[In the early 1960s, the genre of teen songs had "the boy-friend" as their central theme. The demons of teendom were the other girls. Parents] were another conflicting force. Her parents usually disapproved of Jimmy or Eddie or Johnny, and made vague but forceful class distinctions to keep the lovers apart. Their objections were met with either rebellion or death. Only Janis Ian capitulated in "Society's Child," breaking the mold. (p. 77) Outside of a few songs written by ...

The first thing that struck one about Janis Ian was her youth and the precocity of her talent. (p. 205) It was in 1966, after her dramatic first appearances at Green-wich Village's Village Gate, that Janis made her first album for Verve-Forecast [Janis Ian]. Immediately the record earned the admiration of the educated public, but also the disapproval of the Establishment. This was due to the most noticed song on the album, "Society's Child," which tackled the problem of racial di...

Janis Ian is for the trendies one of the most exciting, red-hot writer/performers in pop at the moment; for the rest of us she's definitely here to stay. With "Miracle Row,"… she has seized for herself the title of Girl Most Likely to Get Pop off Its Moribund Ass in the Late Seventies. Like the lady herself, "Miracle Row" exudes theatricality. It has equal amounts of the high romance of the low life and the jaded, dark-red-nail-polish lows that accompany the high li...

[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 tha...

Janis Ian has grown into a charming, mature singer-songwriter. There is surely some of the snotty kid in there somewhere, but what was once called uppityness is now called arrogance…. Recently, with the re-release of her very first recordings, that pretentious teenager has come back to haunt Janis Ian….

Janis Ian was one of the authentic voices of the Sixties, one of the street kids who told it exactly as it was without any of the "poetic" trimmings. She directed her coruscating wit, gelid eye, and scolding fury as much at the opportunists of her own generation who were corrupting the dream as at the society that feared and brutally repressed anyone not stamped out by the cookie cutter. But Ian seems to have paid a high price for her own involvement and convictions. She came back about a year...

[Among contemporary lyricists, Janis Ian] is second as a poet only to John Lennon (certainly) and Dylan and the Airplane's Slick-Kantner-Balin combination (maybe). She does not indulge in the obscurantist, free-associational quasi-poetry that passes for profundity among many of her contemporaries—and elders. She has, instead, the rather quaint notion that words are designed for meaningful communication. Which does not mean that she is simplistic or obvious—merely that most of her songs ...

Seven years after the success of Society's Child, a watershed topical song written when she was fifteen, Janis Ian is back, at the age of twenty-two, with songs composed during her own private season of hell. Always one of the most sensitive of composer/performers, often hypersensitive in live performance, she has at last stopped meandering artistically and [on "Stars" has] come to some positive conclusions: yes, the public will eat you alive if you let it, but she still wants to be a S...

[The Secret Life of J. Eddy Fink is] a real down. It's pretty awful, despite containing some interesting elements. There are only three truly good songs on it: Friends, Misery and Son; I include the latter on the basis of some rich, imagistic lyrics. Friends is delightful, a loving parody of Dylan's c&w-tinged stuff, performed with exactly the right balance between mockery and conviction (except when Janis breaks up at one point). The words aren't parodic, for the most part, though ...

[Janis Ian] is a national phenomenon, a composer and singer who makes bitter poetry of teen-age dilemmas. Her most successful record, entitled Society's Child, detailed the woes of interracial dating…. Her first album, [Janis Ian, touched] heavily on prostitution, corrupted religion and children…. The second album, [For All the Seasons of Your Mind], explores such subjects as suicide and loneliness. Her folk songs, tinged with funereal dissonances, tear up the old folks at home. Their l...

As far as hype goes, it may have been all over for Janis Ian when she quit writing hit songs about being an ugly teenager with a hit song. But as her craft matures, Ian's lyrics get more distilled, her emotions more subtle, the brisk melodies more distinctive. And her best numbers have become the kind of adult love songs that make singers cry and other composers bite their lips…. [Janis Ian] contains at least three tunes ("That Grand Illusion," "Tonight Will Last Forever,&...

["Miracle Row"] is a disappointing production and contains no songs of the At Seventeen/Watercolors caliber found on Ian's best-selling "Between the Lines" album. (p. 144) [Crucial] to the failure of "Miracle Row" is its dearth of strong material. Many of the new songs are inferior recyclings of old ideas. Party Lights, Let Me Be Lonely, Slow Dance Romance, Will You Dance? and I'll Cry Tonight in one way or another all touch on a theme that Ian has tre...

Most of Ian's new material [on Miracle Row] recycles old musical ideas, again evoking the hypocrisies of social rituals and romantic encounters. However, these miniatures are problematic due to the obsessiveness of Ian's craft: by combining melodramatic chords and claustrophobic rhymes, she reconstructs her psychological perceptions too literally. Still, there are a couple of nice moments. "I Want to Make You Love Me" has a more relaxed melodiousness than one customarily associat...

Janis Ian has arrived. The ugly duckling of Society's Child has, all these years later, become the most glittering and luminescent of swans. ["Aftertones"], her best album to date, is one of those joyous things that probably happen only once in an artist's lifetime: that particular moment when everything that has gone before finally coalesces into sustained, articulate, and controlled statement. The intelligence is remarkable, the craftsmanship superb and the attack dazzling thro...

Sixteen-year-old Janis Ian has a message. But whether its content is reality or fantasy, one theme is predominant—disintegration of the mind, leading to mental destruction of society…. [In a recent live performance, the] recording artist methodically and unemotionally spelled out her message in song. With her crisp voice, she soared to the heights while dousing her audience with her macabre incantations. Insanity, frustration and apathy, Vietnam, poverty and loneliness—she sang them all...

The youth movement in the music biz was given a tremendous boost [recently] when Janis Ian made her concert bow to a near-capacity audience. Only 16 years old, Miss Ian stunned her peers and her elders with the power of the material…. Miss Ian's celebrated number about an inter-racial love affair, "Society's Child," was only a partial tipoff on the calibre of this girl's compositional talents. She can write blues, rock and folk on any topic, from prostitution, old a...

[I find Janis Ian interesting because she uses a] powerful cerebrum more to move people than to impress them. Sometimes she overdoes it and works for shock value alone…. In such cases, she's merely doing what worked so well before—Society's Child, written when Janis was a little kid, separated the liberal men from the liberal boys. But she is a prodigy growing up, and her later work deserves a larger audience. (p. 60) Noel Coppage, "Troubadettes, Troubadoras, ...

With Miracle Row Janis Ian is no longer the "poor, sad dear" her many fans perceived…. Janis' writing has grown…. It is not so self-centered. The remaining traces of what has evidently been self-pity and self-righteousness are turning quickly into maturity. Songs such as Take to the Sky and the building Candlelight reflect this growth. The grand finale of the intertwined stories Miracle Row/Maria is as impressive a piece as she has ever put together.