Janis Ian - singular talent

Many of these blog entries have highlighted books or authors that I find inspiring. I've meant to add some of my favourite recording artists (a phrase I usually find awkward), or entertainers or singers or chanteuses ... take your pick.

Being a baby-boomer born in the early 1950s - blessed with an unusually good memory - I recall many things:

• some of my childhood in the latter part of the 50s
• the critical decade as I moved through childhood, high school and puberty and started to comprehend politics and social upheavals of the 60s
• my early adult years played against the dynamisms and schisms of the 70s
• the exciting, confusing, and exhausting career-building years of the more sedate (Reagan era) 80s
• the (personal) challenges in my family and career lives as technology really started to change everything in the 90s, and finally...
• as I entered late-career time and the concept of terrorism became mainstream and local during the naughts or zeros decade of the new century.

Now... to finally get to the point.

Of all the records I purchased, and all the CDs I have accumulated over the decades, one stands out as my favourite. (I know... is making that choice even realistic?)

The 1975 album from Janis Ian, BETWEEN THE LINES, still stands above all others for me. It is a profoundly adult collection of sad, morose, and melancholy songs - actually poems of love and loss. (It is reasonable to assume that my personal streak of melancholy influences the impression of depression.)

In spite of the collection's incessant malaise, there is also, to my view, a nascent streak of happiness, just about to emerge. In its entirety, BETWEEN THE LINES is a singular accomplishment, is beautiful, will stay with you (obviously if I'm an example of its alure) and never sounds dated.

STARS is the album from 1974, which makes BETWEEN THE LINES possible. It is more of a pastiche of styles, still angst-ridden, but not as complete a work of melancholy. But you must hear the title track - it is a stunner about the arc of fame. (Actually inspired by Don McLean's Vincent).

Janis has recently released her autobiography  Society's Child. The reason I listed the decades is that I first heard her song Society's Child in 1969 or 1970, when I was 17 or 18. It is a stunner about racial intolerance. She was only 15 when she released that song!