Like a lot of people I still listen to vinyl, which is probably silly as I also subscribe to a couple of on-line music services and get much better sound qualtiy that way than listening to the pops and cracks of albums that were never really well-cared for. Still, holding an album in one’s hand and reading liner notes is similar to holding a real book. It’s just a different experience.
On weekends I will sometime pull an album from my collection at random and put it on the old turntable. Today the winner is Janis Ian’s 1975 album Between the Lines. The best-known song from this one is “At Seventeen,” which may be special to me because I was seventeen when it was released. Though it was written from the perspective of a women looking back on her formative years as a time of adolescent cruelty and teenage angst, I suspect it was meaningful to many as a reminder that things are rarely what they seem and that life provides many opportunities to “learn the truth.” Yet it never seemed to me to be a sad song, and neither apparently did it seem that way to Ian, who said in one interview, ‘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.”
“At Seventeen” won a Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance in 1976 in a category that included Linda Ronstadt, Olivia Newton-John, and Helen Reddy. It was also nominated for “Record of the Year” and “Song of the Year”. For those who go back farther, Janice Ian’s first national hit single, released in 1967 when she was just fifteen years old, was “Society’s Child (Baby I’ve Been Thinking).”
“Between the Lines” contains a number of remarkable tracks as least as good as “At Seventeen,” including the title track, “Tea and Sympathy.” and “Lover’s Lullaby.”
An interesting aside, which I do recall, is that Ian performed “At Seventeen” as a musical guest on the very first episode of Saturday Night Live in October 1975.
Unfortunately, a clip from the SNL appearance seems not to be easily accessible and neither is the audio quality from a few other live clips very good.
Below is the album cut, which will do just fine.
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