Ian, Janis
Janis Ian
Singer, songwriter, guitarist, pianist
Disturbed by the problems and hypocrisies of modern society, singer/songwriter Janis Ian has made a career out of earnestly challenging the status quo. In 1966, at the tender age of 15, she addressed racial prejudice in her hit song “Society’s Child,” the poignant story of a white girl forced by parents, teachers, and others to forsake her black boyfriend. A decade later the performer touchingly conveyed the painful feelings of a plain adolescent girl in the award-winning “At Seventeen,” indicting a society where female self-worth too often hinges on physical beauty, lan’s “Uncle Wonderful,” written in the mid-eighties, looked at the secret world and indelible wounds of child molestation. “Janis lan’s intelligence and perception continue to shine through all that she does,” observed Peter Reilly in a Stereo Review critique of the entertainer’s 1979 album, Night Rains. “The title song … has vintage Ian lyrics, flushed with the kind of theatrical melodrama that only she can create … and it is performed with the pulsing, dark intensity that is her trademark.” “No one ever accused songwriter Janis Ian of dodging life’s difficult issues,” People reporter Lois Armstrong agreed.
A musical child prodigy, Ian began classical piano training at the age of three and mastered the acoustic guitar a few years later. By age 12 she was writing songs and performing at school functions—music being her only solace as she moved from place to place repeatedly with her family. Her own musical tastes varied, with favorites like jazz vocalist Billie Holiday and folk singer Odetta; lan’s early compositions were largely stormy generation-gap pieces with folk song melodies that nonetheless contained some remarkably perceptive observations. By 16 she was singing and playing in Greenwich Village folk clubs and landed a recording contract with Verve.
Verve agreed to release lan’s daring “Society’s Child,” already rejected by twenty-two other recording companies. The year was 1966, and disc jockeys across the country were reluctant to air lan’s song of interracial love. But New York Philharmonic conductor Leonard Bernstein featured the young singer on his television special, and she became an instant celebrity—with “Society’s Child” rising to Number 14 on the charts. Her debut album, Janis Ian, was a success; acclaimed as a female Bob Dylan, the performer embarked on a national concert tour. Yet her auspicious start proved impossible to sustain, disillusionment set in, and the entertainer’s career began to flag. Turning to drugs and psychotherapy, Ian eventually settled in Los Angeles, where she could scarcely obtain a booking. “People were throwing bottles at me,” she recounted to Armstrong. “It was all the dues I never paid when I was 15.”
Ian announced her retirement—but could not stop
For the Record…
Name originally Janis Eddy Fink; born April 7, 1951, in New York, N.Y., raised in New Jersey and New York City; daughter of Victor (a music teacher) and Pearl Fink; married Tino Sargo (a businessman) in 1978. Education: Attended Manhattan High School of Music and Art.
Began studying piano at age three and guitar at 11; wrote songs and performed by age 12; sang and played at school functions, then in New York City folk clubs; first recording contract, 1966, at age 15; national television debut on Leonard Bernstein special, 1967, first hit song and national concert tour that same year; retired from performing, 1968-70; began comeback as performer in 1971; semi-retired as entertainer by 1981, concentrating on songwriting.
Awards: Grammy Award for best female pop vocal performance, 1975, for “At Seventeen.”
writing for long—she still had things to say. “I felt more mature, that I had more insight,” she told Irwin Stambler in the Encyclopedia of Pop, Rock, and Soul, as she discussed her comeback efforts in the early 1970s. “The reasons I came back to the music field come down to this: I was writing songs I liked and I wanted to record them.” While her next few albums brought disappointing results, Ian enjoyed moderate success with the 1974 LP Stars. Notable was the title song, lan’s cynical view of celebrity, as well as her version of “Jesse,” a hit for vocalist Roberta Flack a year earlier (which helped rekindle lan’s reputation as a songwriter). Her comeback endeavors reached full flower a year later with the platinum album Between the Lines, containing the Grammy-winning single “At Seventeen.” Critics found this new Ian less angry and grim, more thoughtful and assured.
Ian continued to write, record, and perform through the seventies and eighties, but never again approached the success of Between the Lines. Still, she remained uninhibited, addressing subjects that interested her. “Under the Covers,” a 1981 song reflecting on the virtues of Latin men as lovers, was refused air play because its lyrics were deemed too risque; “Uncle Wonderful,” which Ian performed in concert, was avoided by record companies in much the same way as “Society’s Child” two decades before.
