Music

Janis Ian: Breaking Silence — a career-spanning documentary about groundbreaking singer-songwriter Janis Ian, in theaters now – began with a simple, polite message to the artist’s official website.
“I said, ‘Hi, my name is Varda Bar-Kar, I’m a filmmaker and I’d like to make a film about you,’” the London-born director tells Billboard. “And I said ‘no,’” interjects Ian with a mischievous smile. “That was my kneejerk response.”

The film’s journey might have ended right there had it not been for Bar-Kar’s gentle persistence and a few helpful coincidences. Despite the dismissive greeting, the director kept in touch, sharing links to a few of her other documentaries, Big Voice and What Kind of Planet Are We On?; additional correspondence between the two revealed mutual acquaintances, similar experiences and a shared interest in Zen Buddhism.

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“I had just walked away from a potentially lucrative [movie] deal with another entity,” Ian says of her reticence to participate. “I firmly did not want a puff piece.” But after viewing a 20-minute proof of concept from Bar-Kar, the Grammy-winning singer of “At Seventeen” felt like she could trust the director with her time and story.

“I wanted something that reflected the times,” Ian says of her dream for the project — and Bar-Kar’s engrossing, informative documentary does that superbly. Watching the film, one gets as much of a sense of America’s complicated, shifting identity over the decades as one does Ian’s own life and personal evolution. We watch the turmoil of the Civil Rights era inspire Ian, a 14-year-old girl from a farm town in New Jersey, to write “Society’s Child,” a song about an interracial romance smothered by external prejudices. Then, we see how American audiences – with all their contradictions and confusions – reacted: Some hailed her as an astonishing, bold voice, pushing the single to No. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1967; others hurled racial slurs at her during concerts, reducing the teenage singer to tears for daring to suggest love could go beyond racial boundaries.

That song wouldn’t be the last time that Ian – who publicly came out as a lesbian in 1993 – would find herself alternately celebrated and pilloried by audiences and industry players. Named after the album that came out when she did, the film uses Ian’s unusually insightful music, her memories and fresh interviews with Joan Baez, Arlo Guthrie, Lily Tomlin, Laurie Metcalf, Jean Smart, the late Brooks Arthur and others to tell the story of her impact and importance.

Ian and Bar-Kar sat down with Billboard one morning in Manhattan to discuss making the film, frustrations with music licensing, why the former’s performance on the first-ever episode of Saturday Night Live isn’t included in this doc and plenty more. Janis Ian: Breaking Silence is in select theaters now, and hits streaming on April 29.

As we see in the documentary, Janis, you were a guest on Leonard Bernstein’s TV program at the age of 14. I know he did the Young People’s Concerts series – were you aware of him and how big of a deal that was at the time?

Ian: It didn’t even occur to me. The Bernstein thing didn’t compute that it would be any big deal. My parents and grandparents were freaking out, but for me, I had to get my Spanish homework done. Felicia Bernstein [Leonard Bernstein’s wife] helped me with that homework. (My parents) had wanted the second-generation immigrant dream (for me). I was clearly musically talented, so they wanted me to be a classical pianist. But if you look at my hands, the only thing I could’ve played was Mozart or Bach. And I wasn’t interested: the minute I discovered boogie-woogie and rock n’ roll, that was it. Either that or (they wanted me to be) a doctor, and I had zero interest in being a doctor. When I said I was going to be a singer-songwriter, nobody was thrilled. They were supportive, but they weren’t thrilled. Bernstein was like, as someone says in the film, the mark of God. He was hellbent on convincing the old guard that believed the only real culture was European that America had its own culture. He fought that battle his entire life…. “Society’s Child” aligned with his whole community service: the concept of the artist as someone of service to the community.

In the film, you talk about starting out by imitating Odetta and Joan Baez and taking a moment to find your own voice. Even so, you found it fairly quickly. Do you have any advice for young artists who are already making music but still searching to lock in on their own voice?

