Janis Ian
- Avg user rating:
Out of 44 votes - Similar Artists: Joan Baez, Mellissa Ethridge, Bonnie Raitt
Out of 44 votes
- Genre: Folk » Folk Singer-Songwriter
Editor's review
She learned the truth at age 17, and still Janis Ian has grown immensely as an artist since emerging as a folksinger in the mid '60s--creating some of her most poignant work some 40 years into her career. Whether provoking controversy with her risque, politically driven subject matter or simply offering her poetic and personal take on love, Janis Ian's voice is a pleasure.
Biography
2006 sees the release of Ian's twentieth major-label album, and to this writer's mind, her logical follow-up to the critically acclaimed Between the Lines. Titled Folk Is the New Black, the album takes no prisoners; from the wry self-deprecating humor of its title song ("Folk is the new black/cheaper than crack/and you don’t have to cook") to the political ("While politicians lie and cheat to get to higher ground/we follow them like sheep, and salute them as we drown"), to what is possibly the best love-'em-and-leave-'em song written in decades ("All those promises that you made me from the start/were filled with emptiness from the desert of your heart"), Folk Is the New Black is a songwriter's tour de force. Never mind that it took decades for her to come full circle; Ian is right back where she started, in the bosom of folk music at its best: older, wiser, her talent honed and sharpened until it cuts so fine, we barely feel the blade slicing through us.
