I fell into a different world with this album. I thought it would be a good omen for my return to music blogging, since Janis was the first musical guest on Saturday Night Live. Silly reason, I know. I did this writing as Billy's Bunker (Music Reviews), but that was more than 10 years ago.
I resolved to listen to every Janis Ian album and every interview and I did that listening before I wrote a word. On every album and in every song, I encountered an honesty and strength of character that moved me and challenged my own life to be better. I started writing what turned out to be the beginnning of a biography, and not a music review at all.
Janis Ian wrote and recorded her own biography and won a Grammy for it. I don't mean that metaphorically! She won a grammy "Society's Child," which is her autobiography of the early years. She won another Grammy for "Best Pop Vocal Performance" for her song "At Seventeen." The Light At The End Of The Line has been nominated for Best Folk Album in the 2023 Grammy Awards. From Janis: “This is full circle for me: my first Grammy nomination ever was in 1967, also for 'Best Folk Album.'" From Billy: "Janis Ian should win this time. No one has given away so much, or told more truth in any one album ever!"
So what makes The Light at the End of the Line the most generous album of the last decade? Here we go!
Let's start at the end: "Better Times Will Come." Janis gave the song to the world for free and started a "Project" to make the hope of the song a realilty. The Better Times Will Come Project has resulted in more than 180 versions of the song posted by musicians from all over the world. And who gets all those royalties? You guessed it! Nobody. Janis makes her money selling music, and musicians often starve. That is generosity! Oh my!
Next, there is "Resist!" Many musicians write songs that become anthems to a movement, but nobody gets paid when a crowd sings the anthem at a protest or gathering. If you sing “Happy Birthday,” you may get a letter from an attorney! I am not kidding. “Happy Birthday” is aggressively enforced. “Resist” could really be the "I Shall Be Released" of the women’s movement one day. It has the substance and juice for that, if it catches on. I suspect neither Janis nor Bob are expecting checks when you sing their songs at the “million person march” or sit-ins or whatever. Those songs have a special kind of generosity to them.
Other musicians are selfish sometimes, and complain when they don't win a Grammy, and hire lawyers to squeeze a little more money from any similar song or sample. There is no good reason for giving it away, besides a core of generosity and a God-like love of people who sing.
BREAKING NEWS FROM JANIS
I saw just now — weeks after this review was first published — Janis sent a post on Facebook with bad news and also some love from another musician and his daughter. This is Janis Ian learning the truth about her voice at 70, and learning about Dave Grohl and his daughter Violet singing “At Seventeen:”
This morning I woke up and thought "How strange. I'll never be able to sing 'At Seventeen' again." And I don't mind admitting that it was really depressing.
But what better antidote could there be than to hear my work, 47 years after I wrote it, beautifully and sincerely sung by Violet Grohl?
What a perfectly happy day this turned out to be. Thank you, Violet.
Thank you, Dave. Thank you.
BACK TO THE SONGS
What about the rest of the songs? Janis shows her unrivaled empathetic ability to tell the story of good people who are targets of intolerance in our society -- which has been her hallmark and monument since album #2 in her catalog. This album celebrates transgender people ("Perfect Little Girl"), undocumented immigrants who are being deported ("Stranger"), the great and severely, physically damaged mentally ill master songwriter and Janis' friend Nina Simone (“Nina”), and, to leave nobody out, even Lucifer himself ("Dark Side of the Sun").
And something like "Dark Side of the Sun" where there’s just that huge fat guitar sound and a vocal that’s filled with compassion for Lucifer. There are things I’ve never even tried before.
-- Janis Ian (Meredith)
This is Janis Ian's most personal album. She is a woman of heart and mind, great wisdom, pure joy, substance, and an abiding love for humanity which has endured an enslaught of good reasons to give up on us all. I believe this album is manifesto on how to make an album in the 21st Century. From the content to the recording technique, the songs, and every detail of this production, Janis offers her wisdom to anyone who will listen.
