photo by Lloyd Baggs

By Paul Freeman [1995 Interview]

It didn't take her long to make an impact on the world.

Janis Ian was only 14 when she recorded the poignant, socially relevant "Society's Child" in 1965. Instantly impressed, Leonard Bernstein featured Ian performing her song on a CBS special he was hosting -- "Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution." In 1967, her record finally became a chart hit.

Ian, who had grown up listening to such artists as Odetta and Joan Baez, had conceived the song at age 12 and wrote it when she was 13. Because it movingly described an interracial romance, the record sparked tremendous controversy. She received hate mail from racists. An Atlanta radio station that played the song was burned down.

Over the next years, people began to perceive her as a one-hit wonder. Did Ian have more to offer? She certainly did. Her 1975 song "At Seventeen" changed her life... and the lives of many who heard it. Anyone outsider who had experienced bullying or marginalization could relate. She performed the song on the very first episode of "Saturday Night Live." It was the second single from her album "Between the Lines" and it earned her a Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.

She has continued to write great folk-pop songs, making compelling albums, ever since then. But the record industry proved to be less dazzled by her brilliance and more baffled as to how market her. Ian has thrived, however, as an independent artist. Fans remain enthralled by her intelligent, insightful and always burningly truthful compositions, as well as her riveting vocals.

She moved to Nashville in 1988. We spoke to Ian just after the release of 1995's "Revenge." It followed another excellent album, 1993's Grammy-nominated "Breaking Silence." That was released the same year that Ian came out as a lesbian.

Ian's songs have been recorded by such diverse artists as Roberta Flack, Cher, Nina Simone, Celine Dion, Dolly Parton, Glen Campbell, Amy Grant, Shirley Bassey and John Mellencamp. An uncompromising artist, she lives her life openly and honestly. An important singer-songwriter while in her teens, she continues to tour at age 67, the creative force still strong within her.

POP CULTURE CLASSICS:
I love the new album. Were you looking for a harder edge to it, going in? Or was it just the way it came out naturally?

JANIS IAN:
You know, I think it was a combination... when I listened to "Breaking Silence," like a year later, I missed the air that you get with a lot of musicians live in a room. It's sort of the opposite of the law of diminishing returns. The more musicians you get, the more air you get sometimes.

So when I sat down with John Jennings [her co-producer and noted guitarist, who passed in 2015], and we got clear that we really wanted to work together, he asked what my goal was for this record. And I told him that I really wanted, not harder, but a more musical record, less sophisticated, but more musical, if that makes sense. And he said, "Well, what's your dream band?" And I actually named six out of the seven people on that record. The only one we couldn't get was Eric Clapton [laughs] and John said, "Well, he probably didn't have our number."

And then the goal was really to go in and make a record that wouldn't be painful. I wanted to make a record like my very first album or like "Between the Lines" and "Stars," where we had everybody in the room and we didn't take three days a song or two days a song or whatever. And that was explained to each of the musicians, as we called and invited them to play on it. And boy, it was just one of those charmed projects that you dream of and that so rarely happens with records, where we called everyone, everybody had that time or made that time available. We brought them in two days early, they all came in with their wives. I kept telling John we were going to lose our shirts.

We came in under budget instead. We got two songs done the first two days, and three songs for the next three. So we cut the whole album in a week. And then when we started doing the vocals, about a third to half of them, we ended up using the scratch vocals, because they were better. And ditto on my guitar parts. And that took maybe another week. And then we mixed. So top to bottom, including mastering, we were four weeks down.

PCC:
So with most of the albums in recent years, it had been more of a painful and painstaking process?

IAN:
Well, my first record, my very, very first, was "Society's Child." And that album was recorded very quickly. But that was the 60s. And then "Between The Lines" took three months, because we were doing it on and off, touring. But generally, I've taken eight weeks, sometimes 10 to do a record. I've never done one of those six months-to-a-year. I always thought that would be horrible.

It had been a long time since I'd just sat with a bunch of musicians where we sat down, ready for the war and did the first take and all looked at each and I think it was [drummer Steve] Gadd who said, "Boy, this sounds like a band!" Everybody suddenly realized that it was that lucky combination. You know, you think it's going to work, but you don't know until you start playing. It really worked. It made it so all we had to worry about was playing. We didn't have to worry about explaining or discussing or tearing things apart or arguing. We could just play.

PCC:
A very positive environment.

IAN:
It was... which is so rare.

PCC:
The title, does that reflect your thinking about what you had to endure to get to where you are?

