Sharon Van Etten's New Video Is Deeply Moving

When in a crisis, panic, or drowning in trauma, one of the devices that can help us is talking to our younger self. If you can't be yelled at as an adult without crumbling into a utility closet, it might help to talk to ten-year-old you; tell that version of you that it's okay that they got yelled at, and that you're there for them. It's sometimes one of the only ways out of the dark. Sharon Van Etten must have this approach mastered, because she wrote a beautiful song about just that, and a touching corresponding video. 

Switching between talking to the audience in the choruses, and her seventeen-year-old self in the verses, Sharon Van Etten speaks to something in her new song that anyone on the longer side of thirty years old can understand. However, it's not just a vestigial "I wish that I knew what I know now when I was younger" but also an admission of mistakes and shame she feels of letting her teenage self become the version she's become. "Seventeen" might be the most universally-connected theme in a song from the past several years, and it should make any fan of non-Billboard Hot 100 music happy that it came from someone so lovely and revered as Van Etten.