New York City has always been a paradox: a place where the mythic collides with the mundane, where the glittering skyline hides the cracks in sidewalks, and where every corner seems to whisper a story. But what happens when the stories themselves start to change? Sharon Van Etten’s song Seventeen isn’t just a nostalgic glance at the city—it’s a haunting meditation on how time erodes not just buildings, but the very essence of what makes a place feel alive. Personally, I think this is where the song’s power lies. It doesn’t just mourn the loss of a dive bar or a bookstore; it mourns the erosion of memory, community, and the fragile thread that connects us to the past.
Let’s unpack this. Van Etten, an adopted New Yorker who moved there in 2005, sings about the dissonance between youth and experience. When you’re 17, the world feels infinite. A closed laundromat is just a door that won’t open. But as you age, those doors become portals to a version of the city that no longer exists. What makes this particularly fascinating is how she frames the city’s transformation as a mirror for her own identity. The line ‘I used to be free / I used to be 17’ isn’t just about a person—it’s about a mindset. The freedom of youth is a kind of delusion, one that crumbles when you realize how much of the city’s soul is built on impermanence.
The song’s video, directed by Maureen Towey, is a love letter wrapped in a elegy. It’s a virtual tour of places that defined Van Etten’s creative journey—Union Pool, Baby’s All Right—but it’s also a catalog of what’s been lost. I find it striking how the visuals juxtapose beauty with decay. A crumbling subway station, a neon sign flickering against a grey sky. These aren’t just set pieces; they’re metaphors for the tension between hope and entropy. What many people don’t realize is that New York’s identity is built on reinvention. But Van Etten’s song asks: At what cost? When a neighborhood becomes unrecognizable, does it still belong to the people who shaped it? Or does it become a museum piece, curated for tourists?
There’s a deeper layer here, though. The song’s refrain—‘Everything passes, everything changes’—echoes Bob Dylan’s wisdom, but Van Etten adds a twist. She doesn’t just accept change; she interrogates it. The city’s evolution isn’t just about gentrification or rising rents. It’s about the quiet, incremental loss of shared history. A laundrette closing isn’t just a business decision; it’s the end of a ritual, a gathering place where stories were traded over wash cycles. This raises a question: Can a city still feel like home if it no longer reflects the people who live there? Or is home always a moving target, defined by the moments we cling to?
Comparing Seventeen to Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now feels inevitable. Both songs grapple with the duality of loss and growth. But Van Etten’s approach is more visceral. She doesn’t just acknowledge that ‘something’s lost’—she makes you feel the ache of it. The fragility in her voice isn’t just about aging; it’s about the weight of knowing. What I find especially interesting is how she reframes nostalgia. It’s not a romanticized longing for the past, but a recognition that every era has its own kind of beauty. The 17-year-old version of herself was free, yes—but that freedom was naive. The older Van Etten understands that growth often comes from confronting the truth that nothing lasts. And yet, she doesn’t wallow. There’s a resilience in the song’s melancholy, a quiet acceptance that change is inevitable, but so is the possibility of reinvention.
If you take a step back and think about it, Seventeen is a microcosm of our collective relationship with place. Cities are living organisms, constantly evolving, but they’re also repositories of memory. The challenge is balancing progress with preservation. What this really suggests is that the fight to protect the soul of a city isn’t just about saving buildings—it’s about safeguarding the stories that make those spaces meaningful. As Van Etten’s song reminds us, the truest measure of a place isn’t its skyline, but the lives it holds. And maybe, just maybe, that’s why we keep returning to New York: not because it’s perfect, but because it’s still trying to figure out what it means to be itself.