IAN:
I think that was a big part of it. The title came out of a conversation with Gadd, where we were talking about being our age, which is the 40s, in the music industry, and how wonderful it was that we were both respected and yet that didn't translate into dollars. I mean, I had people calling me from all over the country, asking whether Gadd was coming and could they come watch him drum. It was just amazing to me. And yet he was talking about the difficulties getting funding for his own project. Luckily, "Breaking Silence" did well enough that we had more funding than we needed, this album. But we still couldn't get a major.

PCC:
You did want that? You did seek that?

IAN:
Oh, yeah. Well, you know we started out seeking it. We got an immediate -- "Ah, maybe. We don't know. Send us some demos." And it was so unenthusiastic that I think Simon [Renshaw], my manager decided -- and I wholeheartedly agreed -- that it was would be slitting my own throat, because we'd have to be pushing it. We'd basically be going in on our knees. Whereas, with Beacon [Records], they were thrilled.

PCC:
As far as the lack of enthusiasm, I think I read that one thing that was brought up was actually the age issue.

IAN:
Uh-huh, well, the age issue's a major factor for them. Major. In a way, I understand it. If they're looking at an 18-year-old, it's going to be a lot more malleable. They're going to have a lot more control. The jaundiced part of me says it's a business run by guys in their 50s and 60s who like young girls. I mean, that's an ugly truth, too. But think there is truth to it.

Also, I'm 44, but most of my contemporaries from the 60s are 54 to 60. So there's that perception, too. I've had a long career. It's weird that that perception works against you. But Steve pointed out that of all the presidents who had turned me down in my career, and all the record companies that had passed, he said, "How many of those are still working?" And when we looked at it, not one of them still had a job. And he said, "So living well is the best revenge." And that's really where the title came up.

PCC:
It has been quite an endurance contest, at times, I guess. {Ian had to battle through a myriad of obstacles, including illnesses and a devastating IRS embroilment.]

IAN:
You know, it looks so f-cking dramatic on paper. I mean, I read the bio and I thought, "My God! No one could have lived this life!" And thought, "Isn't this weird?" And it's very weird to me, because, from my point of view, I mean, it's a cliche, but I'm real lucky that I've basically never had to do anything but my own work. And I consider that I've been real lucky. I know a lot of people who are waitresses or who do jobs to support their families and look forward to retiring. And I look forward to my next gig or making an album. So I'm lucky. All the other stuff becomes irrelevant.

PCC:
How old were you when that first hit broke? 15?

IAN:
Fifteen when it broke.

PCC:
Wasn't it overwhelming at the time?

IAN:
Oh, sure. I mean, a hit is overwhelming any time, but certainly at that age. And all the more overwhelming, because, at that age, you have no power. And you have no sense of control. So it's the worst possible scenario. You've got an adolescent who's got a lot of people around them whose best interest it is to say yes. It's horrible.

PCC:
And all the controversy surrounding the song, that must have made things even more difficult.

IAN:
Yeah, that was really scary. I think that really took me a long time to even acknowledge that it had scared me that badly, because I suddenly realized, when I moved to the South, all of a sudden, I was having these thoughts about "Society's Child" that I hadn't had in 20 years. And I realized it was because of the mail we used to get from the South around that record. And I realized that I had never toured the South. I had never played anywhere south of Nashville, which I played once. Or south of North Carolina. Because everybody felt that it was dangerous to me.

PCC:
The mail was threatening?

IAN:
Yeah, the mail was real threatening. There were pictures of me with my head cut off -- "Here's what we'll do to you." And stories of people having stations burned and stuff. You never know if those stories are true, but if you hear enough of them, on some level, it was real scary to me. And then I think, when Martin Luther King got shot, it was like everyone's worst fears realized, including mine. It's like, if they'll do this to King, then they would certainly do it to some singer with a big mouth.

PCC:
Looking back, does it seem like things have really changed dramatically?

IAN:
Yeah, I think it's an enormous change. You've got a lot more crazies with a lot more access to guns now. It's a lot easier to get a gun. It seems like it's easier every month. And whether it's TV or something in the water or what reason it is, but people are losing their grip. But living in the South now -- and Nashville is very definitely in the South -- I see the change just since I used to go there in the early 70s.

Gosh, two gay people can walk down the street holding hands and they're not automatically run over. A black and white couple can sit down in a restaurant and people don't spit in their food. I mean, I think there's a major change all over this country, in terms of stuff like that, that you can lose sight of really easily, because you want the changes to come more quickly and be more final. But it's changed a lot. I mean, if I'd come out, when "Seventeen" was coming out, I'd have never gotten played on the radio.

