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JANIS IAN talks to Spencer Leigh

Spencer Leigh spoke to Janis Ian while she was recording a live concert for Radio 2 in Liverpool in October 2004.

SL: The booklets with nearly all your albums contain a message about your guitar being lost in 1972 and you are trying to find it.

JANIS IAN: Well, all of them but the last couple. The guitar was returned about six years ago after it had been missing 26 years – isn’t that amazing? There is an article on my website about it called ‘Of Guitars And Righteous Men’. Somebody had stolen it in Los Angeles in 1972 and from there it had wound up at a reputable shop in San Francisco, and it was bought by someone called Jeff Gray who wanted a D18. He had been working with Jefferson Airplane and it was used on a bunch of their records. He had been thinking about selling it because he wanted a smaller guitar when he read an interview with me in ‘Vintage Guitar’ magazine and the interviewer had put in a note about this guitar of mine, serial number 67053, 1938 D-18 and this feller Jeff Gray had looked at it and realised it was his guitar. The guitar had been stolen from him at one point and he had found it by memorising the serial number and making the rounds. We talked about it and he told me what it was worth and I said that I did have a Martin and I would trade him for it. He finally said, ‘I don’t want to own somebody else’s guitar, that’s bad karma, let me just send it to you.’ I said, ‘Well, send it, I will make sure it’s mine and I will send you this other guitar, just in gratitude.’ Never let hope die.

SL: Was this an important guitar for you? Was it, say, the first guitar you bought with your royalties?

JANIS IAN: It was a guitar that my dad had bought a year before I was born. He was a farmer and he had bought it from a woman whose husband had died. She had found the guitar in the attic and my dad bought it for $25. It was the guitar I learned on, it’s the guitar I wrote ‘Society’s Child’ on, it’s the first guitar I ever played at shows and it’s obviously an important guitar for me, and, as it turned out, it was worth considerably more than $25, although my dad didn’t know until I came home one day and told him.

SL: Your first album, ‘Janis Ian, in 1967 was quite an angry album.

JANIS IAN: Not so much angry as frustrated. It is the characteristic of a 14 or 15 year old to be frustrated by everything. To me ‘Society’s Child’ is more frustration and sadness although that might lead to anger: it’s a sadness that you can’t wave a magic wand at and have the world the way that you would like it.

SL: Was the inspiration for ‘Society’s Child’ something in the newspapers?

JANIS IAN: I wish I knew where songs came from or where inspiration came from but most of the time I have no idea. I assume that it was something in the wind as people were talking about Civil Rights. My parents were very involved in the Civil Rights movement, but I didn’t know anybody going through that and I hadn’t read about anybody going through that.

SL: And it is a very well crafted song: you seemed to have it all there when you were young.

JANIS IAN: That’s the thing about talent, Spencer: you are either born with it or you’re not. You only have five things to work with on stage and that is Entrance, Focus, Energy, Exit and Talent. You can learn the first four but you can’t teach someone the last one. I don’t know why I thought that chorus should lift, I don’t know why I knew enough to make it a two line refrain instead of a chorus, but that’s the talent and that’s the part I try to keep in harness.

SL: Do you still perform many songs from those early years?

JANIS IAN: I do ‘Society’s Child’ pretty much every show, that was the best of the lot for a while. There are others that are all right but they don’t have that clarity.

SL: You then came out of the business for a couple of years.

JANIS IAN: I started recording when I was 14 and a half and I worked steadily until I was 17 and a half. ‘Society Child’ was a very rough introduction to the music industry: it was so volatile and people either loved it so much or hated it so much. Some people hated me so much that it was very difficult. It was before anybody thought about bodyguards and there were a lot of years of getting spat at on the street or as I walked on stage. When I was 17 and a half, I wasn’t even sure that I wanted to be in the music business. I thought about becoming a vet or an archaeologist or anything that would not have people spitting on me with such regularity.

SL: And your peers like Joan Baez and Bob Dylan were that much older.

JANIS IAN: They were a lot older and they were very good to me. Joan, in particular, was always wonderful to me. Odetta was great to me and also Dave Von Ronk, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. I didn’t have much of a connection with people my own age and I needed some time to grow up. I went away for three and a half years and I was working at whether I could be a songwriter, a really good songwriter. I didn’t want to be average, and then I wrote ‘Stars’ and then I wrote ‘Jesse’. When I finished those two, I figured that I could call myself a songwriter.

SL: And ‘Stars’ is about coming to terms with recognition.