Take a half hour as soon as you can and listen to Janis Ian at the Berklee College of Music. My friend musical genius Ernst Ströer of Ströer Bros & Howard Fine watched it, and thanked me at some length! I tell you this lecture is a necessary addition to any musician's working life!
After listening to this album, I am confident you will lose your objectivity about this music, and hopefully about transgender people, immigrants, humanity in general, and most certainly your own damn self! If you don't care, you don't matter. If we don't start caring real fast, we may not last. I got that from this most generous album of a decade, Janis Ian's The Light at the End of the Line.
TRUTH: JANIS IAN's BIOGRAPHY
This all started with a 12-year-old who decided to write songs. One day she was on a bus near her New Jersey home, and she saw a couple making goo-goo eyes at each other. The boy was black and the girl was white. This was 1965. All the riders on the bus that day — both black and white — were staring daggers. The couple was blinded by love and completely oblivious. Love is a wonderful thing.
Little girl Janis went home and wrote their story in a song. Everybody likes a happy ending, but this story would have to obey the hatred of the time. Even in fiction, Janis thought the girl would break up with the boy. A happy ending would be a lie, so a very young Janis Ian told the truth. She wrote what a very articulate little girl might say:
It’s a marvelous song called “Society’s Child” written astonishingly enough by a 15-year old girl named Janis Ian. This tune is very well known among the followers of pop music, but you may not have heard it since it’s been withheld by most of the radio stations for reasons unknown to me, although probably to do with its subject matter, which is as you’ll see somewhat controversial.
—Leonard Bernstein on CBS Special Report “Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution” (Bernstein Introduction)
After radio stations were shamed into playing the song by Leonard Bernstein, the song became a hit, and it triggered a bigoted backlash that threatened Janis Ian’s career and her life.
Oh my gosh back then people just lost their minds. People were wound so tight over that song! I mean, people would trip me as I tried to go up on stage. People would stop in the street, say “Are you Janis Ian?” I’d say, “Yes.” They’d spit in my face. It was very threatening and I didn’t realize the impact until people started telling me about it 10 15 years ago…
— Janis Ian (Meredith Interview)
When it became a hit, it created quite a stir and there was a pretty violent reaction. I mean, there were radio stations burned for playing [it], and people were fired and it’s pretty amazing.
— Janis Ian (John Brought Interview)
Janis toured with that hit song and her new album at 15. When she got home, her star began to fade.
So, I say in concert that I wrote my first song when I was 12, and I got published when I was 13, and made a record at 14, had a hit at 15, and I was a has-been at 16.
— Janis Ian at Friends of the Island Library (2009) (Island Library)
Janis Ian got home and left the music industry for ten years. She made a lot of money with that hit song, but she didn’t think she needed a lot of money. So she gave a lot of it away:
John Broughton: What prompted that decision for you to do that. To give away a lot of your earnings?
Janis Ian: It just seemed like I had way more than I needed. I had friends who needed it more. It was, you know, again, pretty basic.
— John Brought Interview (1998)
Ten years later, Janis wrote At Seventeen, which brought her back into the spotlight, won her a Grammy for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance and landed her a gig as the first musical guest (along with Billy Preston) on the first episode of Saturday Night Live. At Seventeen was another controversial song, and it was so personal that Janis was initially unwilling to perform it in public. Once again, she chose to tell the truth, when it might have been easier to do something else.
John Broughton: I believe it took four months for you to write "Seventeen". Is that right?
Janis Ian: Yeah, three months.
John Broughton: Is that usual for you to labor over a song for that long?
Janis Ian: Depends on the song. "Seventeen" was a hard song because I knew that it was going to be an important song for me. So, I didn’t want to blow it, you know, and when you’re sort of striking new ground for yourself as a writer, you have to be real careful not to rush it.
— John Brought Interview (1998)
The song At Seventeen was a hit, and the album Between the Lines was a huge success, and Janis got 461 Valentine's Day cards.
Trouble came when Bill Cosby campaigned to ruin her career.
