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Janis Ian - At Seventeen

Janis Ian - At Seventeen Lyrics and Youtube Music Videos

Album: Between The Lines
Released: 1975

At Seventeen Lyrics

I learned the truth At Seventeen
That love was meant for beauty queens
And high school girls with clear skinned smiles
Who married young and then retired
The valentines I never knew
The Friday night charades of youth
Were spent on one more beautiful
At seventeen I learned the truth

And those of us with ravaged faces
Lacking in the social graces
Desperately remained at home
Inventing lovers on the phone
Who called to say - come dance with me
And murmured vague obscenities
It isn't all it seems at seventeen

A brown eyed girl in hand me downs
Whose name I never could pronounce
Said - pity please the ones who serve
They only get what they deserve
The rich relationed hometown queen
Marries into what she needs
With a guarantee of company
And haven for the elderly

So remember those who win the game
Lose the love they sought to gain
In debentures of quality and dubious integrity
Their small-town eyes will gape at you
In dull surprise when payment due
Exceeds accounts received at seventeen

To those of us who knew the pain
Of valentines that never came
And those whose names were never called
When choosing sides for basketball
It was long ago and far away
The world was younger than today
When dreams were all they gave for free
To ugly duckling girls like me

We all play the game, and when we dare
We cheat ourselves at solitaire
Inventing lovers on the phone
Repenting other lives unknown
That call and say - come on, dance with me
And murmur vague obscenities
At ugly girls like me, at seventeen

Writer/s: Ian, Janis
Publisher: EMI Music Publishing, Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC
Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind

At Seventeen

In our interview with Janis Ian, she explained that this song is about feeling alienated while growing up. It was more about Janis' life between the ages of 12-14, but "17" fit better into the lyrics.

Janis was 15 when she had her first hit song, "Society's Child," and had been on the road for two years by the time she was 17. Although her childhood was not typical, she knew what it felt like to feel out of place at a young age.

Speaking about crafting this story, Janis explained in our interview: "I never went to a prom, but I did go to my 6th grade dance. That's the trick, it's just like acting. How many people are playing Hamlet whose father is a king? You take your own experience, find something similar in it and draw on that. Even though I didn't go to the prom, I knew what it was like not to get asked to the dance."

This song came at an opportune time for Ian. She told us: "I had to move back into my mom's house because I was broke and I couldn't make any money on the road. I was sitting at the kitchen table with a guitar one day, and I was reading a New York Times article about a debutante, and the opening line was 'I learned the truth at 18.' I was playing that little samba figure, and that line struck me for some reason. The whole article was about how she learned being a debutante didn't mean that much. I changed it to 17 because 18 didn't scan."

Janis wrote the first verse quickly, finding it flowed in a logical pattern: "I leaned the truth at 17," what did you learn... "that love what meant for beauty queens," and who else... "and high school girls with clear skinned smiles," what do we not like about that... "who married young and then retired." The chorus was a lot harder to write. Janis explains that at some point you don't have a lot of control over a song. You can control the craft, but not the inspiration.

Janis told us: "I wrote the first verse and chorus and it was so brutally honest. It's hard to imagine now but people weren't writing that type of song then. I was coming out of listening to people like Billie Holiday and Nina Simone, who did write those kind of songs, but pop music and folk music really didn't. I remember thinking I couldn't blow this because it really was going to be a good song. I put it away for three weeks and it took about three months to write the whole thing. I couldn't figure out the ending, I couldn't figure out what to do with her, then I thought I would recap it, bring myself into it and bring it into the past."

When she went to record this, Janis knew it was going to be a hit and wanted to make sure it came out right. She kicked the lead guitarist out of the session because he wasn't trying very hard to capture the feel of the song, replacing him with a young kid who was "so scared you could smell his sweat across the room." This made the other musicians in the room pay attention, and helped capture the feeling of confusion and adolescence Janis was going for.

Janis Ian: "To me it's never been a depressing song. It says 'ugly duckling girls like me,' and to me the ugly duckling always turns into a swan. It offers hope that there is a world out there of people who understand."

Getting this on the radio was no easy task. Not only was it packed with lyrics, but at 3:56, it was about a minute longer than most songs radio stations were playing. Janis and her management decided to market it to women, and because radio stations were dominated by men, they had to get creative. They sent copies of the song to the program director's wives, then put Janis on every daytime TV show they could. It was six months of exhausting, grassroots promotion, which paid off when they got a spot on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. This pushed the song over the top and it became a hit.

This was nominated for five Grammy Awards, the most any female artist had ever been nominated for at the time. It won for Best Female Pop Vocal.

Ian performed this song on the first episode of Saturday Night Live in 1975. (thanks, Michael - Mountain View, CA)

Janis Ian - Society's Child

Janis Ian - Society's Child Lyrics and Youtube Music Videos

Album: Janis Ian
Released: 1966

Society's Child Lyrics

Society's Child

Janis was 13 when she began working on this, 14 when she finished. She started it while waiting outside the office of her guidance counselor, who was kind enough to call Janis in for consults every time she had a science class. After that, she wrote most of it on the school bus.

This song is about an interracial romance. Janis was living in an all-black neighborhood in East Orange, New Jersey, where she was one of five white kids in the school. She told us: "I saw it from both ends. I was seeing it from the end of all the civil rights stuff on the television and radio, of white parents being incensed when their daughters would date black men, and I saw it around me when black parents were worried about their sons or daughters dating white girls or boys. I don't think I knew where I was going when I started it, but when I hit the second line, 'face is clean and shining black as night,' it was obvious where the song was going."

