Not Lindsey, Not Don: Stevie Nicks Didn't Write This Emotional '80s Hit About Her Exes

When we're belting out the lyrics to Stevie Nicks' "Edge of Seventeen," it's easy to assume they're about heartache. After all, the song was released on her debut solo album "Bella Donna" in 1981, just a few years after her relationships with Fleetwood Mac bandmate Lindsey Buckingham and Eagles' Don Henley ended. But "Edge of Seventeen" is actually about grief, both personal and collective. She wrote the song shortly after John Lennon's shocking death in December 1980 and the death of her own beloved uncle.

Nicks had been living with boyfriend Jimmy Iovine, who had been friends with the former Beatles star. "A terrible sadness set in over the house, there was simply nothing I could say," she said, according to In Her Own Words. She saw no point in staying at their house, so she went to her native Phoenix to be with her family and to see her Uncle Jonathan, who had colon cancer. She was holding his hand when she felt it slip away, lifeless. "I did run out into the hallway, but no one was there... and the white winged dove took flight," she explained.

And thus the famous lyrics to her classic hit came to be. "The white-winged dove is the spirit going, and the nightbird at the end is the one that is taking," she explained, according to Far Out magazine. The song was Nicks' own way of dealing with the tragedies. "I felt a great loss at how both Johns were taken," she told Rolling Stone in 1981 (via In Her Own Words). Indeed, songwriting is how Nicks had been dealing with pain since adolescence.

"Edge of Seventeen" might not be about a breakup and traditional heartache, but Stevie Nicks wrote plenty about that, too. In fact, she owes her whole songwriting career to a heartbreak. She had just turned 16 when her first boyfriend broke her heart, an experience that coincided with her getting a guitar for her birthday. "It was a relationship at 15-and-a-half, where I was absolutely crazy about this guy. And he broke up with me," she told ABC News in 2001.

As awful as it was at the time, Nicks remains grateful her beau dumped her the way he did. "Thank God he broke up with me, because if he hadn't... I wouldn't have been spurred on to write that song... I don't know what would have happened if it hadn't have been for that," she said. Songwriting wasn't a career path she had considered before, but it became the only path for her the moment she completed her first song. "When that song was done, I knew that I was going to be a songwriter. And I think my mom and dad knew it too," she continued.

From then on, writing defined her life. Nicks even chose to remained childless to fulfill that purpose. "I want to enhance this planet. I came here for a reason. I didn't come here to be a mother. I didn't come here to be a nun. And I did not come here to be a cleaning lady. I came here to be a poet," she said on Jim Ladd's "Innerview" radio program in 1983 (via In Her Own Words). Thankfully for all fans, teenage heartache paved the way.