If you’ve ever listened to Fleetwood Mac’s Tango In The Night album, you’ve likely been entranced by songs like “Everywhere”, while also being captivated by tracks like “Little Lies”. Even though this album certainly isn’t the band’s most popular project, it’s not one to be overlooked. In addition, Tango In The Night also brought us the Sandy Stewart-penned “Seven Wonders”.
Stewart is a musician who played a major role in the making of Stevie Nicks’ second studio album, The Wild Heart. She not only played keyboard and synthesizer for the singer but also sang background vocals. In addition, for The Wild Heart and two of Nicks’ other solo albums, Stewart co-wrote several songs.
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When Stewart first gave Nicks a demo of “Seven Wonders”, the “Landslide” singer didn’t have a lyric sheet. So, she had to figure out what the lyrics were herself. This resulted in her mishearing one of the lines and also in her getting credit for the song alongside Stewart. The line that was changed was “On the way down to Emmaline”, which appears in the first verse:
So long ago
Certain place
Certain time
You touched my hand
On the way
On the way down to Emmeline.
“I thought she said that, and she hadn’t,” Nicks once explained. “And I had become so attached to the name Emmaline that we kept it in, and she gave me a small percentage.”
The “Edge Of Seventeen” Story
“Seven Wonders” actually wasn’t the first song Stevie Nicks worked on after mishearing a phrase. The other song of hers that this unique situation applies to is from her first solo album, “Edge Of Seventeen”.
Nicks wrote “Edge Of Seventeen” after the death of her uncle, which coincided closely with the death of John Lennon. The song chronicled Nicks’ grief during this time.
However, it was through a conversation with Tom Petty’s wife, Jane Petty, about how the couple met at seventeen that Nicks came up with the title. Jane Petty said “age of seventeen,” but Nicks misheard her as saying “edge of seventeen.”
In 1981, she shared: “So it started out about Tom and Jane basically, who I have no idea what they were at 17, but I made it up. And, uh, it went into being written about [her Uncle Jon and John Lennon].”
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