Help me out here folks.
Firstly, I love this track and am generally a fan of most of Ms Nicks stuff (although her later albums were always a bit bland). I would probably say that Edge Of Seventeen is up there with the best tracks she has written – including her Fleetwood Mac stuff.
But…
The YouTube clip in the first comment is the recently aired / posted performance of Edge Of Seventeen from SNL and I think is terrible. I can’t put my finger on why and understand that she’s now about 140 years old and so the voice maybe not what it was, but I just don’t like this.
The comments on YouTube though are universally positive. Is it just me then ? What am I missing ?
And here it is….
I have some thoughts on this. As advertised elsewhere, via the happy medium of karaoke, I have sung pretty much all the songs. All the songs ever written, and the ones that have yet to be written as well.
Amongst those songs, Edge of Seventeen is quite possibly the most challenging. It’s a dear friend of mine’s favourite tune, so we perform it every time we do karaoke. This has been going on for years and I’d say we still aren’t really nailing it.
Because Edge of Seventeen is absolutely brutal: the whole thing completely lives or dies on the vocal, and the vocal doesn’t track the backing music. It is super exposing of your singing, more than almost any other song I can think of, because you’re kind of tied to this melody that weaves in an out: you can’t just freestyle it, but you get no support (other than on the chorus).
I actually don’t think there’s much wrong with Stevie’s singing in the clip posted. For someone nearly 80 years old she sounds absolutely great. But she’s up against the Stevie Nicks of her early 30s, who just brings an unmatchable energy and charisma to that original performance, and every flaw is there for all to see.
I could be wrong, and there might be a more technical reason this isn’t great, but from where I’m sat it’s less a case of this being bad, and more a case of the original just being an absolutely unreal vocal performance. And I say this as someone who was doing Edge of Seventeen in the wee small hours on Saturday night. You don’t sing this one, you just kind of survive it. 🙂
Agreed, a tough one to sing. I wouldn’t do it because it breaks one of my iron Rules Of Karaoke: it goes on a bit too long.
Kudos to you for attempting it, though.
And to the audience too, I imagine.
I agree, there’s an element of “I’m dill danding” about that clip. But Stevie is only two months younger than my mum, and only one of them needs a zimmer frame to shuffle round the stage.
Much like Macca, Shakey & Sir Reginald of Dwight, I’m pleased they’re still around to make their fans happy but I gave up listening long ago.
Stevie Nicks is 76 (“House!”) and her voice sounds relatively better than many of the men about that age who are still treading the boards.
Plus Saturday Night Live is actually live, not only that but if you were watching live in the USA, there was a seven minute gap before Nick’s performance of Edge of Seventeen where they ran two commercial breaks back to back because the soundboard went down just as they were due to come back from the first set of commercials. So whatever happened they had three minutes to get everything back up and working and the back end of the show had to be rearranged on the fly: the last live sketch got dropped at the last minute and they ran a pre-taped sketch from the dress rehearsal that had been dropped from the main show. [SNL does a full dress rehearsal with a full audience as if live between 8pm and 10pm to prepare camera angles and timings for the real show (and it gets recorded too in case of emergency). The show’s running order is then finalised and goes out live between 11.30pm-1am (it was also delayed last night due to a football game)].
If you’re interested this is the rehersal sketch that got flown into the real episode – it has errors like badges held upside down and cue cards coming into shot that are usually ironed out by the time of the live show.
She has a new single out which starts off sounding very unlike regular Stevie Nicks fare. Her voice is still pretty powerful, but a little ragged round the edges these days. Years of cocaine use and prescription drugs addiction probably haven’t helped.
She’s really talented, but she did write one of the great ‘slightly confused’ lyrics. In Rooms on Fire, she says, “There is magic all around you, if I do say so myself.” Surely ‘if I do say so myself’ is only a phrase employed in a self-referential manner, e.g. “This jacket looks pretty dapper, if I do say so myself!” Anyway, I’m off for a lie down and a stiff drink, but not in that order.
I always heard that song as her being aware that she’s working a spell on another person, and that she sees her magical self as being a different entity to her physical body. It’s a complicated song. I love it (I knew the person that it’s about…)
It doesn’t irk me anywhere near as much as “If I was a sculptor, but then again no”. You’re writing a song, Taupin, you don’t have to show your working out and change you mind mid-line.
Never heard the song before but the singing seemed okay to me
It shows up in School of Rock:
The original works because of the urgency in the performance, the same thing that makes There She Goes, Wild Night and Boys of Summer work. In each case the band is pushing hard against the tempo and the singer is at the limit of their range. With all those songs, it’s very hard to capture that lightning in a bottle again, leading to disappointing live and cover versions.
This performance is tired, dragging behind the beat, and her vocals are just not there, despite the support of the backing vocals. The original is full of the drama and emotion of a girl on the edge of 17 (the phrase ‘age of 17’ being misheard through Mrs Petty’s southern drawl). This sounds like an old lady who needs a good lie down.
I agree with @Chrisf Edge of seventeen is a stellar song and possibly her best.
The version posted is okay – not terrible but not as good as the original.
See also: Africa by Toto (the ‘gonna take a lot’ part).
That method of pulling emotion out of a song by raising the key was everywhere in the 80s.
I think that (sadly) this is a problem caused by hearing so much music that’s been pitch corrected, tempo corrected, and everything else. She is a bit flat at times, which is ok, but because our ears are getting trained to perfect pitch, it sounds worse than it should.
It’s a great performance anyway. The band is superb.
It’s not the pitchiness: it’s the energy, or lack of. Good to see everyone’s favourite pedo guitarist Waddy Wachtel is still hanging in there.
…oh, I had no idea about that
Allegedly the images were on a second hand laptop he bought and had serviced. He denied they were anything to do with him
For my money, this is somewhere between “I’m dill danding” and Liam Gallagher’s honking before the Joshua fight. I think the problem is two-fold: these heritage artists spend some time off the road and then have to relearn what they’re meant to sound like – they end up doing an impersonation of themselves. The other is they’re undeniably slightly less powerful as vocalists than they used to be. So there’s a tendency to speak-sing through songs, cut short lines and row back on the hard bits to sing. For a TV performance this is really not bad, but it doesn’t quite sound like Stevie Nicks.
I saw Stevie and what I assume is this band supporting Tom Petty in 2017. They started with this song and I remember it being a lot tighter than this. I think because they have to play to a guitar with delay on it, and weave in and out of that strict tempo, everyone has to be bang-on. I think, given the technical hassles they had right up to filming, they were a bit off – and it shows.
In an adjacent field, lovers of the Buckingham Nicks album, the blue touchpaper that kickstarted the revived fortunes of the Mac, Andrew Bird and Madison Cunningham have done rather a good track by track cover version of it.
https://www.covermesongs.com/2024/10/review-andrew-bird-madison-cunninghams-cunningham-bird.html