Kids Like Us
Janis Ian on Charles De Lint
I have not met many elves in my time.
Well, to be scrupulous about it, I have only met one, and I’m not sure he qualifies.
There are so many different kinds of elves these days, it’s hard to keep track. There are the elves I grew up on, a hardy bunch of toy-makers assisting Santa throughout the year so he could keep up with the interminable Christmas demands. There are the Scandinavian elves of my scary fifth grade teacher, impossibly tall, thin, white-haired and cruel. Then there are the Post-Tolkien elves, Yoda-like in their wisdom, more beautiful than a blooming rose, but covered in hidden thorns. Long-lived and mostly condescending, they tend to populate urban romance stories with a heated desire for sex with mortal beings, after which they’re whisked away in elven carriages, surrounded by glitter and hemlock.
Go figure.
When Charles de Lint sat down next to me during a quiet moment at Mythic Journeys 2004, I had no idea who he was.
Wait, I’ll correct that. I knew who “Charles de Lint” was because I’d read everything he’d written, back to The Harp of the Grey Rose. But I had no idea what he looked like.
Serves me right, always buying paperbacks. If I’d been rich and bought hardbacks, I’d have looked at the author photos and not been quite so shocked when I ran into situations like this. Or that lunch with George R R Martin, Mike Resnick, and Terry Pratchett, when I cheerfully asked Pratchett what he did for a living and why he was at Worldcon….
Based on my reading, Charles should either have been a tubby little fellow wearing green with a toy in his hand. Or a lofty tower of tree-like limbs that swerved dangerously close to my hair. He was nothing like either, but he felt like an elf.
And so he has remained, my only elven acquaintance.
He was delightful. That’s the only word for it. Our conversation ranged from esoteric music groups we both liked (Calexico I think) to his use of music in books (ahem. Not mine.) to our mutual birthday year (1951, and I think the conversation went like “Charles, I was born in April 1951, and you weren’t born until December that year. Therefore I am older and You Must Do As I Say.”)
I’m usually uncomfortable around people I don’t know. Contrary to appearances, I get shy in the presence of strangers. But Charles has never felt like a stranger. More like a long lost cousin, raised in a different country but nonetheless, from the same neighborhood.
As it turned out, we had a lot in common besides date of birth. It’s hard to make friends when your family moves every few of years. Rootless children like us tend to find “home” in non-geographic locations –films, music, and often, books. When we’re reading, we’re safe. Secure. Relaxed in the knowledge that somewhere out there are others like us, children who want to be, in Charles’ own words, “magic”.
Kids like us, we grow up believing that one day, we’ll wake up and find our people have finally come, and we’ll get to return to our true home. The place where kids like us are everywhere, and no one makes us outcast, because everyone else believes what we believe – that hidden worlds exist, that possibility is endless, and that in the end, goodness will triumph.
Like calls to like. When artists connect, it’s usually on a level so deep, there’s barely a ripple on the surface. I ran across this quote of Charles’ that sums up why I immediately felt so comfortable with him. Not because of his books, not because of his music, but because of his dreams. He said it best:
“I want to be magic. I want to touch the heart of the world and make it smile. I want to be a friend of elves and live in a tree. Or under a hill. I want to marry a moonbeam and hear the stars sing. I don’t want to pretend at magic anymore. I want to be magic.”
I could not have said it better myself.
Janis Ian
June 25, 2024
© Janis Ian
Janis Ian keeps a sign above her workspace at home, a North Star that guides her after more than five decades as a revered songwriter who dares to say what no one else will.
“Do not be held hostage by your legacy.”
When you’ve written, starting at age 14, some of pop music’s most evergreen songs — “Society’s Child,” “At Seventeen,” “Jesse,” and “Stars,” among them — it’s no wonder she’d need a reminder to shake free of our expectations.
Now, at 72, Ian is embracing a new milestone: the art of the farewell. Released on January 21, 2022 on her own Rude Girl Records, The Light at the End of the Line is Ian’s latest and last solo studio album to bookend a kaleidoscopic catalog that began with her 1967 self-titled debut.
Ian says, “It takes a certain amount of maturity to realize that you don’t have to keep proving you can write. I’ve already created a body of work I’m proud of, and I’m old enough to realize that it’s the light at the end of the line that matters. And I’m not calling this retiring. It’s rewiring.”
As her first album of new material in 15 years, The Light at the End of the Line also sets the stage for what Ian imagines is her final North American tour in 2022.
Let’s be frank: It’s a bittersweet moment for fans who have stuck with her from the very beginning. At once familiar and poignant, these 12 new songs present Ian in miniature. They’re intimate portraits of getting older but wiser (“I’m Still Standing”), of knowing when to stand up and not take any more shit (“Resist”), of celebrating life’s fleeting beauty (“Swannanoa”), of exalting in your true identity (“Perfect Little Girl”), of paying homage to a lifelong hero and her demons (“Nina,” as in Simone).