PCC:
But even now is there no fear of that having a negative impact in certain circles?

IAN:
Oh, sure. And there has been a negative impact in some circles. But it's by and large become unacceptable to discriminate. I was watching a film the other day and I suddenly realized that it wasn't that long ago that women couldn't vote. It's not that far away. It's not that far away that people took slaves for granted and assumed that, if you won the war, you got to take people as slaves. It's not that far away historically. So I think we've made tremendous strides, on all fronts, as human beings.

PCC:
But what you run into now, is it beneath the surface? Or is it overt?

IAN:
I think that's a real fair question. And I still think that there's less of it, because it's become less socially acceptable, because people see in the media, black people, white people, yellow people. It's not the alien. You know, it's really hard to hate somebody you know.

PCC:
Back to the early days, looking on the brighter side of things, it must have been quite an experience to be spending time with people like Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix.

IAN:
You know, you don't know people are going to be legendary. And then you wake up one day and sit there going, "Wow!" [Laughs] It was a good time, I think, just because there was that camaraderie. I was talking about it with another singer the other day. We had lunch together and we were saying that you never get to really interact with other performers anymore. It used to be such a small circuit.

Remember, in the 60s, there wasn't a music magazine. There was Creem. And there were the teen magazines. But there wasn't a Crawdaddy evolving into something like Rolling Stone. There was Sing Out! [dedicated to preserving and promoting traditional and contemporary folk music] and Broadside [influential, mimeographed folk revival publication]. You didn't have this culture of music and music industry the way you do now. And it was a very small group of people. So everybody ran into everybody at airports. Everybody knew everybody, because we all played the same gigs.

I mean, now when I say to people "Yeah, I worked with Junior Wells at Winterland. I was opening for him and Buddy Guy," people go, "Wow!" But then it was a circuit that everybody did. And it was a great time in that sense, because you could learn from people. Now I can brag and say I played organ with Jimi Hendrix. Well, so did eight million other people.

PCC:
Do you think it's mainly because the industry has grown so huge that that atmosphere has become impossible?

IAN:
I think that's a lot of it, because, if you go somewhere like Australia, where it's a much smaller industry, it's very much more like that -- the artists all know each other; everybody's got to live together. Country music, until a few years ago, was much more like that. When I first moved to Nashville, I saw Chet Atkins sitting in the pancake house and people were just, "Hey, Chet, how you doin'?" Everybody knew everybody.

PCC:
Was that one of the attractions, why you moved there?

IAN:
That was the main attraction for me, yeah. Nashville is the closest to that sense of community that I'm aware of, as a writer... or even as a performer. Nashville is one of the few places left where you run into everybody all the time. And it's growing way fast. It's starting to be less and less like that. But it's still a little island in the middle of all of this.

PCC:
But there's still the perception of Tennessee and that whole area being a bastion of the religious right. Despite that, did you sense or know that there would be acceptance there?

IAN:
I didn't know. I trusted, on.... I don't want to use the word "faith," because it's got such religious connotations... I trusted on my instinct, based on what I saw when I started really working there a lot in the mid-80s. I trusted that people would judge me on my writing and not on my lifestyle, or whatever you'd call it. And by and large, that's been true.

You know, the religious right -- and I know a lot of those people, I know a lot of the gospel people, as well as the Christian music people, for want of better words -- they're having to come to terms with the fact that their sons and daughters are gay and that their husbands have been out sleeping with guys in the park and bringing home who knows what. There's a lot of crashing going on in that area.

I think that's one of the things we're seeing politically right now, people running their mouths and it's falling in on itself. And I think you see it, in a way, more clearly from Nashville, just because you're interacting with them daily. There's people in Nashville who would not leave me in their homes with their kids, I'm sure. But you know, there's people everywhere who wouldn't leave a Jew in their home with kids either. Or a black person. That's the sad truth of it.

PCC:
So no more so in Nashville than anywhere else.

IAN:
I don't think so. You know, look at Bensonhurst in New York [the scene of much racial tension in the 80s]. You go to Nashville and it's different, but it's the same. So no, I don't think so.

PCC:
Were you already in your current relationship [with Patricia Snyder, whom she married in 2003] before you moved to Nashville?

IAN:
Uh-uh. No, we met in Nashville.

PCC:
Your significant other, is she involved in the music world?

