Composition
Throughout the song a distinctive 16th note guitar riff is played by Waddy Wachtel, progressing through C, D, and E-Minor chords. During the bridge, the chords alternate twice between E-Minor and C. Wachtel claimed that The Police's "Bring on the Night" was the inspiration for the riff.
As is typical of Nicks' songs, the lyrics are highly symbolic. Nicks has said that the white-winged dove represents the spirit leaving the body on death, and some of the verses capture her experience of the days leading up to her uncle Jonathan's death.
Perhaps appropriate for a song named for a mondegreen, the line "Just like a white-winged dove" is sometimes misheard as "Just like a one-winged dove" or "just like the world we know",also many hear it as; "just like the wild wind does sings a song...", and "just like the ones we love' thus "Edge of Seventeen" has been cited frequently as a source of misheard lyrics since its release, and appears on a number of misheard lyrics web sites and in books of famous misheard lyrics.
Read more about this topic: Edge Of Seventeen (Just Like The White Winged Dove)
Famous quotes containing the word composition:
“Since body and soul are radically different from one another and belong to different worlds, the destruction of the body cannot mean the destruction of the soul, any more than a musical composition can be destroyed when the instrument is destroyed.”
—Oscar Cullman. Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? The Witness of the New Testament, ch. 1, Epworth Press (1958)
“Boswell, when he speaks of his Life of Johnson, calls it my magnum opus, but it may more properly be called his opera, for it is truly a composition founded on a true story, in which there is a hero with a number of subordinate characters, and an alternate succession of recitative and airs of various tone and effect, all however in delightful animation.”
—James Boswell (1740–1795)
“Those Dutchmen had hardly any imagination or fantasy, but their good taste and their scientific knowledge of composition were enormous.”
—Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890)