Her original idea was to name the tour “The End of the Line” and write a song around it, but that felt too bleak. Instead, she says, “I wanted to write about the result of all these years. As part of that, I’ll change it to ‘The Light at the End of the Line’ and write a more adult version of ‘Stars’ to go with it.” From 1973, “Stars” was often called Ian’s “comeback song” and was covered by Nina Simone, Cher, Mel Tormé, and a host of other artists who felt the song spoke to their own lives. “As I wrote ‘The Light at the End of the Line,’ I realized that it’s really a love song. I didn’t understand that so many years of meeting my audience after shows, of corresponding with them, had created this very real relationship that few artists are privileged to have.”
There’s a moment on every Janis Ian album that parts your hair, upends your ideas about her comfort zone. Her latest is full of surprises. She strikes a triumphant tone on the opening “I’m Still Standing”:
See these lines on my face?
They’re a map of where I’ve been
And the deeper they are traced,
the deeper life has settled in
How do we survive living out our lives?
It took Ian nearly three years to whip “Resist” into shape with help from longtime production collaborator Randy Leago. It was worth the wait. A call to arms, it’s a curveball of cacophonous sounds — wailing electric guitars, clanging percussion, feral saxophone — that culminates with Ian rapping about how women are torn down and stripped of their agency.
“Her music is serious but still full of beauty,” says Leago, who co-produced the song and played throughout the album. “I’ve worked with wonderful singers and songwriters and instrumentalists — and Janis is all of that. The sheer honesty of her work is really what shines through.”
Indeed, The Light at the End of the Line feels like a victory lap for an artist who has nothing to lose, and nothing left to prove. You hear that in the risks Ian took in both her lyrics and the inspired production choices.
Ian, who’s fond of saying she doesn’t sing the notes but rather the space between the notes, is at her most primal as a vocalist here. Every note, every cadence, every beat is in the perfect place. She sounds unvarnished yet luminous, as expressive as when she was that young woman delivering “Stars” on late-night TV as if she were beaming in from a cosmic plane. (Google her 1974 live performance on “The Old Grey Whistle Test.”)
Enlisting bassist Viktor Krauss and an all-star cast of supporting musicians (Vince Gill, Diane Schuur, Sam Bush), Ian sends us out on a hopeful note with “Better Times Will Come.” A crash course in American roots music, the joyous coda veers from Appalachian hoedown to New Orleans second-line parade to serious rock shredding.
If The Light at the End of the Line ends up being Ian’s swan song, it’s as graceful an exit as fans could want.
“I love this album,” she says. “There is an element of, ‘This is the absolute best I can do over the span of 58 years as a writer. This is what I’ve learned. And I realized that this album has an arc, and I’ve never really done anything like that before.”
As Ian reflects on a career with its share of hits and misses, it’s startling to realize how urgent and out of time her most fearless work remains. We’re still having the same conversations around race and racism that Ian ignited in 1966’s “Society’s Child,” her teenage ode to a white woman who brings home a black boyfriend. It was so incendiary that it got banned from radio and led to death threats and public ridicule that scarred its songwriter until she finally untangled the trauma in therapy.
In the age of social media, 1975’s “At Seventeen” (from her landmark album Between the Lines) is perhaps more resonant than ever as a meditation on feeling isolated and ostracized.
“It’s a piece of luck when you can hit on a universal theme like ‘At Seventeen,’” she says. “It’s what you strive for as a writer. I’m astonished that the song has lived this long, but I’m also horrified that it, and ‘Society’s Child,’ are both still so relevant. I would have hoped that by now so many things would be better.”
Ian has taken a circuitous path ever since then, scoring ten Grammy Award nominations and two wins (in 1976 for best pop vocal performance-female for “At Seventeen” and in 2013 for best spoken-word album for “Society’s Child: My Autobiography”).
Along the way, she has been a columnist and a ringleader of a lively online fan community. She’s dabbled in science-fiction writing (squint and you’ll see her pal George R.R. Martin, the “Game of Thrones” mastermind, in photos from her 2003 wedding to her wife, Pat). And for the past several years Ian has been devoted to her philanthropic endeavors, the Pearl Foundation and the Better Times Project.
If there has been any common thread, it’s this: Ian has always been down for the ride. “The journey has always been more interesting to me than wherever I end up,” she says.
Which brings us back to that sign above her desk.
“The idea of not being held hostage by your legacy lets you move forward. You don’t have to be held hostage to those memories,” Ian says. “You have to acknowledge them, but you don’t have to stay there. And I never have.”
Celebrating CdL 