LOS ANGELES – Having toured around the world for decades, Janis Ian has come to understand that “eing away from your own country is a great reminder that we’re all the same under the skin. You don’t have to speak the language to know when people are happy. Emotions like joy and sadness are universal.” In her liner notes to the upcoming release Janis Ian – From Me To You: Live In Bremen 2004, she adds “music goes into you, and it remains there, becoming a part of your everyday life. It’s the greatest connector in the world.”

The double-CD release, available in Europe on May 30 and in the US on June 6, features Ian’s entire live concert of 16 performances of songs including hits like “At Seventeen,” “Jesse,” and “Society’s Child,” along with interludes during the more than 90-minute set. The recording of the event at “Sendesaal” in Bremen, Germany by Radio Bremen on October 4, 2004, had a packed-audience, while Ian performed solo with just her guitar.

Ian remembers, “That night in Bremen, it didn’t matter that the audience spoke little English, and I spoke no German. Everyone laughed when they recognized ‘I Got You, Babe’. Everyone tapped their feet to ‘Boots Like Emmy Lou’s’. Nights like this reinforce my belief that this world could be a peaceful place. Ultimately, what matters is kindness. Empathy. Understanding. Within the framework of different cultures, different languages, even different beliefs, music is the great unifier. It’s one of the reasons I love being a singer/songwriter.”

Pre-orders of Janis Ian – From Me To You: Live In Bremen 2004 are available now HERE. This new offering is the first album of a full live show since Ian’s release of Remember… which features Ian with her band at Osaka Festival Hall in Japan and at the Sydney Opera House in Australia during her 1977 tours there.

Although Ian is no longer touring due to the loss of her singing voice after she contracted a virus that left her with vocal fold scarring in 2022, she remains a creative force in music and culture with several projects now available.

Critics and audiences are finding the new documentary film, Varda Bar-Kar’s Janis Ian: Breaking Silence, to be important, moving, and award worthy. Earning the Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 35th Annual San Diego International Jewish Film Festival (SDIJFF), the film debuted as an Official Selection at DOC NYC in November 2024 and has also been named Best of Fest-Top Films at the 2025 Palm Springs International Film Festival. In features about Ian and the film, Rolling Stone proclaimed “Janis Ian is a living, breathing trailblazer. Let’s listen to her.” And Deadline stated “in addition to being one of the great songwriters of all-time, Ian is a captivating raconteur.”

Janis Ian: Breaking Silence is now in select theaters and  available online to stream, rent, or buy before airing on PBS as part of its “American Masters” series beginning in June. It was inspired by her GRAMMY Award Winning autobiography, Society’s Child: My Autobiography (2008), and features Ian as well as friends and collaborators including Joan Baez, Lily Tomlin, Jean Smart, Laurie Metcalf, and Arlo Guthrie.

This year, Ian also celebrates 50 years since the release of the GRAMMY Award-winning song “At Seventeen” and the GRAMMY Award-winning album it came from, Between the Lines, which was released on March 22, 1975, on Columbia Records. The song and album have received critical and peer acclaim. The Advocate said, “At Seventeen” is “the best song about growing up female ever written,” while The New York Times noted, “‘At Seventeen’ confronted lookism and bullying with a candor that anticipated the work of contemporary artists including Billie Eilish, Demi Lovato, and Lizzo.”

“It’s a piece of luck when you can hit on a universal theme like ‘At Seventeen,’” says Ian. “It’s what you strive for as a writer. I’m astonished that the song has lived this long, but I’m also horrified that ‘At Seventeen,’ and ‘Society’s Child,’ are both still so relevant. I would have hoped that by now so many things would be better.”

In late 2024, The Janis Ian Archives opened at Berea College, a private liberal-arts institution in Kentucky, and cemented her legacy as one of our most influential songwriters. From her first guitar and handwritten lyrics to stage attire, GRAMMY invitations and awards, first drafts, signed scripts, a timeline of her family in America and her career, and even her family’s FBI files, the archives house decades of invaluable artifacts.

Last fall, Ian also began releasing music from her archives for the first time, including two albums –Live at the Calderone Theater 1975 and Worktapes & Demos Vol. 1– and the song “When He Was Here,” an aching ballad about divorce that she co-wrote with Lance Cowan in the ‘90s. More previously-unreleased music will continue to be released. To learn more, go to JanisIan.com