Trying The Patience Of: Janis Ian
Well, after ten years of reviewing records, we finally scored an interview. And not just any interview, but an interview with the eminently interviewable Janis Ian. Read on...
DBW: This is David Wilson sitting here with Janis Ian.
Janis Ian: Hi, David. This is Janis Ian sitting here with David Wilson.
DBW: We could do this for...
JI: Hours. We could be the geeks of all time.
DBW: So, the new record. I haven’t had a chance to hear the new record.
JI: Excellent! No preconceptions. I can lie to you as much as I like.
DBW: Yeah. You can say anything. So, what can we expect?
JI: It’s very simple. It’s pretty straightforward. There’s a lot of acoustic guitar and vocal - a lot of acoustic guitar, vocal, bass - some acoustic guitar, vocal, bass, drums. So cut it like the sixties, keeping with the whole ethic of turning back the clock and going back to my roots. And it’s just three of us sitting around the studio, live, with baffles ahead of us but our heads above them, sitting pretty closely, and we play each song down - we have three days rehearsal at my place, which translated into a couple hours a day of playing and the rest just shooting the shit, and then we cut the whole album in three days; we did all the vocals live; we did no editing, and mixed it. It was great. Three weeks top to bottom.
DBW: Wow.
JI: Yeah. Hopefully, that shows. The song “Folk is the New Black,” um, I’d written the song as a sing-along for my shows. So I got 30 or 35 friends who are not professionals, and who can’t carry a tune to save their lives, and had them sing on the last chorus, and that’s up on the website now because I told my, uh, I told my message board fans that there would be a test at the end of every show and they’d better be able to sing that chorus.
It’s a little more political than my last works. It’s the first one in 23 or 24 years where I’ve written everything myself, and, uh, there’s some funny stuff on it. There’s some sad stuff on it. So it runs the gamut.
DBW: Is this the first time you’ve recorded that way since -
JI: Since the sixties, pretty much, yeah. We did Revenge sort of like that, but it was a six-piece band, so we had a much bigger room and much more separation. The drummer Steve Gadd was off in a booth, and it was a whole different thing. This way, like there’s one song “The Last Train” about - a woman’s on a platform in her, well I think of her in her sixties. She asks the Station Master if anybody had been asking for her, and she says, you know, “I’m late, but I thought he’d wait to say goodbye,” and the Station Master tells her that the train’s been gone for decades but that 40 years ago that very night the last train left for Vietnam. And then it says “in the distance thunder roared, the whistle pierced the cricket song, and you can hear tracks of the wheels the last train back from Vietnam.” And she starts running toward the train, and it stops, and a young man meets her at the door, and suddenly she’s young again. And it was great, because I recorded it, just me and a guitar, and then I was listening back to other musicians, and I said, “You know, it’s missing that thing that you get when a group of people are really truly sitting around in a mountain cabin, and somebody starts to sing, and someone else joins in, and someone else joins in,” and I said, “Let’s just go out and see what happens.” So it turned into this nice tapestry where I picked up a harmonica, and my drummer picked up a big barong and made the sound of thunder, and the bass player just played one long note, but it sort of makes a back drop. The whole album’s like that. I hate the word “organic” in this context, but it is a very organic album. One of the few albums I’ve ever done where both musicians wanted copies of the songs a month ahead; wrote out their own charts; both wanted lyrics to everything so they could make notes on the lyrics. And there were a couple of songs where I said, “Well, I’m gonna do this solo,” and they went, “No, no, no, no no, we should be playing on that!” Yeah, it was very alive. Very open.
DBW: That’s great. That sounds like it was a good recording experience also, right?