More than one critic has puzzled over the music industry’s apparent wariness when it comes to Ian—ironic, given the provocative topics rock groups have dealt in for years. Discussing “Under the Covers” in a review of the performer’s 1981 album Restless Eyes, Reilly decided that “compared with the average pre-teen conversation these days, it’s about as lewd as To a Sky-lark.” “‘Underthe Covers’… is a typically fine piece of writing and performing by Ian,” continued the critic. “Like all her work, it’s distinguished by an earthy but romantic sensibility that expresses itself fearlessly regardless of social climate.”
Compositions
Composer of numerous songs recorded by other artists, including Roberta Flack, Kenny Rogers, and Alabama; has collaborated with country songwriter Rhonda Kye Fleming. Has written songs for motion pictures, including The Foxes and The Bell Jar.
Selected discography
Singles
“Society’s Child”/“Letter to Jon,” 1967.
“Younger Generation Blues”/“I’II Give You a Stone If You’ll Throw It,” 1967.
“Insanity Comes Quietly to the Structured Kind”/“Sunflakes Pall, Snowrays Call,” 1967.
“Song for All the Seasons of Your Mind”/“Lonely One,” 1968.
LPs
Janis Ian, Verve/Forecast, 1967.
For All the Seasons of Your Mind, Verve, 1968.
The Secret Life of J. Eddy Fink, Verve, 1968.
Who Really Cares, Verve, 1969.
Present Company, Capitol, 1971.
Stars, Columbia, 1974.
Between the Lines, Columbia, 1975.
Aftertones, Columbia, 1975.
Miracle Row, Columbia, 1977.
Janis Ian, Columbia, 1978.
Night Rains, Columbia, 1979.
Best of Janis Ian, Columbia, 1980.
Restless Eyes, Columbia, 1981.
Sources
Books
Stambler, Irwin, The Encyclopedia of Pop, Rock, and Soul, revised edition, St. Martin’s, 1989.
Periodicals
People, September 22, 1986.
Stereo Review, February 1980; October 1981.
—Nancy Pear
Ian, Janis
Janis Ian
Singer, songwriter
Anew generation of female musicians developed in the 1990’s. Some of them looked tough, some fresh-faced and beautiful. Some were talented songwriters, while still others possessed angelic voices. Janis Ian was a little of each of them, but she cleared the way for them all. Ian has been called an American folk troubadour, and her consistent staying power has earned her nominations for at least one Grammy award from the 1960s-90s. And she started in 1966, when she was just 15.
While waiting to see a high-school guidance counselor, the former Janis Eddy Fink, daughter of a music teacher, wrote a song about interracial romance called “Society’s Child (Baby I’ve Been Thinking).” After she recorded and released it, the controversial song was ignored by most radio stations, and outright banned by others. Things changed for the song, and for Lan, when conductor Leonard Bernstein featured her on his TV show Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution, calling her a “marvelous creature.” She performed the song backed by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. The song charted at number 14 in 1967.
For the Record…
Born Janis Eddy Fink, April 7, 1951, New York, NY; married and divorced photojournalist Peter Cunningham. Education: attended High School of Music and Art, Manhattan.
Composition “Hair of Spun Gold” appeared in Broadside magazine, 1964; released debut, “Society’s Child (Baby I’ve Been Thinking)” in 1966; released Janis Ian and was nominated for a Grammy award; appeared on The Tonight Show and in Time, Life and Newsweek; released Between the Lines in 1975.
Awards: Grammy awards for “At Seventeen,” 1975; “Silly Habits” with Mel Torme as Best Vocal Duet, 1981; and In Harmony 2, in 1982.
Addresses: Record company —Windham Hill Records, PO Box 9388, Stanford, CA 94309; (415) 329-0647; fax (415) 329-1512; email —[email protected].