Ian: I think my generation in some ways was much luckier than this one. Lyrics were not usually with albums, so you would sit down with the new whoever album and copy out the lyrics. Any artist knows that when you imitate and copy, it’s just like a computer – if you put garbage in, you get garbage out. So by copying Bob Dylan, Dylan Thomas, Odetta as a vocalist or people like Joan Baez and Billie Holiday, I was really putting the best into myself. I encourage people to imitate other people, because it lets you know what you’re not good at. But the next step for me was that I realized I was not hearing the voice on tape that I heard in my head. So I apprenticed at (a studio) when I lived in Philadelphia for nothing. I swept floors, I did patching and I learned about cables, and in return they would let me work with the second or third-tier assistant engineer for an hour a night. Working with a really good Neumann microphone watching the meter, I learned how to sing without a limiter, which gave me this vocal control. Even now with my vocal scarring, my (doctor) told me I still have better breath control than most people. It took three years to get the voice in my head to come out on tape. Now, for better or worse, you don’t have the gatekeepers. You don’t have the time you had – or were forced into – to create yourself, because ultimately artists end up creating themselves. It’s difficult when you can put out music every three months, because the temptation is to believe whatever you’ve done most recently is the best. And a year later you’re looking at it thinking, “Oh, my God.”

Varda, this film includes a lot of vintage clips and music – all of which effectively puts you into each era, but it must have been a beast to license.

Ian: (laughs)

Bar-Kar: Finding them was fun. It was like a treasure hunt. The film took a number of years, I did a lot of research. I even read a whole book about the summer camps (Ian attended as a kid).

Ian: The commie-pinko camps (laughs). I sent her everything that I had digitized.

Bar-Kar: I went through all of that. My daughter, Paloma Bennett, was the archive producer and she has an incredible capacity for taking in a lot of material. And there’s a lot of music in there as well. With regards to the licensing…

Ian: It was a nightmare. She’s never going to use music in a film again and I told her I’ll make it up to her: she can use anything I own.

Bar-Kay: (laughs) I stuck it through, though.

Ian: We started off with almost 50 songs, and I don’t own all of them.

Bar-Kar: It was fun to research, but the music licensing part was very difficult.

Janis, you sang “At Seventeen” on the first episode of SNL, which is not featured in the movie. Was that a licensing issue with the footage?

Ian: I think we decided it was irrelevant. It was a blip.

Bar-Kar: Actually, it turned out to be very fortuitous.

Right, all the SNL 50 celebrations and movies.

Ian: They did our publicity for us.

Bar-Kar: Fate is amazing sometimes. We already had the Johnny Carson performance of “At Seventeen.” It’s one of those things where if you have too much, it diminishes it, it doesn’t add to it. It was smushing too much together.

Ian: And looking back now, people go, “Oh that was a landmark thing.” But then, it was very much not – nobody cared. The show didn’t have legs until the second episode when Paul Simon was on. But NBC has done a brilliant job of making a lot out of it.

Bar-Kar: It’s almost like a trilogy now: there’s the Bob Dylan film (A Complete Unknown), SNL 50 and now our film. They fill in the different gaps.

Ian: I thought the Queen film that came out before was one of the best biopics I’ve ever seen. That’s the only film I’ve ever seen where walking on stage in a huge amphitheater is actually accurate. Everybody thinks there’s all these people making a gangway for you, waving you on. No. There’s equipment flying past you, there’s people shoving you. They don’t care if you’re making 10 million dollars that night: they just don’t want you getting hit by the Anvil case.

Bruce Springsteen, Ed Sciaky, Billy Joel and Janis Ian in ‘JANIS IAN: BREAKING SILENCE.’

Peter Cunningham/Courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment.

In 2022, Janis, you had to cancel your farewell tour due to scarring on your vocal cords. In the film, you talk about feeling deprived of a sense of resolution that farewell tour may have provided. Does this film, in some sense, give you that resolution?