JI: Probably the most fun I’ve had in in a couple of decades. And more. Because it felt like we were doing Between the Lines, you know, where it was all live, and we’d do as much of the vocal as we could live, and um, musicians would really contribute. There was none of that “Oh, this is her song and her record.” That was always acknowledged, but they both felt real comfortable, and Victor Kraus was on upright, and he’s certainly a force to be reckoned with, and Jim Brock, the percussionist drummer, had been with me on just about every album of mine since ’92. So they both felt real comfortable putting in their two cents. And then they had Chad Hailey as our engineer, who - man, he’s done everybody, and he was - we were all at the point where we were sick of production; we were sick of electronics; and we all just wanted to make a real record with real music.
DBW: I wanted to ask you - a couple records back, I think god & the fbi, you said "this could be the last record I ever make."
JI: That was my last studio album before this, because the live album came out in between. Oh no, Billie’s Bones was in there, too. That’s right. Yeah, I think it’s a good attitude at my age, though, to figure that every album may be your last, because you just don’t know. I mean, you don’t know if you’re ever gonna get another contract, or another lease in my case. You don’t know what’s gonna happen to the world. You don’t know what’s gonna happen to you. So it’s a good attitude to not take that kind of cavalier “Oh I’ve been doing this a long time; I’ll get to do this a long time” - I don’t know that I’ll get to do this a long time. If I have to stand on an album, I’d stand on this one pretty happily. Now anyway.
DBW: Until the next one.
JI: Well, it’s gonna be a long time ‘til the next one, ‘cause I’m taking next year off to write an autobiography, and then the year after that, that’ll come out along with a “Best of,” and so it’ll be 2009, 2010 before there’s another studio album. Who knows where everything will be then.
DBW: OK, yeah, I got concerned, you know, ‘cause there have been people who have been around for a while who have just kind of stopped. You know, who -
JI: Well, sometimes that’s a good thing. I mean, I think it’s real good when you have nothing to say not to say anything. I know a lot of people I came up with who are doing rehashes, and that disturbs me, too, ‘cause I always think, “I understand you need to make a living; I need to make a living, too, but why put something really inferior out there?” You know it’s inferior; you know that. I mean, I know certain songs on this record are not as good as other songs on the record, and I know they’re there for a reason, but they’re still not as good. But to make a whole album that you know is not as good - I’d have a hard time living with that. And I’ve made albums that aren’t as good as other albums, but at the time I always thought they had some redeeming quality. Of course, maybe these people do too, in all fairness.
DBW: Well, actually, I wanted to ask you: you’ve said that you try to not listen to bad music.
JI: I work very hard not to listen to bad music. There’s no escaping it, though. I mean, elevators and streets and stores and coffee shops, and… You know, I remember being a kid and thinking, when muzak first began, wow, wouldn’t it be great if they played OUR kind of music - real music, you know, not just Montovani and Mitch Miller - and it’s sort of “be careful what you wish for.”
[LAUGHTER]
JI: And bad music sometimes has its own redeeming qualities. I mean, there’s music so bad that you look through the other end and you go, “Wow, that’s everything that I need NOT to do.” It’s like watching a really bad performer, and thinking, “You know, I could get sucked into doing that; I shouldn’t do that, and now I see why.”
DBW: Right, actually, yeah, I was going to ask if you’d ever learned anything from bad music or learned to, or - if it ever - now - you could write a good song about this but it wouldn’t be that, or any kind of a, like a critique of something that you had heard.
JI: I think that’s usually when I’m in a club and I’m listening to a young songwriter, and I automatically start re-writing and thinking, “Oh no, why did you go there? That’s so self-indulgent,” or “Why did you choose that rhyme?” Stella Adler, my acting teacher, used to always say “Your talent lies in your choices.” And that’s kind of a global thing, you know, it lies in your life choices. Like in my forties, did I choose to become bitter, or did I choose to realize that I would never have a hit again and I would never be astounding again or a child prodigy again, so what do I do with the rest of my life? That was a real clear choice to me, and it’s the same when you write a song or make an album. You know, I may have chosen wrong on this album, to do it the way I did it, but it was a clear choice, and I was aware of the choice. I think one of the things when you’re young and you’re inexperienced is that you don’t have as many choices, because you don’t have as much knowledge at your command. You know, now I can look at my own songs and see ten, twenty ways to take a particular song, or a chorus, or not-chorus. I couldn’t have done that when I was 15 or 16 or 25.
