SFBill
04-02-2006, 08:37 AM
Hello all,
I looked to see if this had been posted and couldnt find it.
apologies if it is a repeat
Its from the TheChronicleHerald.ca out of Nova Scotia
http://thechronicleherald.ca/Entertainment/493883.html
In troubled times, Ian sings music with message
Thirty years after At Seventeen, singer-songwriter returns to acoustic form with Folk Is The New Black
By LESLIE GRAY STREETER Cox News Service
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — "I learned the truth at seventeen, that love was meant for beauty queens, and high school girls with clear-skinned smiles, who married young and then retired."
There is no end to the miseries, both real and imagined, of being a misunderstood teenage girl, and there is arguably no lyrical testament of that misery more tearfully true than Janis Ian’s frank and nostalgic At Seventeen, recorded in 1975, when Ian was an older and wiser 24.
More than 30 years after its release, the ballad of "those of us with average faces, lacking in the social graces" still strikes a familiar, heartbreaking chord with Ian’s fans, now older and wiser as well.
"I still do it at every show. It’s universal. That’s what you try to do — to hit a universal truth about race and culture," says Ian, 55.
Ian’s recent release, the wry Folk Is The New Black, is a self-dictated return to the acoustic form of her earlier work, including her groundbreaking and controversial 1965 single Society’s Child, released when she was just 15 years old.
"I think that I had pretty much explored electronics (in music) as much as I wanted to," says Ian, enjoying a rare almost-day off in Annapolis, Md. — meaning she didn’t have a show, but did have to do a few short interviews.
"I started scaling down when it came to this one. On this tour, it’s just me and a guitar. I’m gonna put on a pair of blue jeans and a shirt and not worry too much," she continues. "What I was looking at was a folk album, and going back to basics."
Folk goes back not only to that form’s acoustic, stripped-down, communally sung roots but to its place as a tool for social commentary, much like the plaintive story of a forbidden interracial relationship in Society’s Child.
The witty title track is a gentle folkie call to linking arms, and features the wickedly droll line, "Folk, it’s the new black, cheaper than crack, and you don’t have to cook."
Elsewhere on the album, in The Great Divide, Ian speaks to folk’s tendency "to rear its head in times of trouble," as in the current war, she says.
"I wrote it out of frustration. We’re not feeling particularly safe or taken care of as a society. I’m addressing things that politicians or even churches neglect to address," Ian explains. "When I started writing the album, I realized I was writing political songs. I usually think that hammering people doesn’t work too well, but then I decided not to worry about it.
"People need something to hang onto. (Musicians) tell the truth as they see it. They’re definitely not getting that from anywhere else. Look at We Shall Overcome, or Society’s Child. Those songs really changed the way that people thought," she says. "Anybody can make music. You don’t need training. You don’t need anything but being a human being."
Ian’s humanity was just as honest, but fresh with the rawness of youth, when Society’s Child debuted. She says that were she to release that album as a 15-year-old in 2006, "I think it would all be very different, because now the whole idea of a 15-year-old artist is not that interesting a thing, although so many are mostly manufactured now, which is a whole different thing. I think the novelty now would be, ‘A 14-year-old writing songs, how interesting.’?"
Unlike the self-aware, media-savvy young artists of today like Avril Lavigne who write some of their own material, Ian says she had "no idea" about how she was being marketed — "It didn’t cross my mind. That’s why I have a co-manager, because I’m no good at thinking about those things," she says. "When the record came out, I would see Little Janis Ian next to Little Stevie Wonder, and I figured he hated it as much as I did, having that press tag."
Forty years later, Ian finds herself in the same business, in similarly turbulent times, but at a different place. No longer the teenager who emancipated herself from her parents, the older Ian is happily wed to Patricia Snyder, her long-time partner, writing science fiction novels, and working on her autobiography. So what advice would she give her younger self, now that she knows more?
"Buy IBM stock," Ian says, laughing. "No, I would tell myself to trust my instincts. When I was younger, it was harder. And I would tell her also about being out of your depth, to be in your depth and know what you’re doing. Not everyone that you assume knows something, does. Often, that’s not the case."
What she does know now is that things do get better from when you’re 17, or at 24, or even 44, and that the truths you learn as you get older deepen in ways you can’t imagine.
"I think the song says it, that it does get better," Ian says. "It talks about the ‘ugly-duckling girls like me.’ But the implication is that you turn into a swan eventually."