After quitting Manhattan’s High School of Music and Art as a junior, the year after “Society’s Child” was released, she released her first album, Jam’s Ian, on Verve, in 1967. She released three more for Verve, For All the Seasons of your Mind in 1967; The Secret Life of J. Eddy Finkin 1968 and 1969’s Who Really Cares. In 1974 and 1975, Ian released Starson One Way, and Between the Lines and Aftertones on Columbia. Roberta Flack later recorded “Jesse” from Stars and topped the charts with it. Between the Lines included “At Seventeen,” a single that went to number three on the charts and earned Ian a Grammy award for Best Female Vocal. 1975 was lan’s most successful year—she sold over $5 million in records—which was important to her. After “Society’s Child,” she felt she needed to dispel the notion that the single was a fluke, that she was washed up by age 18. Her next several albums recorded from 1977-79, Miracle Row, Janis Ian, and Night Rains, didn’t garner much attention at all.
As a young star, Ian faced hurdles in an industry that can be difficult even for adults to deal with. “Well I was fourteen so that’s already a problem,” she recalled in a 1993 interview with Lydia Hutchinson of A&R Insider. Being underage meant that she couldn’t sign her own contracts, book her own musicians, or run her own sessions. Being a young female musician in the late sixties only complicated things further. “I remember violent arguments with TV people in [Los Angeles] when I was fifteen about wearing pants or dresses,” she told Hutchinson. Her wardrobe wars were only the start of her gender-related battles. She also remembered having a tough time getting credit as the leader of her three-person group. “There’s this assumption that if you’re male and have a band—it’s your band.... But if you’re female, they’re pickup musicians. I don’t know why that is.”
Ian acknowledged that the music business is a tough road for everyone, but it was extraordinarily tough for a young, emotionally developing girl. “The hurdles weren’t that different from anyone else,” she said, “except when you are an adolescent, it’s so hard just existing, that the added pressure of expecting yourself to be brilliant and to communicate and to become a whole and honest person is a lot.” She remembered rock veteran and notorious substance abuser Janis Joplin sending her home from a party where drugs were being used.
In overcoming her growing pains, Ian only faced more complicated gender issues as an adult. She went under fire by some feminists because she didn’t have any other women in her band. “I got really offended because it’s a three-piece band,” she said, in which she plays guitar, piano, and sings. “Outside of me there’s just two other people, so we have a 33 percent ratio. But it was like I wasn’t in the band. There was this assumption on some weird level that as a female and as a singer I was not a serious musician.” Although she still felt pressure as a female musician in a man’s world, Ian knew things had changed for her over the years. “Well, the dress thing’s not an issue,” she told Hutchinson, laughing. She started receiving credit from musicians she respected. “Chick Corea thinks I’m a wonderful pianist, Chet Atkins thinks I’m a wonderful guitarist. And that beats it to me. How much does the rest matter?”
Even as a young musician, Ian always stayed true to her own material. Except for a few commercial jingles, she only recorded songs she had written. “I did turn down ‘You Light Up My Life,‘ and I would have done a good job on it,” she admitted to A&R Insider, “but it seemed real important at the time, since there were so few women writers, to prove the point.” And prove the point she did, releasing 13 albums—consisting mostly of her songs— from 1967-81. The next 12 years, however, would see only two albums from Ian.
lan’s 12-year hiatus before Breaking Silence, in 1993, was due to a series of major personal and financial problems that kept her from recording, but strengthened her resolve and self-worth as a musician, nonetheless. A former accountant had botched her taxes, her health failed, her marriage ended, and she lost her house. She sold her instruments for money to live on, but she kept writing music. “The knowledge kept hitting me in the face that everybody could take everything away from me,” she told Richard Johnston in Guitar Player in 1997, “but they couldn’t take my talent.”
“It’s good in a lot of ways because I didn’t want a lot of those years on record,” she told Hutchinson. “I didn’t like what I was writing. Ittook me awhile to find my voice again, I think.” The voice she found was stronger, more mature, than the one her fans had last heard. It was with this hard-earned personal resolve that Ian also revealed her homosexuality. With Breaking Silence, she seemed renewed and empowered, taking on the issues that she’d been missing out on for over a decade. The laid back folk sound of lan’s new material belied the strong lyrics on such heady subjects as battered wives, eroticism, the Holocaust, and ‘60s nostalgia.
When new-age and classical record label Windham Hill approached lan’s manager, they were told she didn’t trust major labels. “I certainly didn’t want to be with Windham Hill and make ‘zither’ music,” Ian told Billboard in 1997. But they “wined and dined” her and treated her “like royalty”—a refreshing change for an older female artist, she said. Grace Newman, of Windham Hill marketing, professed the label’s feeling about Ian to Billboard in the same story. “She’s a pioneer in the female musician arena, which started out decades ago and went underground—then exploded with everybody from Shawn Colvin to Jewel to Sarah McLachlan.” The label released Hunger shortly thereafter. Windham Hill also predicted that the respect she’d garnered as a woman over the years would attract long-time fans, as wells as those of the new generation of female musicians.