DBW: I was thinking about when you were, um, kind of when you were coming up, and I was just listening to very early, first Cris Williamson record that she made when she was about the age when you made your first record. I was thinking about the kind of folk music background that people, that some really great songwriters came up with that kind of background that I think it really, um, you know, must have kind of learned a lot, because they have such a kind of a broad base and range of experiences.
JI: Well, that’s the great thing about folk music, you know, that’s the thing that really I think distinguishes it from pop music or rock and roll. Those are relatively new forms. Folk music - you go back to the Renaissance, you go back to the troubadours as the first real roving folk singers - maybe even before that. So there’s this body of work you draw from when you start with the really early madrigals, you know, or some of the old folk songs about Anne Boleyn and the bloody tower, and if you come up like I did or like Cris did, where those were the songs you learned alongside Pete Seeger songs, you live in this huge world of historical span, such history, and you have all these different influences. Folk music would include Blues; it would include Spirituals; it would include, really, any kind of World Music. So it’s a huge well to draw from, as opposed to somebody like my road manager, Philip, who grew up in the punk age, and for whom Elvis was really the oldest he went back to. That’s very limited, you know, and the subject matter’s limited, whereas folk music has dealt with history, has dealt with anarchy, has dealt with riots and revolutions, so it’s a much broader well. A deeper well. I’m mixing my metaphors again.
DBW: And do you think that there’s a - I mean obviously the old, the folk music that existed forty years ago still exists if you can find it, but do you think that it’s more, more difficult now to find them when it seemed like there was more kind of a tradition of like-minded people who were, who were exploring that?
JI: I think it goes in circles. You know, “Oh brother where art thou?” certainly got a lot of people interested in Harry Smith anthologies, got a lot of people interested in bands like Del McCrory, who were completely off the radar for anybody but a small group of bluegrass fans. Just like the Kingston Trio and the Jan Mitchell Trio got people interested in Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. You know, one of the things I like about folk music is that it pays homage to its ancestry. Whether they know it or not, the kids now - the David Grays, whoever - are Woody Guthrie’s children. You know, they’re Pete Seeger’s children. They may not ever know the direct influence, but the people they’ve listened to listen to people who listen to those people. There’s a real lineage there that you’re just now starting to see in rock and roll. You know, as people say, “Oh, not Elvis, but Buddy Holly and the Crickets. Well no, but they were singing like Ferlin Husky, but they were singing like Farin Young.” There’s a lineage happening. Does that answer the question?
DBW: Um, yeah. I mean, in a way yes, everything old is new again, and things continually get rediscovered, um, but in another way I feel like sometimes there’s a particular place and time, and it seems to me like kind of in the early sixties there was kind of a critical mass of people who were kind of paying attention.
JI: Absolutely.
DBW: And in a way that, that - I don’t know, it seems to me like, like it’s not there -
JI: Well, don’t you think part of that’s, though, that every generation needs its own heroes? And part of it is that we were coming out of the HUAC years. We were coming out of the HUAC hearings; we were coming out of the blacklists, so there was already attention focused on that, and for my generation, we were hearing about that from our parents and from the older kids, so it led us right back, but it was only nine, ten years removed. I mean, I remember when Hootenanny started, and Pete Seeger was blacklisted, and it made the news. You don’t see that as much anymore. Things are much more indirectly subversive now. Plus there’s so much of it. I mean, there’s so much music now that to scout out the old stuff you’d have to be back when people actually sat down with vinyl and called ten friends and said, “Hey, you gotta come listen to this. Come listen to this. This is really cool.” And that doesn’t happen that often anymore. Not with Nintendo and PlayStation and cable TV and movies, and all the other things that we can go and do that are relatively inexpensive compared to what they used to cost.
