B-side "Stars" Format Vinyl | Released August 1975 Recorded 1974 | |
Length 4:41 (Album version)3:59 (Single version) | ||
"At Seventeen" is a song by Janis Ian, released in 1975 on Between the Lines (her seventh studio album) and as a single. Ian's most successful recording, the song is a commentary on society's beauty standards, adolescent cruelty, the illusion of popularity, and teenage angst, as reflected upon from the maturity of adulthood. It is told from the point of view of a woman who was an "ugly duckling" as a girl and ignored in high school while the popular girls got all the attention.
Contents
Background
Janis Ian, then 22, wrote "At Seventeen" in 1973 at her mother's house over the course of three months. In her autobiography Society's Child, Ian says that the song was inspired by a newspaper article about a former teenage debutante who learned the hard way that being popular did not solve all her problems. The article included the quote, "I learned the truth at eighteen"; Ian found that the word "seventeen" worked better than "eighteen" when she tried to put this lyric with the bossa nova-style melody she had been composing on guitar. She also says she initially did not want to record or perform the song because she felt it was far too personal to share, but eventually changed her mind after adding the song's final verse ("To those of us who knew the pain/Of Valentines that never came...").
Promoting the song was challenging, as it was longer than most radio hits and packed with lyrics. Along with the promotions team at her record company, Ian decided that their best chance to market the song was to promote it to women, which was no easy task when so many radio stations were controlled by men. Ian did a grueling series of daytime talk shows for six months before she was granted an appearance on The Tonight Show where she performed the song and it took off.
"At Seventeen", released as the second single from Between the Lines, became Ian's first national hit single since her first hit "Society's Child (Baby I've Been Thinking)" in 1967. The single version omitted the longer instrumental verse and chorus because it was considered too long and it was feared that the radio stations would refuse to play it. It peaked at #1 on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart and at #3 on the Pop Singles chart in September 1975. Billboard ranked it as the No. 19 song for 1975, and as the No. 2 Adult Contemporary hit of the year behind only Melissa Manchester's "Midnight Blue." It also won a Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance in 1976, beating out the likes of Linda Ronstadt, Olivia Newton-John, and Helen Reddy and was nominated for "Record of the Year" and "Song of the Year".
Ian performed "At Seventeen" as a musical guest on the very first episode of Saturday Night Live in October 1975. She also performed the song on The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1976, when she held the number one spots on the US album and single charts.
The song's parent album, Between the Lines, also hit #1 and earned a platinum certification for sales of one million copies. Another measure of her success is anecdotal — on Valentine's Day 1977, Ian received 461 Valentine cards, having indicated in the lyrics to "At Seventeen" that she never received any as a teenager.
In films and television programs
"At Seventeen" is featured in the movie Scotland, Pa. (2001) and can also be heard playing in the background in one scene in the 2004 movie Mean Girls. The movie, which features a character named "Janis Ian", addresses the topic of teenage cruelty and alienation. "At Seventeen" is also mentioned in Jeffrey Eugenides's 1993 novel The Virgin Suicides, where the song is used by four girls imprisoned in their own home and essentially cut off from normal adolescent experiences to communicate with the narrator and his friends. The song is featured in The Simpsons episodes "A Streetcar Named Marge", "El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Jomer (The Mysterious Voyage of Homer)", and "Chief of Hearts". In the 30 Rock episode "The Break-Up", Tina Fey's character sings "At Seventeen" at a karaoke club. Julia Sawalha's character Saffy sings the song in a bar populated by empathetic drag queens who join in singing in Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie and recorded a studio version for the film soundtrack album.
Studio albums
Live performances
Parody
Ian appeared on The Howard Stern Radio Show in 1993 and performed the song albeit with different lyrics to poke fun at the May–December romance of Jerry Seinfeld and Shoshanna Lonstein.
Influences
At17, a Hong Kong music group, is named after the song. The girl-duo also covered the song in Cantonese on their first album Meow Meow Meow in 2002.