[Janis Ian] has proved herself to be one of the most important writer-performers of the Seventies, and she looks at and into you from the cover photo with a veiled stare that can X-ray a situation, the people in it, and the probable outcome easily, knowingly, compassionately.
Janis Ian operates in the pop-music business, which perhaps denies her the instant credentials the fancier literary and artistic worlds might provide. But what she's been creating for the last several years is a body of work that, for awareness and insight into life as it's being lived (or played) in our time, stands creditably alongside the best in any field of contemporary creative expression…. ["Janis Ian"] finds Ian in a more subdued and contemplative mood than the flash and fireworks of her previous "Miracle Row." There isn't anything here that raises the emotional temperature in quite the same way as, for instance, Party Lights, or the grim Latin melodrama of Will You Dance? did. But, while most of the material here may be emotionally in a minor key, it is some of the most assured and elegant work of her career. In this group of eleven songs, literal meaning often gives way to less logical—but equally valid—color, mood, and texture. The key song seems to be the last one, Hopper Painting. It isn't about Edward Hopper, or even about one of his paintings. Instead, it is an ambiguous piece, either about Ian herself or about someone with whom she's once been close…. [By] the time she reached the second chorus I had long since ceased to care much about what the song meant, and much more about the way it was making me feel. I surrendered to the atmosphere Ian was creating, and it was an entrance into a very Hopper-like world indeed. This song, like several others here The Bridge, Some People, and Streetlife Serenaders, has the same cryptic beauty, the fascination with the everyday, and the moment-caught-forever feeling as Hopper's paintings.
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