I looked to see if this had been posted and couldnt find it.
apologies if it is a repeat
Its from the TheChronicleHerald.ca out of Nova Scotia
http://thechronicleherald.ca/Entertainment/493883.html
In troubled times, Ian sings music with message
Thirty years after At Seventeen, singer-songwriter returns to acoustic form with Folk Is The New Black
By LESLIE GRAY STREETER Cox News Service
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — "I learned the truth at seventeen, that love was meant for beauty queens, and high school girls with clear-skinned smiles, who married young and then retired."
There is no end to the miseries, both real and imagined, of being a misunderstood teenage girl, and there is arguably no lyrical testament of that misery more tearfully true than Janis Ian’s frank and nostalgic At Seventeen, recorded in 1975, when Ian was an older and wiser 24.
More than 30 years after its release, the ballad of "those of us with average faces, lacking in the social graces" still strikes a familiar, heartbreaking chord with Ian’s fans, now older and wiser as well.
"I still do it at every show. It’s universal. That’s what you try to do — to hit a universal truth about race and culture," says Ian, 55.
Ian’s recent release, the wry Folk Is The New Black, is a self-dictated return to the acoustic form of her earlier work, including her groundbreaking and controversial 1965 single Society’s Child, released when she was just 15 years old.
"I think that I had pretty much explored electronics (in music) as much as I wanted to," says Ian, enjoying a rare almost-day off in Annapolis, Md. — meaning she didn’t have a show, but did have to do a few short interviews.
"I started scaling down when it came to this one. On this tour, it’s just me and a guitar. I’m gonna put on a pair of blue jeans and a shirt and not worry too much," she continues. "What I was looking at was a folk album, and going back to basics."
Folk goes back not only to that form’s acoustic, stripped-down, communally sung roots but to its place as a tool for social commentary, much like the plaintive story of a forbidden interracial relationship in Society’s Child.
The witty title track is a gentle folkie call to linking arms, and features the wickedly droll line, "Folk, it’s the new black, cheaper than crack, and you don’t have to cook."
Elsewhere on the album, in The Great Divide, Ian speaks to folk’s tendency "to rear its head in times of trouble," as in the current war, she says.
"I wrote it out of frustration. We’re not feeling particularly safe or taken care of as a society. I’m addressing things that politicians or even churches neglect to address," Ian explains. "When I started writing the album, I realized I was writing political songs. I usually think that hammering people doesn’t work too well, but then I decided not to worry about it.
"People need something to hang onto. (Musicians) tell the truth as they see it. They’re definitely not getting that from anywhere else. Look at We Shall Overcome, or Society’s Child. Those songs really changed the way that people thought," she says. "Anybody can make music. You don’t need training. You don’t need anything but being a human being."
Ian’s humanity was just as honest, but fresh with the rawness of youth, when Society’s Child debuted. She says that were she to release that album as a 15-year-old in 2006, "I think it would all be very different, because now the whole idea of a 15-year-old artist is not that interesting a thing, although so many are mostly manufactured now, which is a whole different thing. I think the novelty now would be, ‘A 14-year-old writing songs, how interesting.’?"
Unlike the self-aware, media-savvy young artists of today like Avril Lavigne who write some of their own material, Ian says she had "no idea" about how she was being marketed — "It didn’t cross my mind. That’s why I have a co-manager, because I’m no good at thinking about those things," she says. "When the record came out, I would see Little Janis Ian next to Little Stevie Wonder, and I figured he hated it as much as I did, having that press tag."
Forty years later, Ian finds herself in the same business, in similarly turbulent times, but at a different place. No longer the teenager who emancipated herself from her parents, the older Ian is happily wed to Patricia Snyder, her long-time partner, writing science fiction novels, and working on her autobiography. So what advice would she give her younger self, now that she knows more?
"Buy IBM stock," Ian says, laughing. "No, I would tell myself to trust my instincts. When I was younger, it was harder. And I would tell her also about being out of your depth, to be in your depth and know what you’re doing. Not everyone that you assume knows something, does. Often, that’s not the case."
What she does know now is that things do get better from when you’re 17, or at 24, or even 44, and that the truths you learn as you get older deepen in ways you can’t imagine.
"I think the song says it, that it does get better," Ian says. "It talks about the ‘ugly-duckling girls like me.’ But the implication is that you turn into a swan eventually."