Janis Ian Revived Her Career with 'At Seventeen'
- edgarstreetbooks
- Mar 1
- 3 min read
'Ugly Ducklings Become Swans, so Maybe There’s a Chance'
Frank Mastropolo
Janis Ian was 14 when she wrote her 1967 hit single “Society’s Child,” a controversial song about how social pressure doomed an interracial romance. “I was sitting on a bus in East Orange, NJ, where I was living with my parents, and I saw it happening around me,” Ian told Songwriter Universe.
“I saw black kids and white kids dating, and the parents not really wanting them to date. And so far as I remember, that’s what started it off. I’d been writing songs for about two or three years, and as songs do, it took on a life of its own.
“My parents were the complete opposite of the parents in that song,” Ian said in Songfacts. “They wouldn’t have cared if I’d married a Martian, so long as I was happy.”
But by 1975, Ian had produced a half-dozen gloomy albums after years of drugs and psychoanalysis. Ian was living with her mother because she wasn’t earning enough to live on her own.
Her career was saved by “At Seventeen” on the 1975 album Between the Lines. Ian won the Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance for “At Seventeen.” The song is her personal story of the cruelty of teenagers toward what she called “ugly duckling girls like me.”
Ian explained how she wrote “At Seventeen” in Songwriting. “I was sitting at Mum’s dining room table one day; she was at work and I was reading the New York Times magazine section and there was an article by a young woman about being a debutante. She said that she thought her coming-out ball would solve everything. Suddenly, magically, she would meet a boy, get married, have a white picket fence and life would be perfect.
“The song started off then as ‘I learned the truth at eighteen,’ and I had the guitar in my hand and I was playing this little figure in G with the capo on, I think I’d been listening to Astrud Gilberto that week.
“‘Eighteen’ didn’t scan so I changed it to, ‘I learned the truth at seventeen,’ and then it’s a logical thing to say, ‘That love was meant for beauty queens.’ The first verse is pretty logical — ‘High school girls with clear-skinned smiles,’ that was my own experience. I always thought if my skin would clear up then everything would be fine.
“I came back to it a month later. I remember saying, ‘I’m either in this or I’m not, and if I’m in it then I’m in it all the way.’ That became a mantra for the rest of my songwriting career because you have to be brave; brave enough to trust your instincts and make music that might be uncomfortable but that your heart knows is right.
“So I decided to be brave but I put it away again for a month or two and thought about what to do. I didn’t have much craft at that point. I’d always gone on instinct, but this one I really had to think about. I’d already decided that I was never going to sing it in public so I thought I might as well just go for broke. That’s when the narrator steps out and says, ‘To those of us who knew the pain,’ and talks about it and says it was long ago.
“The line that I love the most in that song is, ‘To ugly duckling girls like me.’ That wrapped the song up, ugly ducklings become swans, so maybe there’s a chance. Whenever people say to me that it’s a depressing song I say that they haven’t listened to it.
“For the first three months, I sang it with my eyes closed because I thought everyone would be laughing at me and making mean comments, but they were crying, it was amazing. There are some songs that you write which transcend the singer and the listener and go straight into the heart and they change people’s lives. I say that in all humility.”
In her autobiography Society’s Child, Ian wrote, “I knew what it was like to never be asked out on a date. I knew the sinking feeling when everyone else in class came in to find a valentine on their desk, and yours was empty. And I sure as heck knew what it was to feel clumsy and ugly. I could write this song, I was sure of it.”
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