Janis: "I don't think I made a conscious decision to have the girl cop out in the end, it just seemed like that would be the logical thing at my age, because how can you buck school and society and your parents, and make yourself an outcast forever."

Janis didn't write this about a particular person: "My parents were the complete opposite of the parents in the song. They wouldn't have cared if I married a Martian, as long as I was happy... I felt bad for my Dad because everyone assumed he was a racist."

This was about the 10th song Janis wrote. Her first was a song called "Hair Of Spun Gold," which was published in Broadside when she turned 13. Broadside was an underground magazine that published folk songs by artists like Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger before they hit the mainstream. They invited her to sing it at one of their periodic shows they put on in Greenwich Village, where it got a huge reaction. Broadside kept asking Janis back, and "Society's Child" became one of the songs that became part of these performances.

Shadow Morton is a songwriter and producer who worked with The Shangri-Las before discovering Janis. This is how she describes their first meeting: "The way we got it cut was I was hanging around with the Reverend Gary Davis trying to learn guitar from him. His wife took a liking to me and told the owner of The Gaslight Cafe, Clarence Hood, that she needed me to open for the Reverend Gary. I did and this guy came running back stage and said 'kid, I'm going to make you a star,' which was such a cliché because I was into being a folk singer, I didn't need to be a star. Plus, at 14, you don't need to earn a living. I met him after school the next day and he took me up to Shadow Morton's office. Shadow was in one of his periodic funks, thinking he was going to leave the music business. He was sitting there with his cowboy boots on the desk, sunglasses and hat pulled over his head reading the New York Times, and he said 'yeah, go ahead.' So I sang him some songs, and realized he wasn't listening. Apparently, although I don't remember it, I pulled out a cigarette lighter and lit his newspaper on fire and left. A few minutes later he realized his newspaper was burning, put it out in the trash can, and thought 'what am I walking away from here.' He caught up with me in the elevator, pulled me back and actually listened. For some reason he decided this was the one we would cut, and a week later we were in the studio cutting it."

Janis: "I was pleased with the chorus because I had just learned to play an F-sharp minor chord. I had no idea it was unusual to have the chorus slowed down, but it became a real problem when we went to cut it."

At the time, many folk musicians looked down on pop radio, but Janis thought it was cool because they were playing Bob Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone," even though many of her fellow musicians thought he sold out.

Janis recorded this with six studio musicians. At a time when 3-4 songs were often cut in a three-hour session, they worked for two-and-a-half hours on this song without making much progress. The breakthrough came when the upright bass player, a jazz musician named George Duvivier, had everyone stop and really listen to the lyrics and get an idea what the song was about. They nailed it on the next take.

At the time, many studio musicians were just trying to crank out hit records, and rarely thought much about the lyrics and what the song was about. Having a jazz player in the session made a huge difference because he was willing to work with the vocalist.

Shadow Morton took this to 22 record companies before Verve/Folkways, a spin-off of MGM Records, took it as a tax loss. They signed artists like Janis, Richie Havens, and Laura Nyro expecting them to lose money. They did believe in the song and pushed hard to promote it. The song got some great reviews and isolated airplay in places like Flint, Michigan and parts of New York City. It gained some momentum as part of the protest movement, and also benefited from the rise of FM radio, which was willing to take a chance on songs like this.

Janis: "Lyrics in pop music were not a big issue until Dylan, and he was thought of as kind of a fluke."

The big break for this song came when Leonard Bernstein's producer saw Janis perform it at The Gaslight, and got her on his upcoming television special. The show had a huge audience - it was on Sunday night at 8, in a time when most people got only 3 or 4 stations and there was very little music on TV. Bernstein loved it and criticized radio stations for not playing it. The next day Janis' record company started promoting it in trade magazines and many radio stations picked it up. It was never a #1 hit because radio stations in many areas took a while before they added it, but this slow progression kept the song popular for a long time.

For most of the '90s, Janis dropped this from her set list because no one wanted to hear it, but then a lot of people who grew up listening to it started coming to her shows and asking for it. Many of these people were Vietnam veterans who heard the song because it was widely played on Radio Free Europe and on US military bases.

The original title was "Baby, I've Been Thinking." It was Shadow Morton's idea to change the title. (Check out the full Janis Ian interview.)

This was inducted into the Grammy Hall Of Fame in 2001.

In 2008, Janis Ian released her autobiography, which she titled Society's Child. She told About.com: "I just took the first three months of 2007 and went through all my old journals, went through a lot of old letters I had friends send back to me, a bunch of old press clippings. I kind of made a map of my life. I attached a time to when the songs were written, when the records were made, when songs were hits. And then once I decided to do a prologue and open it with the 'Society's Child' chapter, it all pretty much fell into place." (thanks, Bertrand - Paris, France)

According to the 2010 United States Census, Janis Ian's home city of East Orange has a population of just 64,270, yet it has spawned a host of other successful artists including Dionne Warwick, Whitney Houston, Queen Latifah, Gordon MacRae, Young & Company, Naughty By Nature as well as Curtis Hudson and Lisa Stevens, the writers of Madonna's first hit, "Holiday."