Janis Ian

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Janis Ian

Janis Ian (born April 7, 1951 in New York ) is an American singer and songwriter .

life and work

Janis Ian was born Janis Eddy Fink on April 7, 1951 in New York, but grew up in New Jersey before the family returned to New York in 1965 after numerous moves.

Janis Ian describes her childhood and early youth as a beautiful, but also very lonely time because of the life on the remote farm. She began to speak unusually early, at seven months, and when she was two she asked her father to teach her to play the piano . In general, according to Ian, she was encouraged in every way by her parents to ask, to learn to be curious. Her father took a part-time job as a publishing representative to get his daughter an encyclopedia .

Janis Ian - Society's Child

Janis began playing her father's guitar at the age of ten, and wrote her first song two years later, which became the attention of music producer George Morton . On August 3, 1966, he recorded a very controversial piece with her about an interracial love that is not tolerated by parents and the community. It was Society's Child (Baby I've Been Thinking) / Younger Generation Blues (B-side recorded December 21, 1966). Ian wanted to give her own composition the title Baby I've Been Thinking , but Morton decided on Society's Child . For Morton it was the same lyrical basis as with the girl groups he had recorded so far , because a girl falls in love - and the parents are against it. After Atlantic Records and several other labels declined to release, Verve Records released the song three times between 1966 and 1967.

Janis Ian - LP Janis Ian

It was only when Leonard Bernstein introduced him on his television program “Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution” on April 26, 1967, that there was a response. After its release in May 1967, the single only reached 14th place in the pop charts, but sold 600,000 copies despite little airplay . Few radio stations in the USA in the 1960s dared to play the explosive piece, which is about a love between a white and a black teenager. The debut LP was called Janis Ian and was released in January 1967. The producer was Morton, who found a familiar staff and studio environment, namely Brooks Arthur as sound engineer , Artie Butler arranged and Mira Sound recorded. The LP, created on December 21, 1966, sold 350,000 copies. Also at Mira Sound Ian's second LP was released on October 20, 1967 and October 26, 1967 … For All the Seasons of Your Mind . The third LP The Secret Life of J. Eddy Fink (June 12, 1968) was also created under his supervision, mixed in the A&R Recording Studios by Phil Ramone .

The songwriter received death and bomb threats for decades because of Society's Child (Baby I've Been Thinking) , racists disrupted her US concerts with shouts like "Nigger lover" and tours in the States without bodyguards were unthinkable. That finally changed in the 1990s when Ian - u. a. via the forum on their website - increasingly looking for personal contact with their fans.

After the painful experience with Society's Child and doubting whether she was the good songwriter she wanted to be, Janis retired from the music business at the age of seventeen. At the age of 21 she wrote two songs with Jesse and Stars , which convinced her of her talent and which later u. a. were covered by Roberta Flack , Joan Baez and Cher .

In 1974 Janis Ian got a record deal with a major label for the first time at CBS. In quick succession she released at least one album each year until 1980, ten albums in total. In 1976 she received two Grammy Awards .

Years followed in which Janis gave between 250 and 300 concerts a year in the USA, England, South Africa, Australia, the Netherlands and Japan. 1983 followed another withdrawal from the music business. Janis had married in the meantime and wanted to start a family, but could not have children. She used the nine following years to write new songs and attended Stella Adler's drama school in New York, but did not record any new albums. During this time she lived on the income from her records and on the fact that other interpreters were successful with her songs, until 1986 her accountant disappeared without a trace and with him all her fortune. Instead, she owed the tax authorities $ 1.3 million. Except for her stage clothes and two guitars, all of her possessions have been seized.

In 1986 she moved from expensive Los Angeles to Nashville , Tennessee, which was just beginning to develop into one of the centers of the US music industry - beyond its reputation as the country music capital. Their marriage had meanwhile failed under dramatic circumstances. In addition, there were repeated serious health problems that made them unable to work for a few years at the end of the 1980s. Although moving from Los Angeles to Tennessee - the southern states - was a culture shock, Janis Ian said, she immediately felt at home there and the local music scene welcomed her with open arms.

After three years in Nashville, Ian met defense attorney Patricia Snyder in 1989, her future partner, whom she married in Toronto in August 2003 .

The meeting with Pat was a turning point. She began writing and performing again and in 1993 produced her comeback album Breaking Silence . The title was programmatic because the album's release coincided with her public coming-out , which she decided to do after a study found that most teenage suicides in the US are committed out of fear of being gay. In addition, the lyrics on this album deal with a number of socially taboo topics.

At the beginning of the comeback was the self-realization that she had not undergone any significant development musically since the early 1970s. “I wouldn't buy a record from myself. I wouldn't buy these songs if I didn't find them interesting. ” She admitted to herself that she had neither an outstanding voice, nor could she offer an outstanding stage show with her height of 1.55 meters. What she wanted wasn't a commercially successful album at any cost, but one that, from the lyricist and composer's point of view, was flawless that people would listen to. She realized that in her songs she could "talk about things that were too painful for other people to address, in a way that enabled them to explore these things" . This ability runs through all of Ian's work.

