6. Janis IanStars
This is a very perceptive lyric. She was very young when she made this song, in her early twenties, and I remember seeing her on TV – it might have been on Midnight Special which was a musical television program in New York. That was really good, but I don’t know why I was watching it or if I was watching with my parents, but the song really affected me as a little kid.
There’s something so tragic and so sad, thinking that these stars have everything but it’s really not who they are. She has a tremendous voice. She’s famous for the song ‘At Seventeen’, which is also a very potent beautiful sad song. ‘Stars’ was covered by Nina Simone, live at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1976, and that’s a really great version. Janis Ian, I think, is a very underrated songwriter. Also, I saw this song on a list of Morrissey’s favourite songs, which is interesting because he’s one of my favourites. So the fact that we have this in common doesn’t really surprise me. But in some ways it does.
