How John Lennon’s tragic murder inspired a classic Stevie Nicks song
The death of John Lennon in 1980 was a moment of intense trauma for the entire world of music. Lennon himself had taken roughly a half-decade away from his music career, opting to become a stay-at-home dad to his son Sean. When he did return with 1980’s Double Fantasy, critical reception was lukewarm at best and dismissive at worst. But Lennon’s murder hit every artist in a sensitive place, including Fleetwood Mac singer Stevie Nicks.
Lennon’s death was still fresh in Nicks’ mind when she began recording her debut solo album Bella Donna in 1981. After a conversation with Tom Petty’s wife discussing how the pair met, Nicks transformed Petty’s claim that she met her future husband at “the age of seventeen” into the phrase ‘Edge of Seventeen’, which became the album’s third single.
“The place where it came from when it was written was sad because it came out of my frustration in not knowing exactly how to accept the death of John Lennon or the death of an uncle that I had that died in the same time period of cancer,” Nicks later recalled. “And that’s what the white-winged dove is. The white-winged dove is the spirit going, and the nightbird at the end is the one that is taking.”
“It was a period of time that I just didn’t know what to do, so I just sat down and wrote about it,” she added. “I spent a lot of time thinking about how I would write this song, and I spent a little bit of time with my uncle as he was dying, and I knew a lot of people that knew John Lennon, and I felt their pain for him and my own pain as losing him too and the ‘Edge of Seventeen’ just was born out of that.”
Nicks herself wasn’t close to Lennon, but her then-partner and producer Jimmy Iovine was. Iovine was one of the engineers who worked at The Record Plant while Lennon was recording his 1974 solo album Walls and Bridges. Iovine considered Lennon to be a mentor, having been one of the first high-profile artists that Iovine had ever worked with.
“Jimmy had told me many times about his incredible friendship with John Lennon, how John had taken Jimmy in and taught him how to record,” Nicks claimed. “He was his teacher…and I was entranced because I could not imagine these two together. Anyway, it was a real-life fairy tale, and I believed it. Then one grey day, the fairy tale ended…Jimmy’s friend was dead. But Jimmy’s love for John did not die. A terrible sadness set in over the house, there was simply nothing I could do to help and nothing I could say. So I went home…Jimmy would have to go this one alone.”
Check out ‘Edge of Seventeen’ down below.
