She was shorter than the corn Pictures of the farm before us Old men in a gospel chorus Sephia And saddle horses easy on the reins Eighty-one a motor in your mama's seventeen again She's squinting at the dusty wind The anger of the plains You and I were

Life pulled on like a limo under the highway after the prom Time ran down like a scoreboard on the last Hail Mary bomb My heart's still stuck at a stop light With you sittin' there next to me And the red light won't turn green Yeah, it won't turn green,

I was born in Chicago at nineteen and forty-one Well, my first friend went down When I was seventeen years old Well, there's one thing I can say about that boy Well, my second friend went down When I was twenty one years of age Well, now rules are

I found out what it takes to be a man Now mom and dad will never understand Seventeen and strung out on confusion Trapped inside a roll of disillusion Secrets collecting dust but never forget Skeletons come to life in my closet What's happening to me

Rise and shine all you gold-digging mothers Are you too good to tango with the poor poor boys Slow nights so long she's frenching out flavour She's seventeen but I done went and plum forgot it. No tears are gone they're pooling on the table No tears are

And into the river we'd dive I come from down in the valley Where mister when you're young They bring you up to do like your daddy done Me and Mary we met in high school When she was just seventeen We'd ride out of this valley down to where the fields

Life pulled on like a limo under the highway after the prom Time ran down like a scoreboard on the last Hail Mary bomb My heart's still stuck at a stop light With you sittin' there next to me And the red light won't turn green Yeah, it won't turn green,

Seventeen seventy-six New York City Pardon me, are you Aaron Burr, sir? That depends, who’s asking? Oh, sure, sir I’m Alexander Hamilton, I’m at your service, sir I have been looking for you I’m getting nervous Sir, I heard your name at Princeton

Under the stars on Brighton Beach Seems like only yesterday I remember when you were only seventeen You were the finest girl that my eyes had ever seen I guess you found it hard to simply just ignore This scruffy beat up working class teenage troubadour

We'd drive too fast Yeah man, we run this town We'd get too loud Nothin’ but a bunch of time to kill Set up on the big hill Seventeen, we owned those streets That was our spot, that’s where we’d always meet And we’d roll on out