IAN:
No [laughs] No, I"m smarter than that. No, when we met, Pat was at Vanderbilt University, working as an archivist and her daughter had just left home to go to college. Pat was on her way to becoming a paralegal. And then when she finished her training and got certified, two friends of ours who were lawyers really actively recruited her and encouraged her, so she's entering law school in August. She wants to be in criminal prosecution [Snyder eventually became a criminal defense lawyer]. She wants to be as far away from the music business as possible. Of course, the way the music business is going, that may be a wide open field for her [laughs].

PCC:
Is it important for you to not become too insulated within the music business?

IAN:
Yeah, it's another of the attractions of Nashville. L.A. is a very scary place, if your goal in life is to be famous and to play Madison Square Garden. You wake up the week that your record comes out... I mean, we went to some restaurant last night that I had never been to and the maitre d' came out and said, "Good evening, Ms. Ian." And that's L.A. to me. L.A. is a place where, if your name's in Billboard that week, all of a sudden, everybody knows you. I'm not real fond of that. It makes me nervous. And I don't think it's good for a writer.

PCC:
Why do you say that?

IAN:
Because, for me, a writer's job is to stay in touch, to communicate, to feel the zeitgeist. And what I seem to do well, that other people sometimes don't do as well, is to talk about things that make people uncomfortable, but that I know are out there. That seems to be my gift. I don't know how else to describe it. And it's very difficult to see clearly, when you're surrounded by people who are telling you how much they love your whatever. And when you're surrounded by people in your own industry, it just becomes another form of ghettoization.

If there's anything Nashville did for me -- and going down there flat broke, without a record deal, without a publishing deal, with nothing but the songs I was writing, really, to prove myself -- it was to remind me that there's an entire world out there of people for whom a $50 concert ticket is a stretch, who don't take going out to eat for granted, who worry about how much their gasoline costs. It's easy to forget that, if you're an artist in L.A.

PCC:
As far as writing things that might make some people uncomfortable, is that something that you take on almost as a mission?

IAN:
No, no. That's too weird. No.

PCC:
You just say what you have to say?

IAN:
Yeah, I caught myself, after I wrote "Tattoo," which is a song about a Holocaust survivor, thinking, "How am I going to top this? What am I going to write about next?" Because I saw the impact it was having. But that's a very dangerous road, because then you're into National Enquirer songwriting, you know? [Chuckles] It's the Oprah Winfrey show on songwriting.

I think Paul Simon's right. He says songs are in the air and if you're lucky, you grab one that day. And your talent kind of leads. And the song leads. I wouldn't want it to sound mystical... but it is mystical.

PCC:
At what point was it that you stepped away from the business altogether?

IAN:
I asked CBS to release me from my contract in '81. And I had another year's worth of commitments to get done. So really it was '82, when I went to South Africa, and that was the last tour I had to do.

PCC:
And then you studied acting for a while?

IAN:
Yeah, I worked with Stella Adler, starting in early '83.

PCC:
What made you step away from the music?

IAN:
The overriding thing was fatigue. I just heard it in my writing. I heard it in my singing. And I've always been real protective of my writing. I'd just been on the road for 11 years.

PCC:
You just needed to be reenergized?

IAN:
I wanted to educate people that it's really in their best interest that I not get so tired that I can't work. It's the performing monkey syndrome. If you keep winding that monkey up, the monkey's going to die on you. But on the other hand, as the music industry gets bigger, gets more global... it used to be you could spend four months touring the U.S. and you could cover your territory. But now you add into that Europe and Australia and Japan -- boom, there goes 10 months. So I don't how it's going to work at this point. But I have learned to take vacations. Vacations where there's no telephone. You learn real quick that, if there is a phone, you use it.

PCC:
The acting studies, was that for self-exploration or were you considering that as another career path?

IAN:
No, no. I was horrible. I would never inflict myself on people like that. No, I studied with Stella Adler as much -- and more -- for script interpretation than acting. And she was really the first female role model I ever had, as an artist. And at the same time, I was studying ballet, which I was god-awful in. But that was also to just learn something that wasn't music, that wasn't what I did. And be in some forum where everybody didn't expect me to be brilliant.

I think it goes back to having your first record be a hit record and being only 14 when you make it -- you set up an assumption that you will be brilliant. And if you're not brilliant, people are really disappointed. But I knew I couldn't be brilliant in ballet, because I was 32 years old starting to study. And ditto acting -- I knew I wasn't going to be good at acting. So it took all the heat off and let me just learn something with no pressure. It was I think what everybody goes through in high school, but I didn't go to high school.

PCC:
What was it about Stella Adler that made her such a role model for you?

