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:
“I live in the angle of a leaden wall, into whose composition was poured a little alloy of bell-metal. Often, in the repose of my mid-day, there reaches my ears a confused tintinnabulum from without. It is the noise of my contemporaries.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The proposed Constitution ... is, in strictness, neither a national nor a federal constitution; but a composition of both.”
—James Madison (1751–1836)
“Every thing in his composition was little; and he had all the weaknesses of a little mind, without any of the virtues, or even the vices, of a great one.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)