Ian approached independentfemale rocker Ani Difranco—a sort of Janis Ian for the X Generation—to work on Hunger. Ian had listened to Difranco’s Not a Pretty Girl album and found a kindred spirit in the younger artist. Ian, in fact, was taken aback. “I thought I should find something else to do with my life!” she told Billboard. “She was pushing the envelope in ways I wanted to do.” Difranco was tentative, as she’d only produced her own material. Thinking that she’d feel intrusive in someone else’s recording studio, it took Ian a year to convince her. The result was the track “Searching” and “the nicest producer experience of my life,” Ian said, lan’s new sound, which she termed “technofolk” was strong, or as Johnston called it— “Stark social commentary, vivid imagery and unflinchingly personal meditations.
Selected discography
Janis Ian (Verve), Verve, 1967.
For All the Seasons of Your Mind, Verve, 1967.
The Secret Life of J. Eddie Fink, Verve, 1968.
Who Really Cares, Verve, 1969.
Present Company, One Way, 1971.
Stars, One Way, 1974.
Between the Lines, Columbia, 1975.
Aftertones, Columbia, 1975.
Miracle Row, Columbia, 1977.
Janis Ian (Columbia), Columbia, 1978.
Night Rains, Columbia, 1979.
The Best of Janis Ian, CBS, 1980.
Restless Eyes, Columbia, 1981.
Uncle Wonderful, Grapevine, 1983.
Stars/Night Rains, CBS, 1987.
Breaking Silence, Morgan Creek, 1993.
Live on the Test 1976, BBC Worldwide, 1995.
Society’s Child: the Verve Recordings, Poly dor, 1995.
Hunger, Windham Hill, 1997.
Sources
Books
Romanowski, Patricia and Warren, Holly George, editors, The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll, Fireside/Simon &Shuster, 1995.
Periodicals
Billboard, August 30, 1997.
Guitar Player, December 1997.
Online
http://imusic.interserv.com (September 27,1998).
http://www.songs.com (September 20,1998).
http://www.jacksonville.com (September 20,1998).
http://www.taxi.com (September 20,1998).
http://www.allmusic.com (September 20,1998).
http://www.cdnow.com (September 20,1998).
Additional information was provided by Windham Hill publicity materials, April, 27 1998.
—Brenna Sanchez
Ian, Janis
IAN, JANIS
IAN, JANIS (Fink ; 1951– ), U.S. singer and songwriter. Born in New Jersey, Ian was discovered at the age of 14 by Leord *Bernstein, who played her song "Society's Child" (1967) on his television special, Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution. Although the song was banned in many places because of its interracial theme, it became a nationwide hit. But Ian had trouble repeating her success and was eventually released by her record label, Columbia. She managed to revive her career in Australia, and then triumphantly reentered the American music scene at 26 with her deeply etched portrait of adolescent pain, "At Seventeen" (1975).
Speaking out through her music as she tackles taboo subjects as well as all-too-human ones, Ian is an emotionally wrenching singer and an accomplished self-taught guitarist. She released more than 20 albums, the earliest being Janis Ian (1967); For All the Seasons of Your Mind (1968); and Who Really Cares (1969). Her more recent releases include Breaking Silence (1995); Hunger (1997); God and the fbi (2000); Working without a Net (2003); and Billie's Bones (2004).
In 1975 she won a Grammy for Best Pop Female Vocalist for "At Seventeen." She then earned five other Grammy nominations. In 2001 "Society's Child" was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
Ian has lived in Nashville since 1988. In 2003 she married her long-time life partner, Patricia Snyder.
In addition to the many songs she composed, Ian published a collection of poems titled Who Really Cares: Poemsfrom Childhood and Early Youth (1969). She also co-edited Stars: Original Stories Based on the Songs of Janis Ian (2003), a collection of science-fiction and fantasy tales written by well-known authors of the genre, each inspired by one of her songs.
[Jonathan Licht /
Ruth Beloff (2nd ed.)]