Author: Ian, Janis

Release Date: 01-03-2012

Details: Product Description Who are the great songwriters in America today? Not the most popular. Not the richest. Simply the greats. Ask any student of the form, and Janis Ian will be counted among them. The writer of Jesse, a song recorded by so many others that few remember Ian wrote it; Stars, possibly the best song ever written about the life of a performer, recorded by artists as diverse as Mel Torme and Cher; and the seminal At Seventeen, a song that brought her five Grammy nominations (the most any solo female artist had ever garnered) in 1975, which is now reaching its third generation of listeners. The glowing reviews come as no surprise to Ian's loyal fan base, who gives her website a stunning quarter million hits per year – even though she hasn't had a top twenty record here in three decades. Ian has had great success as a co-writer, with cuts by Bette Midler, Kathy Mattea, John Mellencamp and a host of others. But Folk Is the New Black is the first album since 1981's "Restless Eyes" that sees Ian writing 100% of everything. 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, wise, her talent honed and sharpened until it cuts so fine, we barely feel the blade slicing through us. Amazon.ca Now in her fifth decade of recording, Janis Ian might be expected to slack off a bit--record a collection of covers, for example--but she still maintains the highest standards for herself in writing original and well-crafted songs based on snapshots from the human and political experience. Coming on the heels of 2004's extraordinary Billie's Bones, with its predominant jazz-blues shapings, Folk Is the New Black may seem a bit too much like a throwback, a slighter effort, particularly as the bookending songs, "Danger, Danger" and the title track evoke the classic '60s hootenanny protest forms without adding anything new or evoking much militant ire. But this beautifully conjured and executed album resonates with soul-shivering truth, and even mundane observations often glisten on the page as poetry. As each song spotlights a haunting moment in a lover's life ("All Those Promises"); tells the story of sad, ephemeral presence in this harsh ol' world ("Jackie Skates"); or uses Woody Guthrie-ish wit to illuminate an event in the artist's personal journey ("My Autobiography"), Ian proves time and again how she has continued to stand tall in the pantheon of America's finest singer-songwriters. --Alanna Nash

UPC: 620638040324

EAN: 0620638040324

Languages: English

Binding: Audio CD

Item Condition: UsedVeryGood