Janis Ian

Thirty years after she emerged as a child prodigy in a hippie world scented with incense, tear gas and cannabis, Janis Ian is writing and singing songs as powerfully as ever. Hunger, her debut album for Windham Hill Records, is a showcase for one of the most important composer-performers of our time. Almost alone among her contemporaries, Janis Ian has found a way to translate her extraordinary gifts into every era of modern American popular song. She stands unique as a talent that has received Grammy Award nominations in the ’60s, the ’70s, the ’80s and the ’90s.

As the performances on Hunger show so eloquently, Janis Ian is moving toward the millennium in full command of her skills as an instrumentalist. Away from the singer of “Society’s Child” and the hypersensitive wallflower of “At Seventeen,” she still creates extraordinary social commentary songs. “Searching for America”and “Black & White” are two selections with some of the most insightful lyrics of her career. She also remains the most tender, empathetic and thoughtful of love-song writers. The woman who gave us Roberta Flack’s “Jesse” and Amy Grant’s “What About the Love” offers a clutch of tunes on Hunger that are positively heart-melting: “Getting Over You,” “House Without a Heart” and “Empty,” as well as the uptown Latin “Might As Well Be Monday,” a throwback to Ian’s years in New York’s barrio.

There is resentment and fury in Ian’s new “cheating” song “On the Dark Side of Town,” and smoldering desire in the album’s title tune. “Shadow” is about a reach that exceeds the grasp and the feeling that comes from aspirations that cannot be met. (Says Ian: “I always wanted to be Picasso,and I find myself ending up Cezanne. . . “) The wryly humorous “Welcome to Acousticville” is an anthem for traveling folk troubadours everywhere, across between Reverend Gary Davis and “Hotel California.” It also contains what Sally Fingerett of the Four Bitchin’ Babes calls the best lyric ever written:

“In between the lotion and chlorine
Jimi Hendrix played a Martin D-18
and we all joined in as he began to scream
‘Welcome to Acousticville.’”

“I called this record Hunger because I felt that if there were one thing that carried through the whole album, it was that,” says Ian. “Hunger. Some of my contemporaries don’t have that any more. I’m a writer and a performer; that’s what I do. I have never been ‘hip.’ I’ve always just marched on and made a living. I was lucky to have gotten in the door when I did, at such a creative time, and unlucky to be in my 40s when women are finally accepted in pop music. But I’ve never become bitter — I believe that bitterness kills art. That’s probably why I still have my hunger, my creative drive.”

Born in 1951, Janis Ian burst on the scene at age 15 with her controversial saga of interracial love, “Society’s Child.” Self-penned and arranged, it topped the charts and created a storm of discussion that featured Ian on The Tonight Show and in Life, Look, Time and Newsweek. Her debut album, 1967’s Janis Ian, garnered her the first of her nine Grammy nominations to date. Since then, there have been 15 albums, some as close as 9 months apart, some as far apart as 10 years.

She achieved a new level of popularity in the 1970s with her trio of masterpieces Stars (1973), Between the Lines (1975) and Aftertones (1976). The first contained “Jesse” which became a pop standard after Roberta Flack topped the charts with it. (“Everyone thought ‘Society’s Child’ was a fluke, and I was a has-been at 18. ‘Jesse’ proved I was a real writer.”) The second contained “At Seventeen” that sold over a million copies and earned Ian her first two Grammy Awards. The third was one of the most critically acclaimed albums of its day and featured Ian’s friends Odetta and Phoebe Snow as supporting vocalists. (“I didn’t stop after Between the Lines; the next album, Aftertones, gave me my first international number one records, and the world shrank.”)

Janis Ian entered the ’80s with the international disco hit “Fly Too High,” a song featured on the soundtrack of the Jodie Foster movie Foxes. (“It gave me the number one record in Europe, Australia, Africa, and I had the fun of going out on a high-power disco tour, jumping around the stage like a lunatic.”) This was one of several film-music ventures. Ian has either scored or contributed title tunes to such movies as Virus (1980), Betrayal (1977), The Bell Jar (1979), Falling From Grace (1992) and Four Rode Out (1969). She has also contributed to such television projects as the ABC Movie of the Week Freedom (1981) and the hit series Murder She Wrote (1987), and her songs have been featured on shows as diverse as The Simpsons and General Hospital.

She won her next Grammy Award for children’s music because of her work on the 1982 album In Harmony 2. The Recording Academy has also recognized her as a jazz artist by nominating her for a 1981 Grammy with Mel Torme as Best Vocal Duet for Ian’s song “Silly Habits.” Janis Ian has also written and sung radio jingles for such products as McDonald’s (“I am the Egg McMuffin. . . “), AT&T, Nescafe and Budweiser. She has studied acting (with famed theater personality Stella Adler), directing (with Jose Quintero), scoring and ballet (“although I was for sure the clumsiest student she’d ever seen!”).

People who see Janis Ian perform for the first time usually know none of this. Perhaps they know only the voice and a song or two. They invariably leave her shows stunned by her lead instrumental work on piano and guitar, as well as by the depth of her composing talent.

“I get told a lot, ‘You play like a guy’, and I’m not quite sure I know what that means. I guess it’s meant to be a compliment. I do know that back when I started, women just didn’t play. They might strum along and accompany themselves, but they weren’t players. So when people see me live for the first time, it’s always this big surprise to them.”

Janis Ian is truly a “musician’s musician.” Her songs have been recorded by everyone from Stan Getz to Bette Midler, from Glen Campbell to Vanilla Fudge, from Cher to Hugh Masakela, from Joan Baez to Etta James. She was among the guitarists chosen to salute the legendary Chet Atkins at an all-star gala this year that included Mark Knopfler, Larry Carlton, Travis Tritt and Clint Black.

Hunger comes at a time of intense creative renewal for Janis Ian. During the late 1980s she was beset by severe health and financial problems. The New Jersey/New York native had spent most of her career in Philadelphia and Los Angeles, but in 1988 she relocated to Nashville to connect with the city’s renowned songwriting and instrumental communities. Rock star John Mellencamp brought her back on disc after a decade of silence on the soundtrack of his 1992 film Falling From Grace.

In 1993 she returned with a full collection of new material, Breaking Silence. It was nominated for a Grammy Award as Contemporary Folk Album of the Year. Two years later came Revenge, nominated as Pop Album of the Year at the Nashville Music Awards.

The genesis of Hunger came when Windham Hill Records approached her about contributing a piano duet to a compilation album. Not only was she receptive to the idea, but she was open to making her own album for them. Windham Hill jumped at the opportunity, seeing Ian as a way to drive home their new slogan, “No more candles and sandles.”

“It’s the first time in my entire life that a record company has treated me this way,” says a delightfully surprised Ian. “They’re not expecting me to be 19. They’re not measuring my waistline. They are looking at ‘Can she perform?’ They wined and dined me the way my 19-year-old friends are getting wined and dined, and won my heart.”

The sessions took place at studios in Austin, Woodstock and Nashville during the first six months of 1997, and the result was released September 30. Hunger is the work of a woman whose talent has already carried her through one of the most impressive pop-music careers of our time. And it’s a career that shows no signs of slowing down; Hunger will see to that.

“Actually” says Janis Ian with a chuckle, “I think one of the reasons musicians keep doing what they do and writers keep doing what they do, is that we’re totally unsuited for anything else. And I for one am much too lazy.”