Stevie Nicks' 'Edge of Seventeen' Was Shaped by Grief and a Southern Phrase

The title "Edge of Seventeen" came from a conversation with Tom Petty’s first wife, Jane. She said the couple met "at the age of seventeen," but her thick Southern accent made it sound like "edge of seventeen," and Nicks liked the phrase enough to build a song around the couple’s relationship.

Before the song was finished, John Lennon was shot in New York. Nicks was in Australia at the time; she has said she didn’t know Lennon personally but had heard loving stories about him from Jimmy Iovine, and when she returned to Phoenix she began writing the song.

That same week she also lost her uncle to cancer, and both deaths informed the song.

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