A review of this album can be found below in a description of every song. On first listen, this is a simple and sweet album of singable songs. It has a sense of humor, and a lot of heart. But when all of those achingly beautiful songs reveal themselves through repeated listening, I realized that this album hurt me like a surgeon might wound me to make me better. This album is necessary. The message of Janis Ian has always been to embrace The Truth, because there is no other honorable way to live. And the potent medicine in this album comes with the strength of Janis Ian’s ability to remain true to herself through it all, and even in these times, to always offer hope.
THE SONGS (Click the song titles to read the words at AZ Lyrics)
I want to rest my soul
Here where it can grow without fear
Another line, another year
I'm still standing here
See these bruises? See these scars?
Hieroglyphs that tell the tale
You can read them in the dark
Through your fingertips, like Braile
The first verse ends with the question: “How do we survive living out our lives?” That question jumps out at me. If anyone knows the answer to that question, Janis must know. This question dangles unanswered. I also feel uncomfortable hearing “Here where it can grow without fear.” That world does not exist on Earth, I think, but only in music. The unanswered questions stick with me.
Another line, another year
I’m still standing here
I’m still standing here
I’m still standing here
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 grows in “lines to time.” Shakespeare wrote “in lines to time thou growest” perhaps about a person, but certainly about the poem itself.
— Shakespeare, Sonnet 18
For extra credit: Janis Ian’s song This Train Still Runs has some interesting similarities. It makes me smile that her 55-year career has been so long and prolific that she has written two songs that seem to say, “Hey, I’m still here!”
Video Live at Fur Peace Ranch
Video by Tony King
Video with Dana Jones
Video from Album Strictly Solo
Resist is a logical outgrowth to me of "Society’s Child."
—Janis Ian (Meredith)
And then you contrast that with something like “Resist," which has me and Randy Liego and I’m playing guitar and Randy is playing everything else — that’s totally different from anything I’ve ever done with someone…”
—Janis Ian (Meredith)
This is the protest song that has been missing from the movement for equality and women’s rights.
My favorite version of this song was done in 2019 by Janis Ian at the Woodstock Film Festival. Janis obviously felt at home there, and she sang Resist as a new song, hoping some other younger singer would produce it because she didn’t have a lable at the time. This performance is fierce! Janis is angry, and that fits this song. The first impulse for Resist was Yoko Ono’s comment and the song, “Woman Is The Nigger To The World.” (Woodstock 2019 Interview) This song grew out of her experience with Bill Cosby, who “outed” her at the age of 15 to try to keep her off TV. (See Wikipedia) The song has a sense of humor, but it also has teeth. It might be the sing-along protest for post-Roe America, time will tell. When asked, Janis suggested that Pink should sing this song. This album is the vehicle that Janis didn’t have in 2019. Pink should do this song.
Woodstock Film Festival (2019)
“[S]ongs like Stranger are … deceptively simple.”
— Janis Ian (Meredith)
“I was once a stranger here” begins this song with a voice, a guitar and a haunting harmonica. She came from a place of fear. She left everyone for safety of a “Land of Opportunity / built by people just like me.“ She has received devastating news. “Now I have to leave again / Leave my family, leave my friends / Don't know where they're sending me / Only know that I will be /A stranger there.”
“Stranger” joins Woody Guthrie’s empathetic blockbuster “Deportee” to share the humanity of immigrants who have been forced to return to a hostile home they left in order to survive. In Woody Guthrie's song, these immigrants all died in a fateful airplane crash. His original impulse was to sing each and every name. It would have been a long song.
Swannanoa is an Italian Renaissance Revival villa built in 1912 by millionaire and philanthropist James H. Dooley (1841–1922) above Rockfish Gap on the border of northern Nelson County and Augusta County, Virginia and sits high atop the Blue Ridge Mountains at Afton.
“Swannanoa” sounds like it was influenced by the 19th Century folk song “Shenandoah.” This song has a couple of similarities with that very troubled, and extraordinarily beautiful bit of anonymous Americana. In both songs, the subject shifts from verse to verse. Both songs have a haunting melody. I cannot say the word “Swannanoa” without thinking of “Shenandoah.”
