“Edge of Seventeen” (Just Like the White Winged Dove) by Stevie Nicks, Thursday, September 29, 2022

Fleetwood Mac might be one of the most interesting stories of rock sellouts of all time. The band had been around playing different genres of rock since 1967, but after tons of line up changes and minor hits, the band reformed with Lindsey Buckingham as lead singer and his then-girlfriend Stevie Nicks, playing a tambourine and sometimes the keyboard while singing back up and a few stand out lead vocals on songs like "Landslide" and "Dreams."

THE CLOUDS NEVER EXPECT IT WHEN IT RAINS. Despite Buckingham and Nicks solidifying the classic line up upon releasing Fleetwood Mac's eponymous, tenth studio record and the band's follow-up, Rumors, selling over seven million copies, the band's inner-conflict was legendary. It was sex, drugs, and creative control that simultaneously made the band work and tore them apart. Buckingham left the band in 1987 and Nicks in 1991. But neither Nicks nor Buckingham had to leave Fleetwood to kickstart their solo careers. Fleetwood Mac's follow up to Rumors, the ambitious but decidedly less accessible and commercial disappointment Tusk, had both Buckingham and Nicks writing a lot of material. Some of the extra Tusk material can be found on Buckingham's and Nicks' first solo records, Law and Order and Bella Donna, both released in 1981. Nicks released four singles from Bella Donna starting with the Tom Petty duet "Stop Dragging My Heart Around." Next, she released a song with her then-boyfriend, former Eagle, Don Henley, "Leather and Lace." Finally, on her third single, "Edge of Seventeen," Nicks flies completely solo in one of her most iconic songs in her career.

SOMETIMES TO BE NEAR YOU IS TO BE UNABLE TO HEAR YOU. Some of us may relate to Joan Cusack's Ms. Mullins in the 2003 film School of Rock losing ourselves in an old song. For Principal Mullins, it's the hypnotic guitar riff of "Edge of Seventeen." But before the song could influence everyone from Destiny's Child's "Bootylicious" to Miley Cyrus' "Midnight Sky," "Edge of Seventeen" started as fragments of a story. The song's title comes from mishearing Tom Petty's wife at the time Jane say that she and Tom met at the "age of seventeen," but her heavy southern drawl sounded like edge. But "Edge of Seventeen" isn't a straight-forward love story. In 1980 Stevie Nicks' uncle died of cancer the same week that John Lennon was murdered. After her uncle's death, Nicks sought the comfort of her producer and lover Jimmy Iovine, and the story came together about a "white winged dove" mourning a lost love just as the speaker is coming of age. But just as Nicks misheard Jane Benyo, I misheard the lyric "white winged dove" as "one-winged dove" and I thought about that line for years. A one-winged bird can't fly and can't escape predators. A one-winged bird cries because she is doomed, grounded. But that tragedy besets the meaning of the song, focusing on the doom of the protagonist, rather than the one that the protagonist lost. But then again, what is the song about? The speaker says "I'm a few years older than you," so who's on the edge of seventeen? She or him? A seventeen year old crushing on a fourteen year old? Or a 19 year old crushing on an almost seventeen-year-old? Is it a ghost story? Is it a song of grief or sex or both? Whatever the truth is, the song makes sense in its own dreamscape; you have to feel "Edge of Seventeen" and when you try to grasp it logically, it might not work.