Janis Ian: Society's child at 60
Published by Berkshire Eagle, 4/16/10

Photo: Peter Cunningham
By Jeremy D. Goodwin
PITTSFIELD—Janis Ian is in mentor mode.
“I just hit 60 last week and I'm really at the age where it’s the right thing to start mentoring. I wouldn’t want to have to do it one-on-one because of the time constraints, but I do a lot of workshops and master classers for teachers and doctoral level people and, particularly, performers,” the songwriter, performer and author says in a telephone interview while enjoying a day (mostly) off in Woodstock, Vermont. “If I can talk to those people and pass along things I was fortunate enough to learn from other artists, that's just a well-rounded life I think.”
In a show billed as “Songs of a Generation,” Ian plays a double bill with fellow singer/songwriter Karla Bonoff at the Colonial Theatre on Saturday.
Ian’s musical projects right now center on collaboration, including a series of songwriting partnerships this summer, a possible guest spot on the next Indigo Girls album and a tour next year with Tom Paxton and Natalie Zukerman. At Berklee, she delivered master classes on “all areas the school covers, everything from performing and songwriting to how women dress on stage and what you need to be aware of,” she says. She provided a distinctive perspective to the students, as an artist who’s experienced intense commercial success at different times while also bucking the music business about as long as she’s been in it.
Atlantic Records famously refused to release “Society’s Child,” her tale of an interracial romance written and recorded in 1965, at age 13. The song became a hit after Ian performed it on Leonard Bernstein’s network television show, rising to number three on the Billboard chart. (It song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2001.)
PITTSFIELD—Janis Ian is in mentor mode.
“I just hit 60 last week and I'm really at the age where it’s the right thing to start mentoring. I wouldn’t want to have to do it one-on-one because of the time constraints, but I do a lot of workshops and master classers for teachers and doctoral level people and, particularly, performers,” the songwriter, performer and author says in a telephone interview while enjoying a day (mostly) off in Woodstock, Vermont. “If I can talk to those people and pass along things I was fortunate enough to learn from other artists, that's just a well-rounded life I think.”
In a show billed as “Songs of a Generation,” Ian plays a double bill with fellow singer/songwriter Karla Bonoff at the Colonial Theatre on Saturday.
Ian’s musical projects right now center on collaboration, including a series of songwriting partnerships this summer, a possible guest spot on the next Indigo Girls album and a tour next year with Tom Paxton and Natalie Zukerman. At Berklee, she delivered master classes on “all areas the school covers, everything from performing and songwriting to how women dress on stage and what you need to be aware of,” she says. She provided a distinctive perspective to the students, as an artist who’s experienced intense commercial success at different times while also bucking the music business about as long as she’s been in it.
Atlantic Records famously refused to release “Society’s Child,” her tale of an interracial romance written and recorded in 1965, at age 13. The song became a hit after Ian performed it on Leonard Bernstein’s network television show, rising to number three on the Billboard chart. (It song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2001.)

At Falcon Ridge 2009
Wounded by the intense backlash unleashed at her in the wake of her early success, Ian withdrew from the business while still a teenager, only to re-emerge into public consciousness in 1975 with a number one album and the hit “At Seventeen,” which earned Ian a Grammy for Best Pop Vocal Performance. She stopped recording for most of the 1980’s, but has since released a series of albums as well as her 2008 autobiography and a host of other writing projects. Along the way she’s also come out as a lesbian, emerging as a forceful advocate for gay rights. Her hilarious but slyly heartbreaking tune “Married in London” describes the legal shifting of her marital status when she travels back home from countries that permit gay citizens to marry each other. “We wed in Toronto, the judge said ‘amen.’” she sings, “and then back at home we were single again.”
Ian’s also taken heat from the industry for her embrace of digital file sharing, insisting that it heightens an artist’s profile rather than eroding record sales.
“When the music business starts talking about losing sales because of this and that, it's usually not true. They don’t say it’s because they’re putting out really crappy music, or putting out too much music,” she says. “They made the mistake of thinking the Michael Jackson ‘Thriller’ days were going to last forever, and that's absurd. That can't last forever.”
Looking back at her career, Ian points to one strength she sees as her key contribution to the music world.
“The only thing I think I'm a little bit better at than my contemporaries is, I talk about things that are maybe hard to face, and I give people a safe place to face them,” she says. “Each of us has a strength. Billy Joel writes amazingly commercial songs, Springsteen has all that power, Leonard Cohen is a writer's writer—and I do that.”
Ian’s also taken heat from the industry for her embrace of digital file sharing, insisting that it heightens an artist’s profile rather than eroding record sales.
“When the music business starts talking about losing sales because of this and that, it's usually not true. They don’t say it’s because they’re putting out really crappy music, or putting out too much music,” she says. “They made the mistake of thinking the Michael Jackson ‘Thriller’ days were going to last forever, and that's absurd. That can't last forever.”
Looking back at her career, Ian points to one strength she sees as her key contribution to the music world.
“The only thing I think I'm a little bit better at than my contemporaries is, I talk about things that are maybe hard to face, and I give people a safe place to face them,” she says. “Each of us has a strength. Billy Joel writes amazingly commercial songs, Springsteen has all that power, Leonard Cohen is a writer's writer—and I do that.”