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"Used to be one of the rotten ones and I liked you for that
Now you're all gone, got your makeup on, and you're not coming back"
I was actually 15 years old when this song came out in 2002. It was the type of sad girl music I listened to in the privacy of my own bedroom on a bootleg cassette tape but was too self-conscious to own up to in public. Teenage ephemera lost in subsequent tumultuous years that would see me terrorized by a boy no one taught how to handle rejection, attempt suicide, and watch several friends die in the latest Middle East war. I almost didn't survive 17, and I'd forgotten this song existed until a few days ago when a friend brought it up in a conversation about music that makes you time travel. In therapy -- which I've been in and out of since I was 17 -- there's constant talk of grieving the childhood I didn't have, but what about the opportunity to look back on the childhood I did have and take stock of it? With vocals by Emily Haines, "Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl" is from the perspective of an adult woman singing to her teenage self, an unrecoverable past version that she treats with care and bittersweet humor and grieves the loss of. Finally at a point in my life when it's safe to look back on my teenage years with compassion, listening to this feels like closure.
Now you're all gone, got your makeup on, and you're not coming back"
I was actually 15 years old when this song came out in 2002. It was the type of sad girl music I listened to in the privacy of my own bedroom on a bootleg cassette tape but was too self-conscious to own up to in public. Teenage ephemera lost in subsequent tumultuous years that would see me terrorized by a boy no one taught how to handle rejection, attempt suicide, and watch several friends die in the latest Middle East war. I almost didn't survive 17, and I'd forgotten this song existed until a few days ago when a friend brought it up in a conversation about music that makes you time travel. In therapy -- which I've been in and out of since I was 17 -- there's constant talk of grieving the childhood I didn't have, but what about the opportunity to look back on the childhood I did have and take stock of it? With vocals by Emily Haines, "Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl" is from the perspective of an adult woman singing to her teenage self, an unrecoverable past version that she treats with care and bittersweet humor and grieves the loss of. Finally at a point in my life when it's safe to look back on my teenage years with compassion, listening to this feels like closure.
