Janis Ian

Who are the great songwriters in America today? Not the most popular. Not the richest. Simply the greats. Ask any student of the form, and Janis Ian will be counted among them. The writer of “Jesse”, a song recorded by so many others that few remember Ian wrote it; “Stars”, possibly the best song ever written about the life of a performer, recorded by artists as diverse as Mel Torme and Cher; and the seminal “At Seventeen”, a song that brought her five Grammy nominations (the most any solo female artist had ever garnered) in 1975, and which is now reaching its third generation of listeners.

Ian is a formidable talent, a force of nature. Ella Fitzgerald called her “The best young singer in America”. Chet Atkins said “Singer? You ought to hear that girl play guitar; she gives me a run for my money!” Reviewers have called her live performances “overwhelming to the spirit and soul”, and “drenched with such passion, the audience feels they’ve been swept up in a hurricane.” Not to mention her short stories, her songs for film and television... and oh, yes. She also runs a foundation, named for her mother, that works with various universities and colleges to supply scholarships for returning students; they’ve raised over $300,000 to date!

The glowing reviews come as no surprise to Ian’s loyal fan base, who give her website a stunning quarter million hits per year – even though she hasn’t had a top twenty record here in three decades. Nor to the computer community, who adopted her article “The Internet Debacle” as their Bible against the RIAA’s fight to stop downloaded music. Nor her international fan base, who flock to her concerts and allow her to play sold-out concert halls in Holland, the United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, and others too numerous to mention. Nor the science fiction community, who embraced her anthology “Stars” with glowing reviews like the one from Publisher’s Weekly that begins “This dazzling, highly original anthology....”

Quite a broad spectrum of interests and communities, for a woman who started her life on a New Jersey chicken farm in 1951.

2008 sees a double-whammy: Society’s Child: My Autobiography, released in North America by Tarcher/Penguin, has already gotten stellar reviews; O Magazine called it “Hugely readable” and recommended it as one of 27 “must-reads” this summer. Mojo Magazine gives it a four star review, and Booklist a starred review that ends with “painfully candid, and hard to put down.”

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