“Seventeen Years” is the new single from Ellory Grace, written at 17 about anxiety, and that title carries a hefty weight. It’s her whole life so far, and for most of it anxiety has been hanging around like a houseguest who never took the hint. This song is the moment she finally opens the door.
Plenty of songs about anxiety sink right into it but “Seventeen Years” pushes back. “I’m kicking you out” isn’t a promise that everything gets magically fixed, it’s a decision about how much room the worry gets, and that feels far more honest than a tidy happy ending.
I caught up with Ellory Grace to talk about where the song came from, how a feeling becomes a lyric, and what comes next.
Youâve said âSeventeen Yearsâ started with a question rather than a melody. What was going through your mind the moment that question first came to you?
Itâs amazing how many things we think are âjust meâ things until we actually talk about them. You finally say one out loud and someone goes, âWait, you do that too?â
Anxiety is like that. Almost everyone knows what it feels like to get caught up in a âwhat if.â I started wondering how often a âwhat ifâ gets a vote without us even realizing we gave it one.
And then I had the question: Who would I be if anxiety didnât get a vote?
That question became Seventeen Years.
The song treats anxiety like an unwanted guest youâre finally showing the door. Was there a specific moment in your life that made you picture it that way?
There wasnât one specific moment. It was more the realization that something can be part of your life for a long time without deserving to run it.
I liked the idea of treating anxiety like an unwanted guest because it gave me a way to push back without making the song feel heavy. After seventeen years, itâs basically made itself at home, and at some point you get to say, âOkay, youâve been here long enough.â
Thatâs where âIâm kicking you outâ came from. It doesnât mean anxiety magically disappears. It means I get to decide how much room I give it.
You write your own songs and pull from real personal experience. How do you know when a feeling is ready to become a lyric versus something youâre still sitting with?
I donât usually sit down and think, âOkay, I understand how I feel about this, now I can write a song.â Itâs almost the opposite. If something keeps making me wonder why I care about it, why it bothered me, or why I canât quite decide how I feel, thatâs usually when I want to write.
Sometimes Iâll get an entire idea at once, and sometimes itâs literally one sentence in my notes that makes no sense to anyone but me for months.
I donât think a song always needs to answer the question. Sometimes figuring out what the question actually is becomes the song.
Between modeling, runway work, and music, how do you decide which parts of your life youâre willing to turn into a song?
Itâs not always the huge life moments that make me want to write. Sometimes itâs something someone says, something I notice, or some completely random moment on a Tuesday that didnât seem like it should matter, but somehow Iâm still thinking about it three days later.
I love that we donât really get to choose which moments stay with us. You can have an entire amazing day and somehow the five-second part you remember is the one that seemed completely unimportant at the time.
Sometimes I figure out why. Sometimes I write a song instead.
Youâre already working on your next single for October. Has writing about anxiety changed how you approach songwriting for what comes next?
Not really. Anxiety just happened to be one of the first things I wrote about. Writing songs is whatâs changed things for me. Sometimes I can say something in a lyric that I could never explain the same way in a conversation.
And once I started doing that, I realized how many other things I want to write about. Things I notice, things I wonder about, things Iâve experienced, and probably things I havenât even thought of yet.
“Seventeen Years” is one thing I wanted to write about. Iâm 17. I definitely have a lot more.
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