Jilian Medford is currently on tour promoting the excellent Sucker
Ian Sweet‘s Jilian Medford has dropped a cover of the Broken Social Scene classic “Anthems For a Seventeen Year-Old Girl.”
Medford’s vocals are a perfect fit for the 2002 track, as she quietly conveys the pain and desperation of lines like “Park that car, drop that phone, sleep on the floor, dream about me.”
“Broken Social Scene’s music has always felt like the equivalent of a hug, and I think at some point everyone has to have *that* moment with ‘Anthems For a Seventeen Year-Old Girl,’” Medford said in a statement.
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“Or maybe you have it more than once. This song hits different for me now than it did when I was actually 17, and I imagine it’ll hit a little different each year I get further away from that version of myself. It so poignantly nails the difficulty of trying to exist within the moment of being a teenager while you’re simultaneously looking towards the inevitable transitions looming on the horizon. You want to cry …and you should cry. Simply put: It. Fucking. Crushes.”
She added: “And even though covering someone else’s work is weird and strange and almost always feels like perhaps it shouldn’t be done, I’m willing to say effusively that I never want to escape this song. With this small act, perhaps now I can’t! The original is essential, other covers have taken it to amazing places as well, and now I’ve recorded my version hoping a few more people will get to shout the lyrics at the top of their lungs and FEEL FUCKING INCREDIBLE doing so. Here’s hoping a thousand more artists do the same and that this song just never dies.”
Medford is no stranger to covering her heroes: In 2021, she covered Coldplay’s “Yellow” and remade the beach video. She’s currently on tour promoting her excellent new album, Sucker, which wraps in North America in Catskill, New York in late June.