"Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl" by Broken Social Scene

The song starts out with this strange, innocuous voice repeating the lines, “used to be one of the rotten ones and I liked you for that.” Emily Haines’(she mainly sings for the band Metric) voice is run through a heavy maze of effects (maybe a phase, a flanger, and a pitch-shifter of some kind). Her voice seems altered enough by the effects to be raised a pitch or two for the sake of the song. The tone of her processed voice is eerie and childlike and initially off-putting. There is something uneasy, yet captivating about it. A minute into the song and it starts to beautifully break open. It’s the banjo and the violin that shapes the harmonic structure of the song and suffuses it with the ineluctable longing of adolescence.

I listened to this song for the first time while strolling down some neighborhood on the outskirts of Atlanta, Georgia this winter. A friend had given me a BSS mix and I’d thrown it on my ipod for the trip. Halfway into listening to the song and suddenly the leafless trees around me were decorated with all the pretty girls I’d known: The one’s that broke my heart and the one’s whose hearts I’d broken. I thought about that wilderness of veins and arteries that we could so easily get lost in as boys and girls, without all the artifice and dross of modern adulthood, and it felt like a kind of bittersweet spell. If that’s not magic, I don’t know what is. Amen.