The traumatic financial experiences of the eighties made Janis decide to become independent from the commercial music industry and to manage herself - one of the strikingly numerous musical and biographical parallels that she had in common with her colleague Laura Nyro . She began to buy back the rights to her songs bit by bit from the big record companies and in 1992 founded Rude Girl Records , her own label. To date, she has released over twenty records, all but the first five from the years 1967 to 1971, on Rude Girl Records as CDs in digitally revised versions with live versions added and thus made accessible again.

During 2007 Janis gave only a few concerts in Nashville and wrote her autobiography , which was published in July 2008 under the title Society's Child - My Autobiography .

Musicians and the Internet

An essential component of the business philosophy of Rude Girl Records , besides owning or leasing the rights to over 400 own songs, is the conviction that the Internet is not an enemy, but a friend and helper of musicians.

In an article for the US music magazine Performing Singer Songwriter , which received a lot of international attention and was discussed in 2002, Janis Ian advocated the thesis that free downloading of mp3 files does not harm the music industry, but on the contrary enables fans and the curious to get to know new music Increase in sales. In this article and in the following article, Aftershocks , she cites examples from her own business experience that support her theses. She quotes other artists and publishers from other fields (such as Baen Books ) who were able to increase their sales with them; the author Mercedes Lackey reports that after Baen made the first part of one of her book series available for free on the Internet, her entire backlist sold significantly better.

Discography

Janis Ian (1981)

Albums

  • Janis Ian (1967) Verve; # 29 US
  • ... For All the Seasons of Your Mind (1968) Verve; # 179 US
  • The Secret Life of J. Eddy Fink (1968) Verve
  • Who Really Cares (1969) Verve
  • Present Company (1971) Capitol
  • Stars (1974) Columbia; # 83 US, # 63 Japan (released 1976)
  • Between the Lines (1975) Columbia; # 1 US, # 22 Japan
  • Aftertones (1976) Columbia; # 12 US, # 1 Japan
  • Miracle Row (1977) Columbia; # 45 US, # 26 Japan
  • Janis Ian (1978) Columbia; # 120 US, # 79 Japan
  • Night Rains (1979) Columbia
  • Restless Eyes (1981) Columbia; # 156 US
  • Uncle Wonderful (1983, released 1984 in Australia) now Rude Girl
  • Breaking Silence (1993) Morgan Creek / Rude Girl
  • Simon Renshaw Presents: Janis Ian Shares Your Pain (1995) Rude Girl
  • Revenge (1995) Beacon / Rude Girl
  • Hunger (1997) Windham Hill / Rude Girl
  • God & the FBI (2000) Windham Hill / Rude Girl
  • Lost Cuts 1. Five New Cuts (2002) Rude Girl
  • Billie's Bones (2004) Rude Girl
  • Folk is the New Black (2006) Rude Girl
  • Strictly Solo (2014) Rude Girl

Compilations, live recordings

  • Remember (1978) JVC / now Rude Girl; # 72 Japan
  • Best of Janis Ian (1980) CBS; # 5 Japan
  • My Favorites (1980) CBS
  • At Seventeen (1990) CBS
  • Up 'Til Now (1992) Sony
  • Society's Child. The Verve Recordings (1995) Polydor
  • Live on the Test 1976 (1995) BBC Whistle Test
  • Unreleased 1: Mary's Eyes (1998) Rude Girl
  • The Bottom Line Encore Collection (Live 1980) (1999) Bottom Line
  • Unreleased 2: Take No Prisoners (1999) Rude Girl
  • Unreleased 3: Society's Child (2001) Rude Girl
  • Best of Janis Ian (2002) Festival
  • Live: Working Without a Net (2003) Rude Girl
  • Souvenirs: Best of Janis Ian 1972–1981 (2004) Rude Girl
  • Ultimate Best (2007) JVC
  • Best of Janis Ian: The Autobiography Collection (2008) Rude Girl
  • The Essential Janis Ian (2009) Sony
  • The Essential 2.0 (2017) Sony

DVDs

  • Live at Club Café (2005) Rude Girl
  • Janismania (2005) Rude Girl
  • Through the Years - A Retrospective (2007) Rude Girl
  • Janis Ian '79 - Live in Japan & Australia (2008) Rude Girl

literature

swell

  • Janis Ian about her life and her music (Interview with Rosemary Welsh), Live at Club Café, Rude Girl Records 2004 (DVD Video)
  • Janis Ian in conversation with John R. Killacky at the Association of Performing Arts Presenters' conference, New York City, January 22, 2006
  • The Best Revenge , Interview with Melissa Etheridge, 1995, In: The Advocate, No. 5 (1995), p. 12
  • The Internet Debacle - An alternative View , in: Performing Songwriter Magazine, No. 5 (2002)

Web links

Janis Ian himself

Commons : Janis Ian  - Collection of Images

Article about Janis Ian

Individual evidence

  1. Life Magazine, October 27, 1967, p. 53