JANIS IAN: Yes, particularly early recognition. ‘Stars’ is my longest song, it is seven and a half minutes long and it is my most covered song. I think it is the quintessential performer’s song as it talks about being a performer both from the inside and from the outside. Because I’d had three and a half years out of it, I had some hindsight. ‘Stars’ can afford a gentle view of the whole process without being bitter or being angry, but it is saying to the audience, ‘Look, this is a rough life, but I have chosen it so don’t pity me. If you just put up with the occasional blunder, then I will be here.’

SL:You have had a pretty colourful and traumatic life since then: does that help your songwriting?

JANIS IAN: I don’t think that trauma and pain have squat to do with being a good writer, I really don’t. If nothing else, it gets in the way of the time that you need to be writing. Everybody has a rough life. It’s rough going to a factory every day. My father’s life was rough: his father died when he six and he was trying to make ends meet with just his mom and three kids on a farm. He wasn’t able to go to college and he was drafted into the army. My mother had multiple sclerosis, so my life has just had ups and downs compared to that.

SL: But it comes out in the songs.

JANIS IAN: I don’t know. In ‘Days Like These’ it comes out directly but the older you get as an artist, the more you search for the universal. Your own life becomes uninteresting except in the scope of making your understanding a bit deeper. I know some artists who have led absolutely charmed lives who write fantastic songs and I know other artists who have led horribly traumatic lives and can’t write anything worth beans. When you are a kid, the concept of great suffering making great art is very attractive but you get a bit older and the suffering is not so much fun.

SL: You wrote a song about your husband beating you up in ‘His Hands’.

JANIS IAN: Yes, but I started it before I knew him, so how much direct experience is it? That song has got some direct experience in it but I read a lot and do a lot of research. That sounds awful but that is how I approach ‘Tattoo’ or ‘His Hands’ or ‘I Hear You Sing Again’ on the new album which is from a scrap of a Woody Guthrie lyric. By the time I had received that scrap, I had read three books about Woody and I had listened to everything he had ever recorded. I tried to know him and how he thought and what was important to him as I didn’t want to write the song without any cognisance of him as a man. So a lot of what I do is just plain research.

SL: How did you get involved with that Woody Guthrie lyric?

JANIS IAN: His daughter called me and asked if I would be interested in finishing something and adding a melody. She sent me 11 and that was at the bottom of the pile. I took one look at the first line, ‘If I could only hear my mother sing again’ and I thought, ‘This one’s mine.’ The melody popped into my head and I wrote it in a day and a half. That is because I was prepared. As they say in Nashville, you keep the motor oiled, so when you are ready to take the car out, it moves.

SL: You mentioned the controversy over ‘Society’s Child’, but I presume you found everyone was for you with ‘At Seventeen’.

JANIS IAN: Everybody’s for the underdog. That is the great thing about the song - it is a outlaw, underdog song, and that is why the appeal is so universal. Artists dream about writing a song that will cut through culture and gender and age and race and religion.

SL: And how did you come to write yours?

JANIS IAN: I was reading the New York Times’ magazine section and there was an article by a debutante talking about how being a debutante wasn’t all it was cracked up to be and the opening line was “I learned the truth at 18”. I was playing a little samba figure at the time and I started writing the song. It took three months. It was a hard song to write, but it was straight from my heart.

SL: I presume from the last line about the ugly duckling you are actually saying, ‘This girl is going to win through.’

JANIS IAN: Oh well done, people always say that the song has a sad ending but ugly duckings turn into swans, doh! Absolutely, the whole point is that you have been there and done that, it’s over. We all have our days when we look at our faces and go ‘Aww!’ but you get older and you realise that there are people who will love you for yourself and not for your face, and you begin to like yourself. It is one of the benefits of getting older. As everything else seems to sag and fall, you can accept it and go, ‘This is me.’

SL: And there’s a powerful line about ‘ravaged faces’. It’s a great word to use.

JANIS IAN: I don’t even remember writing that song as it is so long ago, I know it took three months because I was concerned line by line about never telling anything that was untrue. It is very hard to write a song that is extremely personal and extremely truthful and yet universal. It is a hard thing to do. To this day, I don’t know why I wrote the second verse like that but it felt right. ‘Those of us with ravaged faces’ – well, ‘ravaged’ is really the word: what other word could you put in there?

SL: I’m not sure but I hadn’t the word being used in a pop song before.

JANIS IAN: And I bet you hadn’t heard ‘debentures’ being used either with the accent on the wrong syllable!

SL: You’ve worked with someone with a ravaged face and that’s Willie Nelson.