Ian: No, there’s really no resolution for it. It’s difficult to know how to respond because I don’t know how I feel about it still. I think if I had been in my forties or fifties, I might have tried some of the surgeries, even though 90% (odds) it would just come back worse. But having talked to specialists, I know I’m really lucky I retained anything. It is what it is. My ENT [ears, nose and throat] guy, who I really trust said, “Look, you had a 60-year career full tilt. You made, what, 25 albums, toured nine months a year? That’s an unbelievable amount of vocal use. And the instrument is just not made for that.” I’m really grateful. I think as an artist, you live with a monkey on your back, and the monkey keeps saying, “you’re not doing enough, why aren’t you better? Why aren’t you more? Why aren’t you perfect?” And there is no perfect. This last album I made (2022’s The Light at the End of the Line) was the first time in my entire life I felt I had actually lived up to my talent. So to live long enough, to do that as a writer and a singer, that’s a resolution in and of itself.

It must have helped with that album that you were able to take your time – unlike, as you talk about in the movie, your Aftertones album, which you felt rushed into releasing after “At Seventeen” hit big.

Ian: Yes, Aftertones, bane of my existence. And the fact that (The Light at the End of the Line) got nominated for a Grammy [for best folk album] – I wasn’t even politicking at all – was astonishing. That gave me my tenth nomination. If I look at it that way, it’s an amazing career. And it still is.

And unlike some singer-songwriters who are decidedly more the latter, you truly used your voice to its full power.

Bar-Kar: [to Ian] I love your singing voice.

Ian: I can get away with a half a verse, maybe, but I don’t know what would happen if I tried to sing a full song.

Your song “Stars” has been covered by a lot of artists, including Nina Simone, which is a huge compliment. Did you ever get to spend time with her?

Ian: Old friends. Some people are hard to be friends with. Nina was not easy to be friends with. But worth every second. At the Village Gate she did a 10-minute show, and somebody said to me, “Why do you keep coming to see her?” I said, “I learn more in 10 minutes than 10 hours from anybody else.” That’s how amazing she was. That was the same night she came backstage complaining she missed her mother so much, and my mom was backstage with me, so I blithely said, “Why don’t you come for lunch tomorrow?” My mother said (whispers) “shut up, shut up.” She said, “You got us into this, you’re doing the shopping and you’re hosting.” (Simone) showed up with James Baldwin and they both proceeded to get seriously potted. My ex-husband had to carry Nina to the cab.

Bar-Kar: I highly recommend her autobiography. There’s so much more to her story than what’s in the film.

Ian: It’s out of print right now, but Random House gave me my rights back two weeks ago.

Bar-Kar: Wait two months and buy it.

Ian: You can still download it or download the Grammy-winning audiobook (smiles). I know a lot about song licensing because of (singing and narrating my audiobook). … I just went through a thing. Sony has my admin right now — just because I really like the person in L.A., that’s the only reason (I’m with) Sony, it’s a corporation. The royal British something-or-other wanted to use a song of mine in a textbook. To me, that’s a great compliment. It’s been eight months and they haven’t been able to get an answer. It becomes a ridiculous nightmare. There are a lot of people at corporations who should have nothing to do with music.

Bar-Kar: I heard it used to be different, that it was people who loved music and now it’s more of a business.

Ian: Failed musicians would go into the music industry. And then the suits came in the early ‘80s, late ‘70s, that was the first generation of Harvard Business School graduates. That was why I left CBS in ’83. I looked around and I thought, “This is all lawyers.” And I don’t have a problem with lawyers, but I do have a problem when you start phasing out everybody who cares about music. They made it impossible for the remaining people. They’re so big but they’re so understaffed because they wasted so much money – all that coke that went up the executives’ noses, I think. They always said the singers did it, but it wasn’t the singers as much (as them). We could do an entire Billboard magazine about that.