Before Billie Eilish, broke many “youngest ever” records, before Chappell Roan became a queer icon, before Carole King brought Semitic sex appeal to the stage, before Taylor Swift’s spiteful Taylor’s Versions, before Phoebe Bridgers gave a voice to mental health issues, before Kathleen Hanna shouted about women’s issues and Tracy Chapman about race issues, there was Janis Ian.
The Grammy-winning folk-turned-pop musician rose to fame at the age of 15 in 1967 with “Society’s Child (Baby I’ve Been Thinking),” a bold song about interracial relationships. The first scene of Janis Ian: Breaking Silence, the two-hour documentary directed by Varda Bar-Kar, shows a teenaged Ian performing the song on the CBS television special, Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution, presented by Leonard Bernstein.
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It’s a strong start to the film, setting the tone for viewers who may not be familiar with Ian as the household name she was half a century ago. The film blends long-ago archival footage, grainy images, and lo-fi audio with reenactments of Ian’s off-camera narration and her famous friends as talking heads, among them, Arlo Guthrie, Joan Baez, Jean Smart, Lily Tomlin, Laurie Metcalf, as well as journalists and Ian’s partners, past and present.
Janis Ian: Breaking the Silence is a singular story of a musician “…the size of a hood ornament on a Chevy…” “…this kid from New Jersey and her guitar was as big as she was…” “…so full of sass…” with something to say, plus the voice and presence to get people’s attention. Ian wrote her first song at the age of 12 and had it published in the prestigious magazine Broadside (same place as her heroes Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs) when she was 13. Ian was also the first ever musical guest on Saturday Night Live in 1975.
She has 10 Grammy nominations and two wins, the first in 1975, almost a decade after her initial popularity, for her heartbreaking tale of teenage angst, “At Seventeen.” She collected her second Grammy in 2013 for best spoken word album for the audiobook of her 2008 autobiography, Society’s Child: My Autobiography. “Society’s Child” and “At Seventeen” were inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
Ian isn’t looking for validation, but the fact is, Nina Simone, Celine Dion, Cher, Bette Midler, and Baez are some of the artists who have covered Ian’s songs. She is namechecked by many and if you know, you know. Her significant physical archives are housed at Berea College in Kentucky where they are serving as a historical record of life in the United States in the 20th and 21st century.
In 2022 Ian was told she had vocal fold scarring and was never going to sound like herself again. While this has put a stop to Ian’s musical touring, she is actively releasing recordings from the past, writing (including her science fiction work), and making appearances. Before Janis Ian: Breaking Silence makes its broadcast and streaming premiere on PBS’ American Masters later this year, the film is making the movie theater rounds, and Ian will be present at select screenings.
When we speak over the phone for SPIN, Ian’s confidence is as palpable now as it is in the vintage footage in the film. There are many mic drop statements from Ian and when we wrap the conversation, she leaves me with the biggest one: “It’s only always been my goal that my life live up to my talent, because I was born with the talent, but I’ve created the life.”
What made you want to do a documentary, or rather, agree to do a documentary now?
People have been trying to do documentaries about my life since I was 16. It’s not of great interest to me. When Varda approached me, I was even less interested. But she was very persuasive. My team had her not just send me links to both of her earlier films [Fandango at the Wall, What Kind of Planet Are We On?], but also do a 20-minute showpiece of what she was going to do. I was very clear that I wanted the film to reflect the times that inspired the music and the reasons for the music, not just be about how fabulous I am. I think she did an amazing job. The archival footage she found was stuff even I had never seen.
You say in the film that you didn’t hold onto things until your spouse encouraged you to do so. Is it a relief to have your archives housed at Berea College?
It’s an amazing thing that goes along with why I did the movie. There’s 60 years’ worth of everything, not just my life and my times, but the times. There’s a snapshot of what it means to be an American for the past 60 years. What it means to be a Jew in America. What it means to be a gay person in America. What it means to be an artist in the past 60 years in America. The archives include everything from my tax returns and contract notes to publicity stuff. That’s a treasure trove. Several universities are already going through the contracts and seeing the growth of contracts from 1963 to present in my industry. That’s being of service. That is being part of the community, and a responsible member of the community. As cliched and goody two shoes as that sounds, I think it’s really important to leave a mark that you can be proud of and to be generous with it. When you’re in a position where you can afford generosity, it behooves you to be generous.
You talk about that in the film: “As an artist, you’re of service.” That really stuck with me. Can you elaborate on that?
Part of the purpose of being an artist in the modern world is to reflect on the times, and that’s a service to the community. That doesn’t mean that you are obliged to do what the community wants or what the community requests. I’m using service in its most elevated form, in the sense that you’re a member of a community. For an artist, hopefully that community is the world. We are the harbingers. We are the record keepers. We are the ones that don’t care about polls. We say what we say, regardless of the cost, or the popularity. In that sense, art serves the world. In an ideal world, we would have artists running things—although most of us are not very good at that part.
