(Credits: Far Out / TIDAL)
Fri 26 September 2025 2:00, UK
One song alone can take on a million lives and serve a million purposes. It can be one thing in an artist’s notepad, another in the studio, then another again when it’s released into the arms of fans. For Stevie Nicks and one of her songs, she always knew which life she wanted to lead, though.
Being an artist like Nicks must be weird. Now in her 70s, she was in her 20s when she wrote and recorded the tracks on Rumours that shot her name to global acclaim. There must be a strange sense of emotional stunting when that happens, as she’s now had to spend her entire career revelling in her youthful emotions and rehashing them night after night.
She still has to hit the stage on each tour and sing of old aches and pains. She’s singing about heartbreaks from decades ago, yet still, through the power of art, is giving a performance that feels present and current, as if she’s dropped right back into the feeling.
Good art isn’t supposed to rust, and that’s something artists have to consider in the studio when they’re deliberating all the lives a song can live. They have to wonder how it’ll be received in the not-so-distant future as a recording on a tape, but they also have to think about the experience it might have on the road, even being taken on the road for years upon years upon years. Will the track hold up? Will it translate to a crowd? Will it lose its power?
Even when Nicks was making ‘Edge Of Seventeen’, she knew the answer to those things. Despite being a single from her nerve-wracking debut step into a solo career, there was a sense of self-confidence in the track quite keen.
Part of that came down to the message and the fact that she desperately wanted this track, written as a result of her grief and fear surrounding the death of John Lennon, to be heard. Holding his memory as a white-winged dove of peace, it clearly felt like an important one for people to engage with. So that’s why she made it such a banger.
That leads to the other reason: she was confident in the track because she made it a banger, and especially made it a song that she still to this day adores playing live.
“That’s my favourite thing onstage. Of all time. It beats ‘Rhiannon’,” Nicks said, putting this solo track above anything else in her repertoire, including all of Fleetwood Mac’s cuts. Each and every time its iconic guitar chugging introduction begins, she’s reignited with passion for the song.
“I don’t know there’s just something about it that when I hear that da-da-da -da-da thing that just makes me… thats it, then it’s all worth it,” she said, failing to even really find words for it.
The crowd always feel the same. Decades on, the song still sounds huge and is still one that hoards of people are desperate to hear live. They’ve heard it on tape, living it’s one life there, but as Nicks knows, there is something different about it played live at a gig, something altogether more powerful.
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