There’s a passage in Janis Ian’s 2008 memoir, Society’s Child, that is unforgettably stark. It comes in the late 80s when, having survived childhood fame, psychological collapse at the end of her teens and an abusive marriage at the height of her 70s comeback, she discovers that, through the fraud of an accountant, she has lost everything, along, seemingly, with any possibility of being solvent again.

Her properties are sold, her equipment, pianos and most guitars. Her royalties go straight to the IRS, and she can’t tour. She goes from wealth to penury in a split second and, just when the IRS show clemency and permit her a bank account, provided the balance doesn’t exceed $1,500, they swoop in for that jackpot, too. Then her tawdry rented room above a car park is burgled.

“I have never been so depressed in my life. I hung up the phone and leaned against the wall, trying not to cry. I’d been a fool to think I could turn things around. I couldn’t. I’d stay where I was, watching drunks careen through the parking lot all night long. I’d fall asleep to the sound of lovers arguing in their cars while the radio blared. I’d stay in this cheap furnished room, with the couch full of holes, and the carpet that would never look clean again, until the day I died.

“I sank to the floor and sat there for a long time, staring at nothing. Everything was gone. I’d never own a piano again. And where was I going to get rent money? I’d have to sell my remaining instruments, if anyone would buy them. What a loser I was. My mother’s health continued to deteriorate, and I couldn’t even afford to visit her. My father was working three jobs, he had nothing to spare. My brother and his wife were raising three sons; their cupboard was bare.

“Life was over. Why bother going on?”

A page or two later, she notes, “The change of my having another recording career was lower than my getting struck by lightning.”

Yet not only did she buck those odds (though not before nearly dying of septicaemia and suffering chronic fatigue and aphasia) with a Grammy- nominated comeback album, Breaking Silence, in 1993, but the gentler, less mercurial success she’s enjoyed since then is, in some ways, a better fit for her constitution than the frenzies and flashbulbs of her 60s and 70s peaks.

But now, at 71, she faces another unforeseen loss. You’d have thought that someone who’s stacked up such a number of strange, unbidden ordeals would be due an indefinite grace period; after all, this is someone who, before her childhood was over, had endured verbal abuse, death threats and being spat at in public when her first single, touching on interracial love, became a hit. But life seems to have had other plans.

“I got sick in May of last year, not covid I hasten to add, and had to postpone two or three shows,” she apprises RC from her home in Anna Maria Island, Florida, sounding warm and agile-minded. She’s in her pyjamas, she tells me, sitting in her open-plan kitchen-cum- living room, where an old Gibson hangs on the wall along with a letter from Joan Baez, a signed Billie Holiday recording, bookshelves, and assorted artworks. “I kept feeling like there was something wrong,” she continues. “I went to a couple of ENTs’ and they said, ‘Well, it looks like it’s laryngitis, take it easy’ and I did. But every time I tried to sing, I just sounded ‘wrong’ and I finally started pushing people and got the name of a specialist and went to see him in August. He sent me to an otolaryngologist, an ultra-specialist.”

By now it was September 2022, and the farewell tour was due to recommence in one month. Tests were run, including film of Ian talking, singing, and making noise. The results showed scarring on her vocal cords. “Nobody’s 100 percent certain how it happened,” she says. “It’s not to do with singing badly. At some point, one of my vocal cords ruptured and then formed scar tissue to protect itself.”

Following the diagnosis came an agonising three days in which all kinds of ideas were discussed for salvaging the tour. “The plan was for me to work with a speech therapist and see if I couldn’t learn to work around it. And she was very honest with me when I asked her if I would ever be able to have my voice back. She said, ‘No.’ The otolaryngologist also said that, no, I wouldn’t. When I consulted the ENT, he said that I might. There were two treatment options and neither one really works. He said that I might buy myself a show or maybe part of a tour but ultimately was going to be back where I was.”

The decision was made not to press ahead, Ian concluding that, even if she managed to get through a show, the threat of losing her voice at any given moment would be too excruciating.

“Cancelling just one show,” she goes on, “leaves an artist like myself pitifully depressed, with this horrendous feeling of having let everyone down, even if it’s not our fault. There’s still the feeling that not only have you let down the promoters who have lost money and the fans who’ve lost time and anticipation, you’ve somehow let down your talent. It’s a horrible feeling. I can’t even begin to describe it – it makes you feel useless. Of course, I kept telling myself that I’m not useless. I’m a writer first, this is not that big a thing. But these last two tours – the tour of the US in the fall and then the tour of the UK, Europe, Scandinavia, Ireland in the Spring of this year – they were also going to be my chance to have a really good time because I’d be seeing all my friends. Paul Fenn [Asgard], my agent, was planning three shows a week and four days to travel and see friends. And because it was my final tour, I would be making even better money, so it was a chance to stockpile.”

