Stevie Nicks already had a dream career in motion with Fleetwood Mac. That much is true, just looking at the mammoth worldwide success they enjoyed with 1977’s blockbuster Rumours album alone.

But the singer would eventually grow restless and feel somewhat creatively limited within the confines of the group, which is not surprising, since Fleetwood Mac featured numerous songwriters inside its ranks. Nicks found more and more that she had a growing amount of unreleased material in need of a home.

Taking the chance to embark on a solo career seemed like the natural route to take, no matter how much risk there might be. But how well would she fare outside of the Fleetwood Mac mothership? Would it cause conflict? 1981’s Bella Donna arrived on July 27, 1981 and provided a definitive confirmation that there was room for both. In fact, it opened up a whole new world creatively for Nicks, a path she continues to travel to this day.

New York Times bestselling author Annie Zaleski (who has also written for UCR) takes stock of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame legend’s entire career with her book, Stevie Nicks in 50 Songs. It offers a comprehensive and heavily researched look at her work with the Mac, Buckingham Nicks, plus her extensive solo work and collaborations along the way.

In an exclusive excerpt that you can read below, we learn the interesting backstory behind one of her most enduring solo hits, Bella Donna’s “Edge of Seventeen.”

Although Stevie Nicks wrote many of her songs about specific moments or times in her life, others are more like a photo scrapbook of memories. That’s certainly the case with her pop and rock radio hit “Edge of Seventeen,” a galvanizing song with impressionistic lyrics and imagery drawn from multiple strands of her life which became a massive hit in 1982. For example, the immortal white-winged dove mentioned in the song came to Nicks in a rather pedestrian way: a menu she received while on an airplane mentioned the bird being protected by a saguaro cactus. As “Edge of Seventeen” evolved, the dove came to symbolize multiple people in her orbit who had died or were sick when she wrote the song.

“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 said in a 1981 WLIR radio interview. “I spent a lot of time thinking about how I would write this song.”

“Edge of Seventeen” started coalescing in 1980, when she was living with her then-boyfriend, producer Jimmy Iovine. He was wrapping up a Tom Petty album and she was getting restless being at home. “I was starting to get very edgy to do something,” she said in the Timespace liner notes. “I was also starting to feel very unimportant and very sorry for myself. I was ready to begin Bella Donna, and it seemed like it would just never happen.”

Around this time, John Lennon was shot and killed. Iovine was devastated, as he and Lennon had this “incredible friendship,” Nicks recalled in the same liner notes. “John had taken Jimmy in and taught him to record. He was his teacher.” Less than two months later, Nicks’s uncle Jonathan became very ill with colon cancer; she saw him the day before he died. “He was home, and my aunt had some music softly playing, and it was a perfect place for the spirit to go away,” she told Rolling Stone in 1981. “The ‘white-winged dove’ in the song is a spirit that is leaving a body, and I felt a great loss at how both Johns were taken.” Sadly, Nicks then also later came to associate “Edge of Seventeen” with her dear friend Robin Anderson, who became sick as Bella Donna became a success.

And then there’s the song’s title, which came about after Nicks asked Tom Petty’s first wife, Jane, when the couple met. “She said, ‘I met him at some point during the age of 17,’” Nicks told Billboard. “But I thought she said, ‘The edge of 17.’ I said, ‘Jane, can I use that? Can I write a song called “Edge of Seventeen”?’” Consequently, at least some of the song was “Jane talking about Tom,” Nicks added. “I bet a lot of people thought I was talking about me, but I was chronicling their relationship as she told it to me.”

READ MORE: Hear 10 Songs Stevie Nicks Left Off of ‘Bella Donna’

Stevie Nicks – Bella Donna

Given this backdrop, “Edge of Seventeen” is emotionally cathartic—a feeling captured by the music, which is highlighted by glassy piano from Roy Bittan, jagged electric guitars from Waddy Wachtel, and a cascading chorus of harmonies from Nicks and her backup singers Sharon Celani and Lori Perry. Nicks herself sounds like a fire-and-brimstone preacher howling through her grief and love.

The song was also a blast to record, Nicks said. “Recording it was the most exciting thing I’ve ever done, because everybody felt that there was an electrical charge going through this white-winged dove all the way through that song,” Nicks told WLIR in 1981. “And for the three days that we worked on recording the track of it, and we had the lady singers and myself and all 10 of the guys out in one room recording.”

Years later, however, Wachtel admitted that his inimitable guitar part throughout the song was uncomfortably close to the Police’s 1979 song “Bring On the Night”—and it apparently wasn’t exactly an accident. “At that session they told me they were going to do this song based on this feel,” he told Musician in 1999. “I heard something about the Police, but I didn’t know what they were talking about. Then about two years ago, I had the radio on, and on comes what sounds like “Edge of Seventeen”—and all of a sudden, there’s Sting’s voice! I thought, ‘We ripped them off completely!’”

Watch Stevie Nicks’ ‘Edge of Seventeen’ Video

Excerpted from Stevie Nicks in 50 Songs by Annie Zaleski. Copyright © 2026. Available from Running Press, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.