JANIS IAN: Willie’s face is just his face and I wouldn’t call it ravaged. It is sunswept, lined and hollowed - ‘furrowed’ would be the word. He has the most fabulous face and he looks like his guitar. Willie is somebody who is always himself. There are very few people, particularly in the entertainment industry who are capable of being themselves at all times, but Willie is just himself – on and off stage, in the studio and out of the studio. He is what he is, what you see is what you get and I love people like that.

SL: And how did you decide what you were going to do together?

JANIS IAN: That was a no-brainer. I wrote ‘Memphis’ and Chet Atkins played on it. I was listening to it and thought that Willie Nelson would sound amazing on it. I called Deena Carter who cowrote it as she knew Willie and she said that she would get him a tape. He loved the song and he invited us to his studio in Texas so we flew to Texas and we got to see him play and that was fantastic. He’s just great.

SL: And what about the recording itself?

JANIS IAN: It’s like working with Dolly Parton. You are working with someone whose voice is so distinctive. The first time you hear them sing your words you go ‘Wow’ and it’s a huge charge. He came in prepared, like Dolly did. He knew the song and he knew the lyric and where he wanted to sing and where he wanted to step aside. I think it took three takes. A pro’s a pro, there’s nothing like it.

SL: And what about working with Dolly Parton on ‘My Tennessee Hills’?

JANIS IAN: She had had a bad cold and was dog-tired and had wanted to postpone the session, but she was just as nice as could be. She knew the song inside out and had her part worked out. We had changed the arrangement a bit and it took about half an hour to work that out. I asked her if we put some of the rehearsing on my website in Week 5 and let the fans see that we are not perfect and she said, ‘Sure, go ahead.’ I said, ‘But we are a little out of tune here and there’, and she said, ‘Shoot, that’s nothing new.’

SL: You wrote ‘Memphis’ with Deena Carter so when do you decide you are going to cowrite and when you are going to do it on your own?

JANIS IAN: It depends on the mood. Someone told me that Deena was a great writer and had serious potential. It was before her record deal and it is always good to help younger writers. That is part of the responsibility you take on when you move to Nashville: you have to be a good mentor. Sometimes if I get stuck and don’t feel that my writing is going anywhere, then I will do some co-writing for a few weeks to shake things loose. Right now I have a list of writers I’ve been running into and I have said, ‘Call me in December 2004’ and I will spend some time doing that in 2005.

SL: When you write with, say, Albert Hammond, you are dealing with someone who has his way of doing things and you will have your way of doing things. How do you meet in the middle?

JANIS IAN: You either become a good co-writer very quickly or you don’t get asked again. The cardinal rule is that if one person disagrees, then it doesn’t work. It is all a compromise, and in the best situations as with Kyle Fleming, Albert Hammond or Skip Ewing, you keep struggling towards something that you both will know is right because you know you will have a better song out of it. A great co-write is seamless and does not sound like two people have written it.

SL: Did you only write one song, ‘The Other Side Of The Sun’, with Albert Hammond?

JANIS IAN: Yes, he was off to Brazil. That was my first co-writing experience and he was terrific to begin with as I was very nervous and he made it very easy for me. He was very gentle. Co-writing for the first time is like losing your virginity: you want somebody to be gentle and yet firm and to know what they’re doing so you don’t walk away feeling bad. I’ve met people who have had bad co-writing experiences for their first experience and it mars them.

SL: And what about ‘Jesse’?

JANIS IAN: I started that when I was 13 or 14 but I didn’t finish it until I was 20 because I didn’t have the life experience to write about that.

SL: And did you know that at the time?

JANIS IAN: It’s a question of having the talent and letting the talent lead. Part of the talent is instinct and when I get a song where nothing is going right but it has a good beginning or a good chorus, I know that I can set it aside and just stop. ‘My Tennessee Hills’ was like that. I had had that chorus for eight or nine years but it wasn’t until last year that it made sense. I’ve got notebooks full of bits of songs, but most of them are pretty bad. I write scraps all the time.

SL: Your last album, ‘Billie’s Bones, was a return to your roots.

JANIS IAN: Yes, I was pleased about that and I think the next album will be folkier still. There is a lot to be said for folk music. It’s having the ability to get up there with just a guitar and a voice or even no guitar and sing something that moves people. It is an art that is in danger of being lost, so going back to it is proving a point but I also like folk music. I think that anything you can do that is simple and has a common denominator and yet is not condescending is a good thing. It’s a worthwhile thing for a community to have something that brings them together.

SL: Presumably in Greenwich Village, you could write a song one day and perform that night for instant feedback.

