Pension? It just depends on what you mean by pension. For the generation of Janis Ian’s parents, it marked the end of their working lives. ‘For an artist like me, it just means that I no longer have to go to concerts. That I can stay at home and spend more time with my loved ones.”
So yes, Janis Ian, the 70-year-old American singer-songwriter who made her name in one go in 1975 with At Seventeen, a heartbreaking sketch of an unpopular schoolgirl, stops releasing albums. And yes, the patron saint of the misfits is also saying goodbye to her stage existence. She indeed ends part of her working life with her goodbye album The Light at the End of the Line. But all that doesn’t mean that Ian, who broke away from the music industry in 1995 and does everything himself, will stop writing. On the contrary.
Via a Zoom connection, Ian clarifies that she is always preoccupied with secondary matters on tour. ‘I am concerned about the reception of the press. I worry about my clothes and whether I can do my laundry where I’m staying. And that’s fine, because it’s my job as a stage performer to focus on that too, but I never worry about what the next song should be about or the next chapter of the book I’m writing. While writing is where my heart is. And it is impossible to combine performing and writing with each other.’
Not that one is necessarily better than the other, but at some point you have to choose. “Look at Dolly Parton, one of the best songwriters of her generation. At one point he really decided to just be the Dolly Parton brand.’
songwriter-singer
Perhaps we should call Janis Ian songwriter-singer instead of singer-songwriter. If anything has become clear to her in her 55-year career, it is that she is an author first and foremost, just like Bob Dylan is an author. She has also been writing well-received science fiction stories since 2001.
Moreover, the focus of her career as a singer lies in the sixties and seventies. Her debut, the folk song Society’s Child (1966), in which she sang as a precocious 14-year-old about a then-controversial interracial relationship, brought her fame in the United States. At Seventeen gave her a number 1 hit and an international breakthrough. Although Ian regularly releases special material for her fans, her last regular album dates from 2006.
The swan song was coming. The extensive press release for The Light at the End of the Line recalls that Ian had previously decided to quit, but wanted to make her last record when she had a collection of impeccable songs. That apparently took her sixteen years.
Ian: ‘One of the hardest things as an aging artist is keeping your sharpness. How do you make sure you don’t choose the easiest way out? With over 55 years of experience as a professional author, I know how to cover up a bad line or an awkward melody. I definitely didn’t want that for this record. Such an extremely critical basic attitude stops the work.’
Experience
But an aging songwriter also gets smarter, and therefore works more efficiently. Ian: ‘Something you are not always aware of. I once wrote a song with a very famous performer who had never made a song before. After an hour I was tired. That was because that person came up with ideas that I had rejected beforehand. In the back of my mind I had already rejected all kinds of possible solutions before they were spoken. I couldn’t have done that without those years of experience.’
But it remains a struggle. One that takes blood, sweat, tears and fifteen scraps. Small consolation: even the gods of the singer-songwriter Olympus have to fight. ‘I recently spoke to Gretchen Peters (singer-songwriter colleague and close friend, red.) and we were so relieved to find that Leonard Cohen often wrote ten or fifteen versions before he was satisfied.’
Let the comparison with colleagues stop there. Ian has learned that eventually every writer has to compete with themselves. ‘As a starting writer you think everything you write is fantastic. Because hey, you wrote it. Then you go through various phases where you find your own work tolerable, and then dismiss everything as terrible. You find that all along you have measured yourself by your examples. In my case it was Leonard Cohen, Billie Holiday, Rodgers and Hammerstein and The Beatles. You should get to the point where you realize you’ve built up your own repertoire of really, really good songs. numbers like jesse, stars and At Seventeen are, as far as I’m concerned, all top shelf. This is how I measure my new material. Ultimately you can only get better if you become your own touchstone.’
And Ian’s new material easily stands the test. The Light at the End of the Line sounds like a familiar tender anthology of humanity. Even though that humanity now applies not only to 17-year-olds, but also to 70-year-olds. In I’m Still Standing Ian confidently sings about the wrinkles, the folds, the scars life has left on her body:
And I wouldn’t trade a line
Make it smooth and fine
or pretend that time stands still
I plan to rest my soul
You can see it as the final station of the process of becoming aware of that insecure At Seventeen– misfit. Empowerment for girls who have grown up with ‘ravaged faces, lacking in the social graces’.
Ian: ‘It is true that that song has a healing effect. In unexpected ways even. I give songwriting workshops with girls from 19, 20 years old. We then let each other hear what we wrote last. They started to cry when I sang this. So I asked, how does this affect you? To my surprise, they said it was about their own lives. I forgot for a moment how much you can worry about your appearance at that age.’
Socially disadvantaged
In spite of all the wrinkles, something has always remained the same in those 55 years. Janis Ian is still the advocate for the socially disadvantaged. From Society’s Child in 1966 to Perfect Little Girl now, in which she champions the feelings of a trans friend. Or resistant, which speaks out loud and clear to the blues rock rhythm against the consequent discrimination against women.
Put her in high heels, so she can’t run
Carve out between her legs so she can’t come
Get her a dress for easy access
Tell everybody that she’s just like the rest
That each time concluded with the call to resistance: ‘Resist, resist, resist.’
Isn’t it fantastic that there are now pop stars like Billie Eilish and Lizzo who focus on women’s self-esteem and self-determination in their work? “I am the first to admit that a lot has changed in the last twenty years. I can now speak of Patricia as my wife (Ian married her then-girlfriend Patricia Snyder in 2003, red.) while I’ve been in a relationship with her for 33 years.’
And yet sometimes it can feel like we’re back to square one. ‘Shall I tell you something? I was going to do an interview for a major radio station here in America and they let me know they’d rather not have me resistant would sing. They thought it was too suggestive. I thanked you for the honour.’
She’s just saying we’re not there yet. The road to equal treatment of various population groups is a long one. Education is a necessary guide in this regard. Education for men and boys, as far as women are concerned, but also for Ian himself. ‘For example, I don’t know what it feels like to be transgender. Never understood. But a friend – the one I sing about in Perfect Little Girl – shared that at one point he came to the mercilessly hard realization that he would be trapped in a woman’s body forever. It reminded me of the moment as a girl I realized that Peter Pan would never knock on my window and teach me to fly. Foolish as that comparison may be, it felt like a terrible loss. That friend taught me with his words. Making that comparison made me feel empathy. I still don’t understand what it feels like to be trans. But I also don’t know what it feels like to be a man. And I also accept men. Perhaps we should learn to accept more without wanting to understand.’
Janis Ian: The Light at the End of the Line, 2022.