IAN:
Stella took no prisoners. Stella is legendary. Stella was bigger than life. How many people do you get to meet in a lifetime that are bigger that life? It's pretty rare. And she gave me a vocabulary for how I felt about being an artist. She really interpreted a lot of the feelings that I had had. I mean, I was 32 and Stella was 83 or 82. That's a big gap. And she had words for things that I had always felt. She did for me what people tell me I did for them with "Seventeen." She gave me a voice. And she left me with a sense of my own place, that I'd never had before.

Things like, road managers used to get crazy, because I'd always insist on walking around the stage whether I needed a soundcheck or not. And all of a sudden, Stella was saying, "As an actor, it's your job to know your place, because that's your prop." And I had a word for what I did by instinct.

She gave me a sense of lineage, a sense of history as a writer that I'd never felt. She'd talk about the first cavemen and somebody coming back from a hunt and exaggerating a story. And that was what the lineage went back to. And suddenly I was part of not just a 5,000-year-old tradition as a Jew, but a tradition that went back to the dawn of human beings.

She gave me a sense that I was right to feel a sense of responsibility to my talent, that that wasn't just stupid. She just really reinforced a lot of the things that I felt that hadn't worked out. And she made me work my butt off. And that was great for me. I love working. So that was great, to be challenged.

PCC:
So your coming out, was some part of the motivation the idea that you could serve as a role model?

IAN:
Well, the role model thing, Urvashi Vaid was head of NGLTF [National Gay and Lesbian Task Force] and it was about 1988 when I met her and we were talking and I said I was thinking of recording and I didn't want to be outed. I didn't want anyone thinking that I was ashamed of what I was. I didn't want any perception of that. Or misperception. Urvashi really urged me to wait until I had an album out for release. And she started quoting statistics about teenage suicide.

And she said to me, "Who was your gay role model?" And I said "Nobody." I had had "Well of Loneliness" [the 1928 lesbian novel, whose female protagonist grew up longing to be a boy] and I didn't want to be a guy. So I had figured that I wasn't like that. I had no role model. So she said, "You talk about Stella Adler and what she meant to you because finally, at 32, you had a role model. What do you think it's like for a 12-year-old gay kid out there now? Do you think it's any different from what it was for you?"

And I thought about it and that made a lot of sense to me. And she pointed out that, as the writer of "At Seventeen," I had a certain amount of trust and authority built up. And she said, "Then when you come out, you're saying to those people, this is not a gay song. This is universal. Gay people are universal. We're not just ghettoized. Going back to the 'We are your sons. We are your daughters,' blah-blah-blah. That's what you're trying to reinforce."

For me, the coming out thing I did so loudly was much more of a personal issue of not wanting to be mistaken for somebody who was embarrassed or ashamed. But from Urvashi's point of view, it was very important in terms of kids. And I could see that.

PCC:
And the responses must be gratifying.

IAN:
The response is real gratifying. Sure. You're doing something that's good. I was raised to think that everybody does good and then the world's a better place 10 years later. That's a real theme in my family.

PCC:
Were your parents very involved in political causes?

IAN:
Yeah, they were real political. Both my folks come from very political families. And, if anything, I'm kind of the idiot savant of the family, because politics never interested me as much as sociology. But my folks were always peace-marching and singing protest songs. And that's why I really wanted to dedicate this album to them in part. And the only thing I could think of was that they raised me to be a Maccabee [Jewish rebel warriors in 167 BCE]. I mean that really was reinforced -- you do right and right gets done to you.

PCC:
So you think of yourself as a warrior in some sense?

IAN:
Oh, I think everybody's a warrior these days.I don't know. I hadn't thought about that. It's an attractive image until you start thinking about bleeding to death [laughs].

PCC:
You were married to a man at one point? [to Portuguese filmmaker Tino Sargo. In her 2008 autobiography, "Society's Child," Ian details physical and emotional abuse she suffered in that relationship]

IAN:
Uh-huh, from '78 to '83. I just fell in love with him and we got married. It was that simple.

PCC:
So did you go through periods of confusion...?

IAN:
No, I was never confused about it. I knew I was gay when I was about nine. For some reason, I bypassed all that, I think probably because my parents always had gay friends and it was never talked about in the house as something that was wrong.

PCC:
But generally, in terms of life direction, were you ever confused about who you wanted to be? Or did you always know?

IAN:
I never wanted to be anything but a musician.

PCC:
And the songwriting -- do you get the same thing out of it now as you did in the beginning?

IAN:
I get more. I do it better.

For the latest on this artist, visit www.janisian.com.