DBW: Sure, sure, there are a lot more things competing for -
JI: A lot.
DBW: - for leisure time. Sure.
JI: And kids now, I mean, kids have access to so much more passive entertainment than we had. Records were one of the few things that were passive, and we made them active, because we would sing along, or we would act them out, or we would write out the lyrics by hand to learn them, whereas now all that - it’s dumped in your lap. There’s a video. You don’t need to act it out. You don’t need to imagine the story. You don’t need to write out the lyrics or learn them. It’s a whole different way of relating to art now.
DBW: What kinds of things do you find yourself listening to now?
JI: I listen to a lot of classical music. I’ve been on a Satie and Ravel kick lately. I always go back to Billie Holiday before an album. The last year I mostly listened to what I grew up on, just ‘cause I knew that I wanted to make that kind of record so I think it’s all still in my computer. The first Joan Baez, and the first Dylan, and the first Pete Seeger, early Weavers, Tom Paxton, that whole crowd - Buffy Sainte-Marie. Um, that’s what I was listening to all last year. And then this year I’ve just kind of been auditorally overwhelmed and not listening very much at all. But I skip around. Fans are always sending me music: "I love this record. Listen to this record. You’ll like it." It’s kind of a lucky thing.
DBW: Are you the kind of recording artist that when you finish something, it’s done and you put it away, or do you continually think, “Oh, if I only had -"
JI: Oh no, therein lies perdition. No, you make yourself crazy. No, it’s done, it’s done. I mean, it’s gotta be something really glaring. It’s like, there’s a couple spots in “Folk is the New Black” where, uh, there’s one spot where Victor thinks I’m going to an F, and I actually go to a G, and he said, “I’ll fix that,” and I said, “No, man, it’s life. That’s why they call it life. It’s fine; it’s not jarring; it’s not horrible. Let’s keep it; it’s life.” Beyond that, no, not really, you know. There’s so much clean-up work when you finish an album if you’re independent. Finish the album, you go into the artwork. Finish the artwork, you go into the mastering. Finish the mastering, you start sending it out. You get back your test copies, you know, and you make your corrections to that. By the time it’s done, I wish I’d never made it in the first place. I just want to get it out the door and move on. You know, and I found that pretty early, ‘cause I made so many records so fast that if I started looking back and making myself crazy, I couldn’t go forward. Do you know people who tie themselves up in knots over that? I always feel sorry for them.
DBW: This is terrific. It didn’t ever occur to me that I was ever gonna get this opportunity in the first place, really.
JI: How cool is that?
DBW: Yeah. So yeah, this is, this is great. So....
JI: So if you hate the album after all of this, that’s okay, too.
[LAUGHTER]
I thought about not including the last part of the interview because it could come across as self-serving, but I left it in because I think she makes a really interesting point:
JI: I really like you guys’ reviews. They’re always - even the bad ones I’ve gotten, I’ve always felt that there was merit to what you said. They’re honest reviews.
DBW: Yeah, that’s I think the one thing I always try to live up to, is if I gave you my real reaction, then even if it’s -
JI: It’s real.
DBW: Yeah, exactly, though I know I miss a lot of stuff, and that you never know what the artist was thinking on the inside, exactly what they were trying to do, you know.
JI: But you can’t. It’s our job to make sure you don’t need to.
DBW: I never thought about it that way.
JI: Well, otherwise, go create it in your living room, and stay there. I mean, to me, you know, the point of putting a record out is that people hear it, which doesn’t mean you put it out to be commercial, but you want people to hear it. You don’t want, you don’t want to make it in your living room. If your goal is to be understood, then you need to write songs that are understandable and make records that are accessible. Or do the exact opposite, assuming there’s an audience out there for that. But to get pissed off because a reviewer doesn’t get it, you know, unless the reviewer’s a complete asshole, you’re doing something wrong. You, the artist. That’s how I look at it.
Janis Ian reviews.
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