"Graduation (Friends Forever)" — Vitamin C

Colleen Fitzpatrick had been a child actress, Amber Von Tussle in John Waters' 1988 Hairspray, and the frontwoman of the alt-rock band Eve's Plum before she reinvented herself in 1999 as Vitamin C, a pop singer on Elektra. "Graduation (Friends Forever)" was the last track on her self-titled debut, co-written with Josh Deutsch, who produced it with Garry Hughes, and it was written, she said, as a response to how quickly friends drift apart after high school. She told Billboard in 2000 that it started one Sunday of songwriting when she began weighing the past against the future: "It became a very emotional song to write and one that wasn't initially about graduation at all." She saw it as a template for any move from one stage of life to the next, "from job to job, for whenever people move on in their lives."

The music was built on a string arrangement of Pachelbel's Canon in D, the wedding-processional staple, with the NYC All-City Chorus singing behind her. One version cut in interviews with the Class of 2000 at Lyndhurst High School in New Jersey, students talking about their friendships and their plans. Gregory Dark's video followed a girl trying to work up the nerve to talk to her crush before the last bell, and ended with Vitamin C walking alone back into the emptied school.

Released as the album's third single in March 2000, after the top-twenty "Smile," it reached number 38 on the Hot 100 and number 12 at pop radio, and did better abroad: top ten in Canada and Ireland and number two in Australia, where it went platinum. Those numbers undersell it. The song arrived for the first graduating class of the new millennium and became a commencement fixture, reportedly returning to the iTunes charts every spring; a 2020 rewrite, "Graduation 2020 (Worst Year Ever)," was recorded for a pandemic year, with Fitzpatrick donating her fee, and Benny Blanco and Juice Wrld sampled it in 2019. Fitzpatrick herself became a music executive, running music at Nickelodeon from 2012 and later at Netflix.