17 Songs About 17-Year-Olds

I celebrate my child with music, as she teeters over “the edge of seventeen”

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My eldest daughter turned 17 years old today.

Seventeen has long served as muse for songwriters. It represents the brink of adulthood, an age where we’ve nearly outgrown all vestiges of childhood, where we humans start to demonstrate a sense of competence, empathy, and self-reliance that ushers us into adulthood. I see so much of this in my firstborn, the one who made me a mom.

She was 16, going on 17.

She’s young and sweet, only 17.

She learned the truth at 17.

I can feel the shift as we start to see one another not only as mother and daughter, but also as two like-minded humans who share similar aesthetics, values, and thankfully, our tastes in music.

So it seemed fitting for us to celebrate by creating a joint Spotify playlist of songs about being 17, spanning genres, decades, and themes. In some songs, seventeen depicts a transition, a longing look back toward youth or anticipation as one looks ahead. For others, it represents awakening, temptation, and exploration.

And yes, seventeen is also an age men* fetishize. Something about a young woman perched on the precipice of legal adulthood…