The duet with Nuala Kennedy on the porch (linked below) is just wonderful. Nuala Kennedy is a big part of this song. Her own music is astonishing. And both Janis Ian and Nuala Kennedy were at the “Celtic Week” festivities from July 10-16, 2022 at the location Swannanoa.
In addition, this year, folk legend Janis Ian will offer her
“Master Class in Artistry” during all five of our weeks.*
— from the website for Celtic Week at The Swannanoa Gathering
*I believe the word “weeks” should have been days. The schedule for “Celtic Week” is for five days. Ah well!
With Nuala Kennedy on the Porch at Swannanoa Celtic Gathering
I could not hear this song. I wrote that the song eluded me. Then Janis Ian's assistant Judy wrote:
"Sorry ´Where Good Dreams Go' eludes you — Janis has gotten at least half a dozen thank yous from people who've lost a child. She wrote it for a friend whose son had died."
—Judy
I began to sob bitterly. I lost my nephew more than a decade ago, in a death so tragic his father (my brother) took his own life on his son's birthday six months later. I had never mourned my nephew properly. I couldn't allow myself to feel the tragic suicide of that innocent young man. After hearing from Judy, I mourned for two days, and didn't write again for a week. This song is poison to denial, but only if you can hear it. I cannot listen to this song now without sobbing, but now my nephew has been mourned.
I am lighter in my spirit, and I feel things more deeply, now that the wall in my heart has been demolished. I have quoted Robert Downey Sr.'s movie Greaser's Palace in several of the reviews I have written this month. "If ya feel ya healed." I may be falling in love now. Maybe that blockage forbidding mourning was keeping me from feeling love.
This is my favorite song in the Janis Ian catalog now, but I will not listen to it very often, and never in company. I feel my nephew with me now. He sings a duet with Janis. I knew they would get along.
Pretend that you're a girl
For the rest of your life
Pretend it for the world
Though you know it isn't right
I worked for a civil rights lawyer who had an open-door policy and who wound up representing LGBTQ and transgender clients almost exclusively. I know what this song is about from that experience. I learned that gender is sometimes assigned by doctors in consultation with the parents when a child has been born between the lines. This subject is far less simple than the haters would like it to be. The four lines of lyric posted above are devastating, chilling, and the stuff of nightmares. This song is pretty. Janis knows how to sell a little truth dipped in honey, in a hard sugar casing, and wrapped in pretty foil. It is, however, devastating.
“I tried to make that song about anyone but Nina. … I loved Nina.” Meredith
"I got hold of Don McLean’s American Pie and I probably listened to Vincent 50 times and then I sat down and wrote Stars. Vincent was exactly the kind of song that I wanted to be writing."
At a time when Janis Ian was lost as a songwrter, Don McLean’s Vincent restored her inspiration. The song Vincent did not obey the standard rules of songwriting, but it had a logic of its own, and it captured the tortured beauty of a great artist with unique vision including Van Gogh's fatal mental illness. Janis credits that song in her interview with James Broughton for reviving her songwriting career.
On that starry, starry night
You took your life as lovers often do
But I could have told you, Vincent
This world was never meant for one
As beautiful as you
—Don McLean’s song "Vincent"
Nina Simone was Janis Ian’s friend. Nina was a genius at song. Nina saw the world through the eyes of genius, and madness.
Any kind of fool could see
You were always meant to be
Miracles in moonlight, worshipped from afar
Burning like a falling star
Nina was mentally ill, in a deep and physical way.
Crazy as a loon, in your own cartoon
What a world those eyes must see
When you hit the mark, you stopped my heart
Then you'd turn around and grind it
Right into the ground. I'd find it
Janis Ian discusses this song at length with Kyle Meredith in his exceptionally fine 2022 interview. This song was problematic for Janis. But Janis Ian’s love of the song Vincent was the subject of a different interview with James Broughton in 1995. Janis has toured with Don McLean. I believe McLean’s solution to the problem of writing about an artist touched by genius and brought down by madness has simply become part of Janis, and it found its way into the song Nina to express itself again.There simply is no better solution to the poignant problem of incredible beauty living alongside undeniable (and fatal) mental illness.