Taking it to a more mundane level, if people are paying $50, $100, $250, $500, $5,000 to see you, then there’s an understanding that it’s a mutual effort. In my mind, concerts are not a one-way street. I used to say that there was an invisible line connecting the person on stage to the audience, and when that line was disrupted, even though the audience didn’t understand what was happening, everybody felt it. That invisible line continues when you have a recording that a lot of people listen to, like “At Seventeen.”
Were you thinking about the impact “Society’s Child” would have or the pushback you might experience when you were writing it?
Writing is a separate issue from everything else. I should be really clear about that. Writing is a separate art. But I didn’t think about [the impact] when we made the record either. I didn’t think about it until it started happening. My dad thought about it. He told me I was going to have a lot of problems from it. But I thought he was just being a super cautious old person. Who thinks about consequences when you’re 14? People keep telling me how brave I was, and really, it’s all accidental. I don’t think it’s bravery. For me, I happened to be in the right place at the right time. The luck of being born into that specific time. You’re doing what you do, and you don’t think about the consequences. You think about what needs to happen. Somebody like Joan Baez was much more aware than I was of what her music was capable of doing. I just wanted to make a record and get to play out in front of people. That was the goal. To discover that you could actually have a hit record on top of it, that was icing on the cake.
You were way ahead of your time singing about topics that are part of the conversation now, but weren’t back then.
One of the things that you learn as an artist is where your strengths are. The only strength I have is being able to talk about things people are afraid to talk about, in a way that makes them feel safe. I tend to write about the human condition. It’s a conversation opener. “Society’s Child,” from what I hear from fans, was a conversation opener for a lot of families. “At Seventeen” is a way to show somebody else that you understand what they’re going through and empower them. It goes back to service and communication.
You experienced prejudice against queer people even before you were representing yourself as part of that community. What are your thoughts on how things have changed?
Well, you can’t be locked up for being gay—at least not yet. The American Psychiatric Association doesn’t think we’re crazy. AIDS, in a backwards way, was really helpful, because a lot of families found out they had a gay child or a gay cousin or a gay parent for that matter. There was less hiding. AIDS pushed a lot of people to come out. It’s difficult, I think, for a gay person now to understand what it was like then. Looking back, I have a certain nostalgia for the era I grew up in, because in some ways it seems much simpler, technologically particularly.
On the other hand, if I had been out when I was 16, the way that a kid might be now, and I had done that in 1967, I would have lost my ability to perform. I would never have been played on radio. I could have been forcibly lobotomized. The repercussions are too horrendous to think about. Every time I say, “This is my wife,” that’s a piece of victory. Every time I put her name down as my next of kin, that’s a victory. We tend to forget in the heat of the moment how important those victories are and how meaningful they are. We forget until somebody tries to roll them back.
What are your thoughts about the attitude toward mental health issues now versus when you were struggling with them?
What I went through was a direct result of this perfect storm of “Society’s Child,” then my parents breaking up and then losing my health. There’s a point where you bow under the weight of that kind of pressure, and the only thing you can do is stop. One of the great temptations when an artist is being successful is to push them and push them. As artists, we’re taught that our job is to say yes, and there’s always the fear that if you don’t say yes, some great opportunity will pass you by and never come back. I am the person who turned down Woodstock, and yet here I am. You have to learn to say no, and that’s very difficult for an artist. You get to the point where your only sense of control is to say no, but by the time you’re at that point, you have to say no to everything. No becomes your default. Because I was so young, I hit the point where no was my default later. When I told my manager I was stopping, that was past the point that I should have been allowed to get to. It’s such an insulated life to begin with, and artists have very little protection.
You are one of the only artists from your era that set up your own label, and got your masters back. That’s another component of the music industry that is a big part of the conversation these days.
It was what I needed. It’s not being brave. It’s not having foresight. A bit of it is being with the zeitgeist, but most of it is just by accident. Something feels right, so that’s what you do. I wanted my masters back, and I wanted my own label because I couldn’t get a contract with a regular record label that made any sense. I knew what I wanted to do with my life, and I couldn’t do it the way I’d done it in the ’60s or the ’70s. For starters, the labels were pretty small. The music business was a business, not an industry. You could still reach the head of the label without too big a problem. Now you’ve got to go through 40 people. Now they’re all huge, giant, mega corporations. It’s a completely different world. When I formed Rude Girl records, it was right after Ani [DiFranco] had started Righteous Babe Records, and it was with the intention of putting everything I owned, including all of my unreleased material, in one place where nobody else could ruin it.
To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.
