Janis Ian – The Light At The End Of The Line
Rude Girl Records – 21 January 2022
The Light At The End Of The Line is Janis Ian‘s first album in 15 years; she has also announced that it’s her last solo release. As such, there’s a strong reflective tone and references to pivotal earlier songs and experiences. Indeed, featuring Randy Leago on piano and Viktor Krauss on upright bass, it begins with a revisiting of the simple acoustic but defiant I’m Still Standing, a number that first appeared on 2014’s Simply Solo and which she describes as an older, wiser At Seventeen (“See these marks on my skin?/They are the lyric of my life/Every story I begin just means another end’s in sight/Only lovers understand/Skin just covers who I am”).
It’s followed by the equally defiant but musically contrastive Resist, a sparsely percussive, brass embellished jazzy blues groove arrangement that, complete with a rap midsection, plays as an extension of the sociopolitical commentary of her debut single Society’s Child, as a simmeringly angry attack on the misogynistic repression of women that touches on female genital mutilation (“Carve out between her legs so she can’t come”), subjugation to the male gaze (“Tell me I’m ugly so I’ll buy your crap/Tell me you want me ‘cause I don’t talk back”), religion (“Tell me I carry the original sin/Tell me I’m holy when I cover up my skin”), infantilism (“Call me your baby so I never grow up”) and double standards (“You want me to be sexy/You want me to be pure”), as she declares “I cannot be your virgin and I will not be your whore” and ends with the power of music to form a solidarity of resistance (“It’s a funny kind of thing, when you sing a little song and you get a couple people to sing along…you raise up your fist and you learn to resist and you say ‘I will not disappear’).
Featuring just nylon string acoustic and harmonica, Stranger addresses America’s broken immigration process (Ian’s grandparents were all from Eastern Europe) and (applicable equally to other countries, as with the recent Windrush scandal in the UK) the attempt by authorities to repatriate people who have been in the country for decades (“Now I have to leave again/Leave my family, leave my friends/Don’t know where they’re sending me/Only know that I will be a stranger there”).
Featuring Nuala Kennedy on Irish whistle and John Whelan on button accordion, Swannanoa has a traditional Irish air to it (and an echo of Shenandoah), the title referring to the Swannanoa River Valley in North Carolina where she teaches at the Swannanoa Gathering, its celebration of the landscape extending the idea of being apart from the land you love. In contrast, featuring just her voice and guitar and recorded live, the theme of loss extends to Wherever Good Dreams Go, a plaintive, poignant song written for a friend who’d lost a child (“A ceiling full of stars/Mobiles hung in gay displays above the cradle bars/Sometimes I think I hear your laughter through the door/Then I remember what I won’t hear any more”) about the ache and comfort of memory and how you can learn to live with the grief but you never get over it.
Again a musically spare arrangement, this time for just voice and piano, she hits the halfway mark with a musing on self-identity in Perfect Little Girl, a song inspired by her friend and fellow songwriter Cindy Bullens and her gender transition to become Cid Bullens, escaping from the female body in which he was trapped and the anguish of trying to pretend to be something you’re not.
Another fellow performer and friend, one of her longtime heroes, is the subject of Nina, a work tape recording piano-accompanied vintage Ian, almost lullabying ballad homage to Nina Simone, a complicated personality that celebrates her brilliance (“Alphabets of lightning falling from your lips”) while acknowledging she was also “Crazy as a loon”. It’s essentially Ian’s Vincent.
There is, perhaps inevitably, a pandemic-fuelled track, the simple fingerpicked Dancing With The Dark (This Long Night). Still, it extends beyond the trials and tribulations of Covid as a song, a prayer almost, about wanting to be rid of the burdens that threaten to overwhelm (“Take this sorrow from my soul/I have prayed to find some rest/It’s a weight I cannot hold”), yet still limned with the hope that “This long night cannot last forever”.
The darkness continues into Dark Side Of The Sun, a fascinating song that, accompanied by a bluesily minimal fingerpicked guitar, is written from the perspective of Lucifer, his pain and regrets (“from the ground you see eternity and a distance so profound, there’ll be no forgiveness now”) as well as his pride and delusional arrogance (“I am free, now/Free to build my kingdom come on the dark side of the sun”). Still, it also serves perhaps as a commentary on the fleeting nature of fame (“People say they love you, then they disappear/I’m the king of all I dreamed of, but nobody seems to care”) and being careful what you wish for and the choices you make.
There’s another musical swerve as it heads into the final lap, Leago adding a neon-washed clarinet run to her seductive piano prowls for Summer In New York, a (Billy Holiday-styled) nod to her formative love of jazz and a reminiscing love letter to the Big Apple (“Remember how we would strut and promenade the Strand/The men were hat in hand/Fifth Avenue was oh, so grand!/The heat came rising through our feet/When sin and sidewalk meet”).
An echo of Stars, the title track is a valedictory leave-taking that looks back down the years (“From the cradle to silver and grey”) in a touching thank you and farewell note to her audience (“You were there when I laughed/You were there when I cried/You are there as I tell you ‘Good-bye’”), a sense of passing the baton (“In due time, there will be someone else who will see all the good in your heart”) and, while to quote Hamlet’s last words, the rest may be silence, “the song will remember/The spark will still shine”.
Ian is, of course, a seasoned enough performer to know not to leave the audience on a downbeat note. Hence, the album ends with the full-on folk jamboree of the seven-minute plus Better Times Are Coming (a nod to the multi-language, multi-media lockdown Better Times Project) on which she’s joined by violin, soprano and baritone sax, clarinet, resonator guitar, Celtic lever harp, trombone, banjo, and upright bass with guest contributions from Sam Bush on mandolin, and acoustic guitar solo from Vince Gill. Opening with a Cappella folk gospel calling to mind Hard Times Come Again No More, before breaking out into a variegated instrumental workout of acoustic folk, Southern bluegrass, Dixieland jazz, Diane Schuur’s scat solo, squally electric guitar before ending with the multi-vocal repeated refrain, handclaps and final guitar feedback.
Ian has gone on record as saying she thinks it’s the best album she’s ever made and, while I’d personally reserve that accolade for Between The Lines, it’s unquestionably her finest work in the 47 years since then and, if it is indeed her recorded swan song, she bows out on an unequivocal high.
Pre-Order The Light At The End Of The Line: https://ffm.to/thelightattheendoftheline
photo by Lloyd Baggs