What is Stevie Nicks’ ‘Edge of Seventeen’ actually about?
‘Edge of Seventeen’ is a track with more drama than an average series of Game of Thrones, which is rather fitting considering that Stevie Nicks referred to much of her musical life as an “incestuous soap opera” thanks to the many rock and roll love triangles she found herself embroiled in.
However, when it comes to the Bella Donna hit that takes the focus of this piece, the drama is far more Shakespearean. In fact, it pertains to life and death in a very direct sense.
“Well, I see you doing what I try to do for me, With the words from a poet and a voice from a choir, And a melody, and nothing else mattered,” Nicks sings in a song that pits existential despair against the defiant potential of music to save us from such grim musing.
At the song’s crux, there is a great deal of loss and grief, but as the soaring musicology implies, there is also the boon of hope in music and making the most of youth. In many ways, it personifies what Pete Townshend was angling at when The Who guitarist quipped, “Rock ‘n’ Roll might not solve your problems, but it does let you dance all over them.”
However, while the song might be typically dreamy, it is tied to realism by virtue of the losses Nicks had experienced when she was writing the song.
As Nicks explains herself on Live In Concert: “I was in Australia when John Lennon was shot. Everybody was devastated. I didn’t know John Lennon, but I knew Jimmy Iovine, who worked with John quite a bit in the ’70s and heard all the loving stories that Jimmy told about him. When I came back to Phoenix, I started to write this song.”
Her reflective mood only deepened when further grief was cast upon her during her homecoming. “Right when I got to Phoenix, my uncle Bill got cancer, got very sick very fast, and died in a couple of weeks,” she continues.
Adding, “My cousin John Nicks and I were in the room when he died. There was just John and I there. That was part of the song when I went running down the hallways looking for somebody – I thought, ‘Where’s my mom? Where’s his wife and the rest of the family?’ At that point, I went back to the piano and finished the song.”
With that in mind, she began to pair the aura of dramatic loss with motifs that captured Lennon’s iconic status as a musical symbol of transcendence. The Beatle had proven since his loss that what you leave behind lives on, and Nicks wove that into her despair, elevating it to much more hopeful heights.
It became about soaring beyond despair, like the “white winged dove” she sings of. It also “became a song about violent death, which was very scary to me because, at that point, no one in my family had died,” she says. But quickly adds as a counterpoint, “To me, the white-winged dove was for John Lennon the dove of peace, and for my uncle, it was the white-winged dove who lives in the saguaro cactus.”
She even wove this metaphor into musicology, displaying how sound and content often collide in Nicks’ work. “It does make a sound like whooo, whooo, whooo,” she explains of the dove’s call and how that became part of the song’s hook. “I read that somewhere in Phoenix and thought I would use that in this song.”
She concludes: “The dove became exciting and sad and tragic and incredibly dramatic. Every time I sing this song, I have that ability to go back to that two-month period where it all came down. I’ve never changed it, and I can’t imagine ending my show with any other song. It’s such a strong, private moment that I share in this song.”
The final result is a track that broods with Nicks’ mystic view on life. With so much going on in the welter, the lyrics become obfuscated on the surface, but the bold and bruising melody captures the sense of profundity all the same. The track is Nicks in a deep period of reconciliation, looking back at her journey with the fresh context that life is fragile.