But how were you to know this world
Was so damned hard on beauty
Frightened by your lightning song
Nina can't you see?
You were always beautiful to me
My friend and great poet and teacher Richard Howard passed away last year. He said there was a word in Greek. It meant “holding something close, while pushing away.” He got that from the Greeks. I think Janis Ian got this same wisdom from Don McLean.
This is a song about unburdening. "Give me light / Illuminate the darkness in my heart / Dancing with the dark / I'm dancing with the dark" This song is a prayer. It may shock some people and disappoint others, but Janis Ian believes in God. Just so! She says that her atheist parents encouraged her to read, and that lead her to believe, to their chagrin as she recalls. Who wouldn't sing this song who has lived an honest life? It has been a lot to take. For Janis, and for all of us. That's life, Pilgrim!
This Long Night (Dancing with the Dark) (2020)
"And something like *Dark Side of the Sun* where there’s just that huge fat guitar sound and a vocal that’s filled with compassion for Lucifer. There are things I’ve never even tried before."
"Sympathy for the Devil" this is not, but "things are different down here" sounds a bit ominous to me.
Album Version
David Bianculli: You aren’t thinking of writing a musical, are you?
Janis Ian: Boy, that would be a life goal, wouldn’t that? That would be great. I would love to write a musical. Yeah, if you’re listening, I’d love to write a musical. That’s been a goal since I was two-and-a-half and saw a run through of “Oklahoma.”
— Janis Ian from the Interview by David Bianculli at Rutgers
This is a show tune in search of a show! Wherever this song is sung becomes The Stage!
Video by Carol Waechter
The Light at the End of the Line
In due time, there will be
someone else who will see
all the good in your heart,
even though we’re apart
Oh, how I’ve loved your heart
“As I wrote ‘The Light at the End of the Line,’ I realized that it’s really a love song. I didn’t understand that so many years of meeting my audience after shows, of corresponding with them, had created this very real relationship that few artists are privileged to have.”
— Janis Ian (Website Press Kit)
“The Light at the End of the Line is a tip of the hat to Stars. Stars is all about what it is like to be a star and then not be a star and then trying to come back and be a star again. The Light at the End of the Line is all about having been a star and not a star, having done this with my career. Gratitude to the people who’ve hung in there.”
— Janis Ian (Meredith)
I met Janis Ian at McCabe’s Guitar Shop. She gave a gem of a concert in that legendary small venue in the back room with an audience on folding chairs. Janis became my friend that day. Mind you, I didn’t speak to her. I didn’t have to. That concert was so intimate that I knew she was singing to me. Perhaps she could see “all the love in [my] heart.” I felt good after that concert. I felt loved and appreciated. I took that feeling home with me and I have considered Janis a friend ever since. I felt the same from a concert with the late Richie Havens, who I met the same way at McCabe’s Guitar Shop. Janis knows. That spark continues to shine.
But the song will remember
The spark will still shine
It’s the light at the end of the line
There’s a light at the end of the line
Better times, better times will come
Better times, better times will come
When this world learns to live as one
Oh, better times will come
“I mean even something like the vocal on, my vocal on "Better Times Will Come" when I did it originally, I sang it into my phone, and I didn’t want to do that, but I did want the feel of it. So I sat in John’s studio and literally just started singing. Didn’t worry about vocal. Didn’t worry about mic. Didn’t worry about any of that.”
— Janis Ian (Meredith)
Video Live with Janis Ian, Livingston Taylor and Tom Chapin
Sung by Westcoast Black Theater Troup
The “Better Times Will Come” Project has made resulted in many many many more videos than I can catalog here. For all of the videos, following this link: The Better Times Will Comes Project
LINKS TO MORE FROM JANIS IAN
INTERVIEWS USED IN THIS REVIEW
Woodstock Film Festival (2019)
EXTRA! Closing Quotes
Paul Leslie: What does it mean to you to be an artist?
