22 Facts About Janis Ian

Janis Ian was born on Janis Eddy Fink; April 7,1951 and is an American singer-songwriter who was most commercially successful in the 1960s and 1970s.

Janis Ian has won two Grammy Awards, the first in 1975 for "At Seventeen" and the second in 2013 for Best Spoken Word Album, for her autobiography, Society's Child, with a total of ten nominations in eight different categories.

Janis Ian's parents, Victor, a music teacher, and Pearl, a college fundraiser, were Jewish-born liberal atheists who ran several summer camps in upstate New York.

In 1964, she legally changed her name to Janis Ian, taking her brother Eric's middle name as her new surname.

At the age of 14, Janis Ian wrote and recorded her first hit single, "Society's Child ", about an interracial romance forbidden by a girl's mother and frowned upon by her peers and teachers.

At the age of 16, Janis Ian met comedian Bill Cosby backstage at a Smothers Brothers show where she was promoting "Society's Child".

Janis Ian relates on her website that, although "Society's Child" was originally intended for Atlantic Records and the label paid for her recording session, Atlantic subsequently returned the master to her and quietly refused to release it.

Janis Ian relates that years later, Atlantic's president at the time, Jerry Wexler, publicly apologized to her for this.

Janis Ian appeared as the first musical guest on the series premiere of Saturday Night Live on October 11,1975, performing "At Seventeen" and "In the Winter".

Janis Ian cut several other singles specifically for the Japanese market, including 1998's "The Last Great Place".

Janis Ian released Breaking Silence in 1993 and came out as a lesbian.

Janis Ian continues to tour worldwide, though she stated that her 2022 North-American tour which was cancelled when a laryngitis diagnosis became severe would be her "last full tour".

Janis Ian is an outspoken critic of the Recording Industry Association of America, which she sees as acting against the interests of musicians and consumers.

Janis Ian performed at the 2009 Nebula Award Conference in Los Angeles, where she sang "Welcome Home," a version of her song "At Seventeen" with the lyrics changed to talk about the acceptance she found by reading science fiction.

Janis Ian was a regular columnist for the LGBT news magazine The Advocate and contributed to Performing Songwriter magazine from 1993 to 2006.

On July 24,2008, Janis Ian released her positively-received autobiography Society's Child.

An accompanying double CD, The Autobiography Collection, has been released with many of Janis Ian's best loved songs.

Janis Ian took acting lessons and script interpretation classes from Stella Adler in the early 1980s to help her feel more comfortable on stage, and she and Adler remained close friends until Adler's death in 1992.

In December 2015, Janis Ian appeared in the series finale of HBO comedy series Getting On playing a patient who refused to stop singing.

Janis Ian married Portuguese filmmaker Tino Sargo in 1978 and the two divorced in 1983.

Janis Ian came out as a lesbian in 1993 with the worldwide release of her album Breaking Silence.

Snyder and Janis Ian married in Toronto on August 27,2003.