Rock Songs For Your Younger Self

A song list · 14 songs · updated October 2026

Songs I'd hand the kid I used to be. Some are advice, some just look back at being young and sure of everything. Most are rock songs you already know, and three are mine, tagged ZN Rock. What each one is about sits right under it with a link, and both playlists close out the page.

1. The Middle · Jimmy Eat World

   From Bleed American (2001). Jim Adkins wrote it for a fan who'd written to the band about being shut out of the local punk scene. It tells a kid who doesn't fit in that it gets better and to stop writing themselves off.

   Official video

2. September · Daughtry

   From Leave This Town (2009). Chris Daughtry looks back on growing up in small-town North Carolina, the summers that felt endless and the town he knew he'd have to leave.

   Official video

3. Tell Him I Made It · ZN RockZN Rock

   An old photo of a kid in a beat-up jacket with nothing in his pockets, and everything you'd tell him now: hold on, the worst of it ends, you're already who you're going to be.

   Lyric videoLyricsSpotifyApple MusicYouTube Music

4. 1979 · The Smashing Pumpkins

   From Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (1995). Billy Corgan turned twelve in 1979, and the song is about that restless edge between being a kid and whatever comes next.

   Official video

5. Like a Rock · Bob Seger

   The title track of Seger's 1986 album. He looks back at himself at eighteen, broke and working and sure he couldn't be moved, and then asks where the twenty years since have gone.

   Official video

6. My Best Bad Idea · ZN RockZN Rock

   Twenty-two, broke and sleeping on a borrowed floor while everyone said you'd regret it. A toast to every wrong turn that led somewhere good, sung to the people who said it would go wrong.

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7. Ooh La La · Faces

   The title song of the last Faces album (1973), sung by Ronnie Wood. A grandfather warns his grandson about love, and the chorus is the famous wish to have known it all back when you were young.

   Official video

8. Stressed Out · Twenty One Pilots

   A 2015 hit about missing the years when your biggest problem was a made-up game, back before rent and other people's opinions took over.

   Official video

9. My Long Way Around · ZN RockZN Rock

   The life where you got it all right is a stranger you're glad you never met. Every dead end and busted mile stays, because that's where you learned anything.

   Lyric videoLyricsSpotifyApple MusicYouTube Music

10. Vienna · Billy Joel

    From The Stranger (1977). Joel has said the idea came from visiting his father in Vienna, and that the song tells a young person in a hurry to slow down: there's a whole life still ahead.

    Official video

11. Summer of '69 · Bryan Adams

    From Reckless (1984). A first guitar, a band that fell apart and a summer that felt like the best one there would ever be. Co-writer Jim Vallance says he was thinking of the summer he turned seventeen; Adams has given the title a cheekier meaning.

    Official video

12. Simple Man · Shinedown

    Shinedown's take on the 1973 Lynyrd Skynyrd song, the advice a mother gives her son before he heads out into the world.

    Official video

13. My Back Pages · Bob Dylan

    From Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964), and later a hit for The Byrds. Dylan turns on his own younger self, a kid who was certain about everything, and finds he's younger now than he was then.

    Official video

14. Cherry Bomb · John Mellencamp

    From The Lonesome Jubilee (1987). Mellencamp looks back on his teenage nights at a local teen club with his friends, the kind of nights that seem huge at the time and turn into the stories you tell later.

    Official video

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