If there’s one thing lan can call on, though, it’s fortitude – an attribute that has seen her through the ups and downs of a career that started in the mid-60s when she was 14. Born in 1951 to a family of highly musical, second-generation Jewish émigrés whose progressive political leanings prompted the FBI to open files on them, lan moved with her parents from New Jersey to Manhattan in the early 60s. By the age of 16, she was a national star, but one confronted by the ugliest sentiments the public had to offer, her gigs sometimes interrupted by torrents of invective and shouts of “n***er lover!” In 1967, her first single had become a hit more than a year after its initial release. Society’s Child, produced by Shadow Morton, would have secured Ian a place in rock history had it been all she ever did. Inventively arranged mid-tempo folk-rock, it was sung from the viewpoint of a young white girl capitulating to the racism of others (and, by extension, her own) by breaking up with her black boyfriend. The single’s success led to a national furore – Ian immediately became a hate figure for racial segregationists who routinely abused her in public and disrupted concerts.

Society’s Child was the opening salvo in Ian’s four-year tenure with Verve Records, during which she issued an album annually. They were strikingly diverse pieces of work. The debut featured an array of wise-beyond-her-years standouts, including Mrs. McKenzie, a kind of Mother’s Little Helper with more sophisticated chord progressions, and Hair Of Spun Gold, the folk lament of a teenage mum. It’s a shame so little has been done with her Verve catalogue -while the first album, 1967’s Janis lan, was the bestseller, lan improved with each release, culminating in a collaboration with producer Charlie Calello for 1969’s Who Really Cares. Calello had worked with Laura Nyro the previous year (Ian and Nyro had first crossed paths earlier in the decade as pupils at New York’s High School of Music and Art). He emphasised Ian’s gleaming, jazzy, soulful side. But the album sank without trace and when conversations turned to the follow-up, Verve wanted Ian to move into easy-listening and stop recording her own songs. She walked away.

It took therapy to make sense of her whirlwind adolescence and start putting the pieces back together. She relocated to Philadelphia and then LA, recording Present Company for Capitol Records in 1971. Though singing jingles helped keep body and soul together, she eventually moved back in with her mother in New York. An audition for Columbia Records was a humiliating disaster – an impassive Clive Davis barely made eye contact or acknowledged her presence before walking out. But then, by a circuitous route with an Australian company, Ian ended up on the label in 1974, just as Davis was being shown the door. Then, just as she turned 23, the blockbuster period of her career began with a series of landmark albums including Stars, Between The Lines, Miracle Row, and Night Rains and a US No 3 single, 1975’s evergreen ballad of adolescent heartache, At Seventeen. The albums reintroduced her as a sophisticated writer with command over multiple pop styles, whose songs had that magical quality of allowing themselves to be patinated by the circumstances and feelings of the listener. Five were reissued on vinyl by Sony in 2018, a project reuniting Ian with the late Brooks Arthur, possibly the producer with whom she had the most congruent musical connection.

But now it’s gone; a singing voice that started out likeable but quite reedy in adolescence and then blossomed into something feathery and winsome, with subtle, jazz-inspired phrasing that set her apart from the 70s singer/ songwriter pack. In the face of loss, though, there are gains. Ian’s archive, dating back to her grandparents’ immigration paperwork and encompassing clothing, journals, tax returns, financial statements, memorabilia, correspondence, videos and more, has been transported to Berea College in Kentucky.

“It’s literally everything,” she says. “I gain nothing – I don’t even get a tax break – but my one condition was that the archives be open to the public and online.” Her description of the planned exhibition reminds me of the V&A’s David Bowie Is (2013). The two artists share some traits, being early adopters of computers (Ian bought her first IBM in 1983) and the internet. “Though Bowie used it in a very different way,” lan notes. “I was aware of it in the 80s and I saw its potential as a social gathering and an educational force. I think Bowie really explored its potential for art, David Byrne as well, seeing it as a place where you could construct things, deconstruct them, put them out with lightning speed the way Prince personified.”

There’s also a Grammy-nominated album, The Light At The End Of The Line. Some of its sparsely arranged, emotionally direct songs reunite her with the piano. Though today her style is more economical, in the 70s and 80s, she was a flamboyantly dexterous pianist, duetting with Chick Corea for 1979’s Jenny (Iowa Sunrise). The new songs touch on matters ranging from immigration (Stranger) to her real-life friendship with Nina Simone (Nina).

lan has often done her best work from a place of discomfort, of asking herself, “Can I say that? Should I say that?” The ability to tolerate tension and ambivalence in the creative process resulted in key songs such as Society’s Child and Pro-Girl in the 60s, the perennials Stars and At Seventeen the decade after, and brutally frank album tracks, including 1974’s anti-Vietnam-War piece, Dance With Me.

