News and Updates
May 1, 2008

Oh my… what a long, long month April was! No sooner had I gotten home from Cerritos than Angela Aki arrived from Japan to visit with me and do a bit of songwriting. We had an absolute ball together. Her first day, she got stuck in the studio while I recorded five special tracks for the upcoming Best of Janis Ian: The Autobiography Collection, our two-disc CD set that will accompany the book release. Then we discovered that only friend chicken Angela had ever had was Colonel Sanders! So our friends Marty & Linda stepped up to the plate, cooking up a real Southern meal for her – fried chicken, mac ‘n’ cheese, the works.

Angela Aki fuels reveals the secret of her awecome creative drive: Goo-Goo Clusters and beer.

Her two weeks in Nashville kind of went by in a blur for me; I was simultaneously trying to write with Angela, set her up with Jess Leary and Buddy Mondlock for some more writing, show her a bit of the South, get organized and packed for my own Japan tour, finish up the album artwork with John, approve the edits in my autobiography, and half a dozen other things too boring to mention here. But we did end up writing two really good songs, and more important, we had a excellent time with each other.

Janis and Angela celebrate writing *2* songs together

The day after she left, I went into Independent Mastering with my pals Eric and Don, and we spent two days mastering the “new” album. It sounds fantastic! Sony and Universal actually gave us the original recordings of “Society’s Child,” “At 17,” and a bunch of others, so we're able to truly say we re-mastered from the original analogue sources. In addition, Sony found the master of “Ginny the Flying Girl” and gave permission for us to use that, too! We’ve now got 31 tracks, so the CD set will have every song mentioned in the book, plus a couple more.

I finished mastering and spent half a day with Pat, but we ended up running errands for most of it. Then it was off to Japan! I played Osaka, then Tokyo, where Angela surprised everyone by not only coming to two shows, but singing the encore, “Will You Dance?” with me at each one. It was fabulous; I took a verse in English, she took the next in Japanese, and we closed out the rest together. I have to admit, we sounded pretty good, given that we’d only sung it through twice before.

Lots and lots of old friends showed up, which was a real treat. Reiko Yukawa, a leading songwriter and television personality, came backstage for a nice long visit. Mr. Horikawa, who produced the television drama that used “Love Is Blind” as its theme, came, along with Nori Nonaka, at the time a young gun at Sony Publishing who is now Chairman of Sony Music Japan International. I hadn’t realized that using a Western song in a Japanese period drama had never been done before!

I got to see Abe, and Junko, from the message board, as well as Mr. Takeda who runs my Japanese website, and his lovely wife.

And believe it or not, a couple that had literally just gotten married that afternoon spent their honeymoon evening at my last Tokyo show. Wow.

Couple celebrating their Honeymoon with Janis

From Tokyo we went on to one of my favorite cities, Fukuoka, where I actually managed to catch up on my sleep – 12 hours at one whack! Two nights of shows, and we were off on a plane to home, tired but happy to have gone.

That’s about all the news right now. I’ll be doing a few gigs over the next few months, but mostly I’ll be spending them putting together the book promotion and touring with my book publishers. And publicists. And agents. And business managers. And staff.

Well, you know what they say – it takes a village…

<grin>

See you along the way!