2019Released
4:25

Did You Know?

Interesting facts and trivia about Seventeen. By Songfacts®.

Sharon Van Etten was born in Belleville, New Jersey, but moved to Tennessee in her late teens. She moved to New York City in 2005. This thunderous track finds her paying nostalgic tribute to the places that shaped her in the Big Apple, even if they've long since disappeared. Downtown harks back Halfway up the street I used to be free I used to be seventeen Van Etten explained in a press release that the song shows "the chain reaction, of moving to a city bright-eyed and hearing the elders complain about the city changing, and then being around long enough to know what they were talking about."

The song is a Springsteenian love letter to Van Etten's adopted hometown. She told Billboard that during "Seventeen" she talks about "living somewhere long enough to see the changes that I have" before passing the baton onto a new generation.

Van Etten told Billboard that in writing the song, she "was literally catching myself bitching about something closing and reopening." Then the New Jersey-born singer remembered the grief that she'd given her friend, TV on the Radio's Kyp Malone, about his same attitude when she first moved to New York. "He bitched about it, about Williamsburg, and warned me that things were gonna change," Van Etten recalled. "I remember him saying his mantra: 'civilizations throughout time rise and fall.' [Laughs] He would get upset when something closed and a new place would open, and he was just like, things are going to change really fast."

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Song Analysis

Key, BPM (tempo) and time signature of Seventeen.
FKey
MajorMode
4/4Time Signature
127BPM

Album

The album Seventeen is released on.

Released By

The record label that has released Seventeen.
Jagjaguwar
2019 Jagjaguwar
2019 Jagjaguwar

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