Fast forward to 2022 and Ian went through something similar creating Resist, the new album’s anti-misogynist show-stopper. It’s abrasive and tightly coiled, with a formidable spirit and pithy, sardonic rhymes. “It was hard to write because a lot of the lines made me uncomfortable,” she admits. “’Carve out between her legs so she can’t come’. That’s an uncomfortable line. Yet every time I tried to put something else there, it didn’t work.”

The song is all the better for being so unexpurgated. Where much of the music on the album is simple voice-and-one-instrument arrangements, Resist has elaborate production. “We were still in lockdown, and I called my friend Randy [Leago, musician/producer] and said, ‘I’ve got an interesting song that I’d like you to put an edge on.’” Ian felt that her voice, with its tender qualities, wouldn’t necessarily capture the feeling she wanted the song to convey. *So, the arrangement had to do the ugliness because I couldn’t really be ugly with my voice, it wasn’t an ugly voice. Randy came up with great stuff like the beginning – boom boom- which makes you think of footsteps walking into a room. I wanted more attitude and I referenced The Rolling Stones and Randy went and referenced them back with the sax solos.”

In the months since the song was released, it’s only become more topical. “The embrace of misogyny goes right along with the embrace of the far right,” says lan, “the embrace of all things hateful and the rejection of any sort of kindness. The concept that it’s all right to have a lot of power and use it as you will. It’s a rejection of humanity – me first, me first, me first – an Ayn Rand world. So long as I have mine, fuck you! And appeasement doesn’t work. You can’t appease a monster – it’s always hungry. It’s a world of never enough. I don’t understand it. There has to be a point where you have enough money, where you have enough fame. It used to be unusual – it used to be the Hitlers and the Genghis Khans, the British Empire, the American pioneer rush towards expansionism, that whole idea that bigger and bigger and more and more is always better. I think in the 60s we started to reject that, but we screwed it up and it all got lost. And now we’re seeing the results. You raise up two or three generations to think that they’re entitled to everything – that’s a sweeping generalisation clearly, it’s also to do with lack of education – and add social media to the mix and you’ve got something very toxic.”

The Light At The End Of The Line was released with the announcement that it would be lan’s final album. She laughs ruefully at the irony of launching a farewell album and tour only for some capricious force to step in and make sure of it by removing her voice. “The intention was to have an album – I don’t want to sound pretentious – as a final statement. To have an album that was the best that I could do and to know that I might be able to do as well again, but I would not be able to do better.”

In a pop landscape where vocals are titivated in post-production, she wanted to sound human. “All of the album is first-take vocals – except one song where we had to start over because of an electronic glitch. So much of what I hear is so over-sung or over-produced. Not just the singing but the mixing, the use of pitch correction. Part of me wanted to say, ‘Look – you can also just sing. It is possible’.”

Ian isn’t a purist for purism’s sake. 1979’s Night Rains was made with the then $30-a-minute Aphex Aural Exciter, while the strange, out-of-contract Uncle Wonderful (1984), a collection of post-disco dance tracks and ballads set to very dark lyrics, used synthesisers and drum programming and included collaborations with the late Dan Hartman. But Ian’s interest in technology has always been in service of the song rather than to veil deficiencies in talent.

The other positives while Ian is still reeling from the cancelled tour are Lifetime Achievement and Artist of the Year at Folk Alliance’s International Folk Music Awards. As we speak, she’s just getting ready to travel to Kansas City for the ceremony. “I can still write, of course. I can still score,” she says (always a fast learner, lan taught herself to arrange for full orchestra in the early 70s). “I can still do all the things I did but sing. And yet singing is such an integral part of my world, I can’t even begin to cope beyond getting through day by day. I have good support, my wife’s great [lan has been with Pat Snyder, a criminal defence lawyer, since the early 90s], my friends have been great, my business people have been great. But it’s also been surprising how people tend to fall away once they realise that you’re no longer being famous. But I feel like I made my mark. I’ve been good to my fans.”

That particular relationship – lan is accessible to listeners, while maintaining reasonable boundaries – initially took work. She once had no way of knowing if an audience member was at a show in good faith or, instead, to scream insults at her because of Society’s Child. “I was scared of them,” she confides. “And so, to counter that, I started staying after shows and meeting them. Not a formal meet-and-greet, but just at a table, telling people, ‘You don’t have to buy anything, just come up and say hello.’ And I got over my fear and we became closer.” The title track of the new album is a love letter and fond goodbye to that audience.

“I’ve been true to being an artist,” she says, finally. “I don’t want to be the person who feels like they have to have an audience, all respect to my audience. I’ve done my job- and part of me would like to stop having a job.”