Janis Ian: Paul, that’s a serious big and loaded question. Gosh. You know and every artist I'm sure it would have their own definition of that question it's really impossible to put into a few words. To me, being an artist means in part being part of the community at large standing between that community and chaos and helping that community when crimes are chaotic to find itself and find its voice, and to hold on to its voice. It means really being the keeper of the history of your community and your country and of the world. It means being a citizen of the world and not just a small portion of it. I think for me being an artist really supersedes race and nationality gender all of those things and that's why I like thank you for that of all the ways that I could find myself from female or gay or short or northern or second generation or whatever the only one that really I am interested in laying claim to is an artist. The Paul Leslie Hour (2015)
* * *
I transcribed the following speech from a song introduction on the album Janis Ian Live: Working Without A Net. (Click the link to hear Janis say these words from the album on YouTube)
I find myself realizing as I grow older just how lucky I’ve been in my life. ‘Cause if you stop and think about it, to do what I do, its pretty amazing to be born with a talent in the first place. But to take that talent and have it pop up in the right family, in the right country, in the right era for that talent to flourish, that’s all just luck. That’s pretty amazing. And the luckiest part of it for me is that I wanted to do this since I was three because it always seemed like people who got to be onstage got to make magic. They got to really be alchemists. They got to turn lead into gold. Every night, they got to stand up there and take everybody’s hopes and dreams and fears and disappointments, and just pull ‘em right out of the air and turn them into something that you can see, that you can hear, that you can read. And that’s alchemy to me. That’s being a magician. Its the best part of the job. And the way I figure it, if we are doing our jobs right, then when times get hard, and God knows the times are a little strange right now… You know when times get so hard that you forget that you had a dream in the first place. And we’re the ones who get to step forward and say “Here are your dreams back. I tried to keep them safe for you.” And for those of us who get to do that, this is an immense privilege. So I thank you all for the privilege.
Email: billymwb@gmail.com
Submissions accepted. Send a link, not a CD. Lyrics and artwork plus any information is appreciated. Access to artists for interviews encouraged.
Wow…
ReplyDeleteI have been privileged to see Janis live in concert 6x in England - London, Worcester, Warwick, Stockton, York and, my home town, Newark. Always special, with an intimacy brought to bear by those special songs.
ReplyDeleteHaving been a fan since seeing her perform Stars on the Old Grey Whistle Test, I wish her great peace and love for the future. Thank you for so many special songs and concerts.
The interviews all have links in the review. You could watch hours of Janis! I did!
Delete—Billy
What a fantastic story of Janis Ian!!
ReplyDeleteThank you!
Delete—Billy
Probably the most inspired, inspiring, well researched and heart felt review I've ever read. Thank you for profiling this amazing artist as she deserves.
ReplyDeleteThat is the most inspiring comment I have ever received.
Delete—Billy’s Music Without Borders (I am Billy)
Thank YOU 🙏 for this .. Thank Janis Ian for the beginning … music 🎶 lyrics ✍️ her voice her guitar … this story .. herstory … helped so many of us tell our story .. your voice is held in our hearts always ❤️
ReplyDeleteThank you, and I know Janis will see your comment. I never spoke to her, but I felt she was my friend after a concert at McCabe’s. Richie Havens made me feel the same. She was so open that I knew her better than some close friends.
Delete—Billy
Thank you for such a powerful and comprehensive look at such a remarkable artist’s journey. I was gutted when my husband said, “Who’s Janis Ian?” when I shared the news that she had lost her ability to sing. Your review reminded me that I am not alone in holding her in such high regard as a human being.
ReplyDeleteYou are not alone! Janis posted her comment and a link to this review, and 3.7 K readers came to read it in a couple of days. My most popular review prior to that has been read by 140 people. I am grateful for every reader, and numbers are just numbers. But Janis has 470,000 real followers and they respond when she calls.
ReplyDelete—Billy