Lighting the way
Janis Ian (photo courtesy Lloyd Baggs) Singer/songwriter Janis Ian talks about her career and her final solo studio album GREGG SHAPIRO | Contributing WriterGreggShapiro@aol.com By my count, queer singer/songwriter Janis Ian has had four distinct chapters in her musical career.
The first began when she was in her teens with the release of her groundbreaking single “Society’s Child”, and the albums on Verve Records that followed in the late 1960s.
By the mid-1970s, for the second chapter, Ian had signed to Columbia Records, resulting in the biggest hit single of her career, the Grammy Award-winning classic “At Seventeen.” She remained on Columbia into the early 1980s, even collaborating with Giorgio Moroder on the song “Fly Too High.” The third chapter occurred in the early 1990s.
Bette Midler recorded Ian’s song “Some People’s Lives,” the title track of Bette’s Grammy-winning 1991 album. Ian herself recorded the song for her marvelous 1993 comeback album, the aptly titled Breaking Silence.
