Credit: Far Out / YouTube Stills
Tue 11 August 2026 0:00, UK
There are more songs about New York than there are about any other city in the world.
‘Theme From New York, New York’, of course, and ‘Talkin’ New York Blues’. Then Billy Joel had a ‘New York State of Mind’, whereas Jay-Z and Alicia Keys had a case of something similar. The Strokes told us about the mental aptitude of the ‘New York City Cops’, and Taylor Swift welcomed us into the city. Leonard Cohen had plans to take first Manhattan (before moving on to Berlin), and Bobby Womack was heading ‘Across 110th Street’. You get the idea.
In the essay ‘Goodbye to All That’, from Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion wrote that “New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and the perishable dream itself. It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city for only the very young.”
When Sharon van Etten wrote her own New York City song, she touched on a similar sentiment in her song, ‘Seventeen’. From her fifth album, Remind Me Tomorrow, the track is as much a treatise on how the passage of time affects our environments as much as it does our own personal sense of self, identity and place in the world.
An adopted New Yorker (she was born just across the Hudson river in New Jersey but grew up in Nashville, before moving to New York in 2005), Van Etten tracks the changes that she had witnessed in the city over the course of her years living there, and explained in a press-release that the song is about “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”.
Credit: Ryan Pfluger
But the song also tracks her personal changes of perspective surrounding the sense and feel of the city. When you’re young, and you see one shop closed down, replaced by another one, you might think, ‘so what, who cares?’, but once you’ve lived a little longer, you realise that often, it’s not just a mom and pop store, a laundrette or a library that’s closing down, but a community. A place with a shared history, and a person’s life, time and aspirations.
“Downtown harks back / Halfway up the street,” she sings with a voice which is so often somehow both towering and powerful but also fragile and wavering, “I used to be free / I used to be 17”.
In the music video for the song, directed by Maureen Towey, Van Etten created a visual love-letter for her home city, enacting a virtual tour of the parts of the city that made her and her music: Union Pool, Baby’s All Right, The Marcy Street JM Subway Stop, and more.
Towney has said of the video that “We took an eye toward the city that was both tender and tough, trying to find the ways that a beautiful city can fall apart while still nurturing the hopes of a young artist”, but for all that, this is not a song that is shot through with nostalgia.
It’s mournful and lamenting, for sure, but it’s not wallowing. It is a song that understands the ephemerality of life; it knows that all things must pass, and it reinforces the lines in Dylan’s ‘To Ramona’ that say “Everything passes, everything changes / Just do what you think you should do”.
One day, you were 17, too, and the world looked a lot different back then, but you were also looking at the world differently in those days. That message about changing times, changing lives, changing cities and changing perspectives that runs through ‘Seventeen’ can also put you in mind of another line from another one of our great writers.
“Something’s lost,” Joni Mitchell sang on ‘Both Sides Now’ in 1969, “but something’s gained, in living every day”.
