Edge of Seventeen,” and the song’s central image — the white-winged dove of its refrain — is her metaphor for that grief. The dove, Nicks has explained, is the spirit leaving the body at the moment of death. Some of the song’s verses draw directly from the days she spent at her dying uncle’s bedside. “The part that says ‘I went today, maybe I will go again tomorrow’ refers to seeing him the day before he died,” she said. “He was home, and my aunt had some music softly playing, and it was a perfect place for the spirit to go away.”
The title, by contrast, came from something almost comically ordinary: a misheard phrase. Nicks had been talking with Jane Benyo, the wife of Tom Petty, and Jane mentioned that she had met Tom when she was at “the age of seventeen.” But Jane spoke with a thick Southern accent, and what Nicks heard was “the edge of seventeen.” Nicks loved the phrase as she had misheard it — the way it suggested a threshold, a young person on the verge of everything — and she kept it, building the song’s title around a mondegreen. It is a fitting origin for a song that has itself become one of the most frequently misheard records in popular music: listeners have heard “just like the white-winged dove” as “just like a one-winged dove,” “just like the ones we love,” and a dozen other variations, and the song appears regularly on published lists of famous misheard lyrics.
The riff that drives the song, and the album that launched a solo career
The engine of “Edge of Seventeen” is its guitar — a distinctive, chugging sixteenth-note figure that runs almost without pause through the entire track, relentless and propulsive beneath Nicks’s vocal. That riff was played by Waddy Wachtel, one of the most respected session guitarists in rock, a player whose credits run through records by Linda Ronstadt, Warren Zevon, Randy Newman, and many others. Wachtel was not a new collaborator. He had worked with Nicks years earlier, before Fleetwood Mac, in the period when she and Lindsey Buckingham were performing as the duo Buckingham Nicks. The song was recorded in 1981 for Bella Donna, Nicks’s debut solo album, and produced by Jimmy Iovine — at the time both her producer and her boyfriend, and a man who would later co-found Interscope Records. Bella Donna was a landmark for Nicks: released on July 27, 1981, while she remained a full member of Fleetwood Mac, it went to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and established her as a major solo artist in her own right.
“Edge of Seventeen” was released as the album’s third single on February 4, 1982, under the fuller title “Edge of Seventeen (Just Like the White Winged Dove).” It followed two hit duets — “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around“ with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and “Leather and Lace” with Don Henley — but where those were collaborations, “Edge of Seventeen” was Nicks alone, and it stood out as the most personal statement on the record. The single reached No. 11 on the Billboard Hot 100, just missing the Top 10, and No. 11 in Canada. Its chart story is layered: the album version had already reached No. 4 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock chart in 1981 before the single was even issued, and a previously unreleased live version that circulated with the single reached No. 26 on the same Mainstream Rock chart. The song became, almost immediately, one of the defining recordings of Nicks’s solo catalog.
The song that refused to fade
“Edge of Seventeen” has had one of the longest and strangest afterlives of any song from the early 1980s. It became Stevie Nicks’s signature concert-closing number, the song she has used to end her shows for more than four decades. It was given a prominent place in the 2003 film School of Rock. And in 2001, its driving guitar riff was sampled as the foundation of Destiny’s Child’s “Bootylicious,” a No. 1 hit — Nicks even appeared in that song’s music video, a generation removed from her own recording, watching her riff power a record by one of the biggest groups of a new era. Few songs travel that far from their origin: from a private elegy for an uncle and a murdered Beatle, to a stadium-closing rock standard, to the backbone of a 21st-century pop smash.
Stevie Nicks, born in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1948, has continued to perform “Edge of Seventeen” throughout a career that has made her one of the most celebrated figures in American music. She remains a full member of Fleetwood Mac while sustaining a solo catalog that began with Bella Donna, and in 2019 she became the first woman ever inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice — once with Fleetwood Mac in 1998, and once as a solo artist. “Edge of Seventeen” sits near the center of why. It is a song that took the worst week of a difficult year, set it against an unstoppable guitar figure, and gave it a title born of a simple misunderstanding — and turned all of it into something that has outlasted nearly everything around it.
