Mary6906
08-05-2008, 10:08 PM
Here's a little blog post about today's Musikfest appearance....
http://blogs.mcall.com/bethlehem/2008/08/potential-janis.html
I'll be honest, my first exposure to Janis Ian came through The Simpsons. It's that episode where Homer goes on that hallucinigenic journey to find his soulmate. At one point, Ian's "Seventeen" plays on the soundtrack. "That's a rather lovely song," I remember thinking at the time. So it was nice to be able to see the song performed live at Lyrikplatz (http://www.musikfest.org/) earlier today, by its original performer. Ian was slated to perform at one of the larger stages, but also did a surprise show for a small group of people. She only played about five songs, and spent a lot of time talking to the audience. Normally, this would get old pretty quickly, but Ian's a good, witty story-teller. She touched on:
And it was nice to hear it again, live, sung by Ian herself at
Her early years: "I wanted to be famous, and at that time that was considered a very peculiar ambition." Ian wrote her first song at 12, and sold it to a magazine. At 13, she played a show in Greenwich Village with some of folk's biggest names.
Her controversial first single, "Society's Child," which is about an interracial romance. "Nobody would touch it," she said. It wasn't until composer Leonard Bernstein played on a TV special that it became popular. Even then, she received death threats.
Writing her autobiography (http://www.janisian.com/forum/../autobio.html). Ian told the audience that her taste in books is pretty mainstream: John Grisham, Jackie Collins, Olivia Goldsmith. When she reads a memoir, she said, all she cares about is "who you slept with, when you slept with them and why did you stop sleeping with them." So when it came time to write her own book, she had trouble. Her partner of 19 years, asked her why she was having trouble. "I've never slept with anybody interesting," Ian recalled saying, and then paused for a moment. "That was a big mistake."
http://blogs.mcall.com/bethlehem/2008/08/potential-janis.html
I'll be honest, my first exposure to Janis Ian came through The Simpsons. It's that episode where Homer goes on that hallucinigenic journey to find his soulmate. At one point, Ian's "Seventeen" plays on the soundtrack. "That's a rather lovely song," I remember thinking at the time. So it was nice to be able to see the song performed live at Lyrikplatz (http://www.musikfest.org/) earlier today, by its original performer. Ian was slated to perform at one of the larger stages, but also did a surprise show for a small group of people. She only played about five songs, and spent a lot of time talking to the audience. Normally, this would get old pretty quickly, but Ian's a good, witty story-teller. She touched on:
And it was nice to hear it again, live, sung by Ian herself at
Her early years: "I wanted to be famous, and at that time that was considered a very peculiar ambition." Ian wrote her first song at 12, and sold it to a magazine. At 13, she played a show in Greenwich Village with some of folk's biggest names.
Her controversial first single, "Society's Child," which is about an interracial romance. "Nobody would touch it," she said. It wasn't until composer Leonard Bernstein played on a TV special that it became popular. Even then, she received death threats.
Writing her autobiography (http://www.janisian.com/forum/../autobio.html). Ian told the audience that her taste in books is pretty mainstream: John Grisham, Jackie Collins, Olivia Goldsmith. When she reads a memoir, she said, all she cares about is "who you slept with, when you slept with them and why did you stop sleeping with them." So when it came time to write her own book, she had trouble. Her partner of 19 years, asked her why she was having trouble. "I've never slept with anybody interesting," Ian recalled saying, and then paused for a moment. "That was a big mistake."