Janis Ian

Janis Ian: A Life In Song

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, 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 supplies college scholarships in perpetuity; they're working on their ninth.

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 spend ten months every two years doing sold-out tours of Holland, the United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, Germany, and others too numerous to mention - and these are not club tours, these are concert halls. 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.

"Many musicians are gifted; Janis Ian is brilliant." —The Advocate

"How rare is a truly bare heart."
—Rolling Stone Magazine

featured video

Buy titles at:

releases

Souvenirs : Best of Janis Ian + bonus DVD

featured songs