JANIS IAN: You can still do that if you are a performer. I do that in Nashville all the time. It is just a little more complicated if you live somewhere where there are is not a lot of clubs.

SL: So you live in Nashville now?

JANIS IAN: Yes, for 16 years now. It was a country music town until the late 70s and early 80s when it started changing. The prime focus is still country because that is where the dollars are and that is where the fame is. We have a good jazz scene, a good hip-hop scene, a good Hispanic scene, so there is a lot going on.

SL: Country music is more like a fashion parade these days. JANIS IAN: It’s what Clear Channelisation is doing to music.

SL: Do you write for many country artists? JANIS IAN: Oh yeah, Nanci Griffith, Kathy Mattea and Maura O’Connell have done my songs. I have had some good covers.

SL: Are you writing at this moment?

JANIS IAN: No, I am trying to finish this tour. We are out until early December. Then I will go home for a couple of months and hopefully get some writing done and then we tour again late February to April. After that, I will shut down for the rest of the year and stay home and write.

SL:So you don’t write much on the road.

JANIS IAN: No, it’s impossible. If you’re doing five or six shows a week, it is impossible to have the energy.

SL: And you’re going out with just a guitar for a two hour show.

JANIS IAN: It is easier than going out with a band in some ways. It leaves you with more latitude, you can change keys, you can add things, you can drop things, and it doesn’t matter what order you do the songs in. It is harder though in that you have to carry two hours and that is a long time.

SL: Do you respond to requests?

JANIS IAN: When it is one I remember. There are over 350 songs now, so a lot of the songs have just faded in my memory. I can’t play the piano anymore and some songs like ‘Copper Painting’ are strictly piano songs. I injured a tendon in my left hand and I can’t do any stretching movements. I always wrote on both piano and guitar but it has tied me down in a good way. It has made me a better guitarist.

SL: Have you thought of doing a Broadway show?

JANIS IAN: Yes, I almost did one three years ago. I was going to write the music but it started falling apart. It didn’t work out with the librettist and I wasn’t sure that I wanted to devote three to five years of my life to an unhappy situation. I would love to do something though. I would love Broadway to go back to simple melodies and straightforward songs that you can walk out of the theatre singing. Now there are overblown theatrics and songs that no human being in their right minds would try to sing.

SL: So Paul Simon’s experience with ‘The Capeman’ hasn’t put you off?

JANIS IAN: I grew up on Broadway and a lot of my songs like ‘Applause’ and ‘Jesse’ are well suited to that which is very different from Paul Simon’s writing. I would never have thought of him as a natural for Broadway. He had a good bunch of people working with him and it is better to do it the old Rodgers and Hammerstein way where you have other people working around you who are in control of their parts. Julie Taymor was doing the choreography for that show and when she did ‘The Lion King’, she blew me away. I don’t know why it was savaged but it was not the smartest thing in the world to say in interviews that you had come to save Broadway. That didn’t help, but even so, if it had been brilliant and perfect for Broadway, the critics would been kinder as everyone wants to see Broadway live. The costs are so astronomical that Broadway is dying and it would be a shame if that happened. It’s a pity as Paul Simon may have ruined it for the rest of us.

SL: You have come out and married your partner. Is that something you thought a long time about.

JANIS IAN: I came out in 1992 when ‘Breaking Silence’ came out. It didn’t take much thought as my family knew and my business associates knew. I didn’t want to live a life where I was saying, ‘Oh no I’m not married’ or ‘Pat’s a she’. It seemed easier to get it done. We were going to Toronto anyway and one of us e-mailed the other and said, ‘Do you want to get married?’ That was that and it was great.

SL: Has it changed the audiences who come to your shows?

JANIS IAN: I don’t think so. I certainly haven’t noticed any change. I think the same people who wouldn’t come to my shows before still wouldn’t come to my shows.

SL: Do you feel like writing political songs, say, about the Iraq war?

JANIS IAN: I normally don’t write political songs and I take a more sociological view. I am not a good political songwriter as those songs are really hard to write. Dylan was the master of that, and also Phil Ochs from the journalist side. Bob is one for the universal but ‘Oxford Town’ is specific. ‘Masters Of War’ will be around as long as there are munitions makers. Bob is one for the universal. His early work is absolutely brilliant. There is nobody who has done it better than Dylan, nobody. It is like comparing Picasso to everybody else. He never wasted anything: he was elliptical but never illusory.

SL: Janis Ian, thank you very much.

JANIS IAN: A pleasure, thanks, Spencer.