Songwriter Dialogue: Stan Ridgway and Janis Ian

A double interview with two great songwriters together, Janis Ian and Stan Ridgway, about use of gender designation in song, and other issues.

The following interview was conducted in 1999 though never before published in its entirety. I’d interviewed both Stan Ridgway and Janis Ian individually prior to this, and when the idea arose of speaking to them together, I said yes. I wasn’t sure what would happen, though.

That they are each a different kind of songwriter is obvious. But they are also quite alike in many ways; both are super intelligent, informed, and thoughtful. Both are also funny, and see the world in comic ways. Although they didn’t agree on all things, their bond as songwriters and performers forged an unspoken, respectful alliance, and sparked a compelling, dimensional conversation.

Stan Ridgway is best known for writing and recording ‘Mexican Radio’ during his stint with Wall of Voodoo, and has since created many brilliantly solo albums. Janis Ian first achieved fame when a teenager with the beautiful “Society’s Child,” about an interracial romance, before she wrote ‘At Seventeen,’ her most famous song. She recorded many albums after that of beautiful and poignant songs, and alone and with others wrote a lot of songs recorded by others.

We spoke the day after learning that Frank Sinatra died at Cedars Sinai hospital in L.A., not far from where we spoke. He’d been sick for a long time, so his death wasn’t unexpected, yet still represented the end of an era.

Also, it provided a natural bridge into this discussion about songwriting, and specificially about the late Sammy Cahn, who I’d interviewed a year earlier. Sammy wrote the lyrics to 87 songs recorded by Frank, and tailor-made each to fit the Sinatra persona. In this role, he played a big role in building the singer’s image as a swinging celebrant of women. There was poetry in Sammy’s lyrics, and great craft, but relatively little obscurity: Men were men, and women were any one of a number of things, much of which clashes with modern times.

There is an undeniable appeal to his lyrics, and certainly those melodies by Jimmy Van Heusen and others. But much of the use of specified gender in these songs seems oddly out of tune now, causing us to question if this school of songwriting was still appropriate.

Janis Ian: Writing those kinds of macho, male-oriented songs was real important at the time that Sammy Cahn and others were writing them. The old saw was that women could sing a song that was gender-directed to women — they could just switch the gender — but men would never sing a song that was gender-directed to men. Even now, when you make demos as a songwriter, you’re usually told to make male demos if you must choose, because women can hear a song when a man sings and translate it easier than a man hearing a woman sing.

Is gender specificity a priority for you in your writing?

Ian: Not really. I’ve always tried to write non-gender-specific songs, unless it’s a song like ‘Jesse’ that was written obviously to a male — though I have heard people think it was about a woman.

‘At Seventeen’, probably your most famous song, was written very much from a female orientation.

Ian: Well, I would argue with that. Fifty percent of the buying audience for that was male. I think that ‘At Seventeen’ could have done just as well if it was sung by a man.

Stan Ridgway: I bought it [laughs]

Bernie Taupin complained to me recently about how restrictive it is to write words these days for Elton John, because Elton wants every song to be universal and gender-neutral — no “he” or “she.”

Ian: There’s a big difference between Elton and Bernie in that Elton is onstage, so he is seeing the universal; he is seeing the archetype right in front of him, and Bernie is not. But I think I would have a hard time as a songwriter if my singer restricted me. That’s a valid complaint on Bernie’s part.

Ridgway: It’s a natural thing that happens when you write a lot of songs. You start to feel that you want to relate to everyone. I think you’re right, Janis, that you just start to naturally write in a more gender-neutral way as you progress.

Ian: The artist at the end of the day always strives for the universal…

Ridgway: …if you want to communicate. Otherwise you can be cutting out half of the population. But in the ear of Sinatra and Sammy Cahn, those kinds of songs had something else at work, a kind of postwar ennui…

Ian: Yeah, the setting of a scene.

Ridgway: That kind of romance. I just love that era, and I love those kinds of songs. There are standards such as ‘Yesterdays’ that don’t have a gender in them.

Ian: But if you look at Johnny Mercer or anyone from that school, even the show tunes tend not to be gender-specific, unless they’re building a story. It’s hard to imagine the dustman in My Fair Lady singing something that isn’t gender-specific: “I’m getting to the church on time.” But you can also imagine Ethel Merman singing that song.

Stan, I’m surprised to hear you say that a songwriter’s songs become more universal as he or she matures, because so many of your songs tell stories and are very character-specific.

Ridgway: It was about building songs almost like theater pieces. In those songs there was a period where I was building stories and a scene and a specific place, and it was a little bit like making a film — a lot like that, almost writing a novel. And casting it like a movie. Casting myself in it, I would have a hard time sounding like a woman — certainly not a woman you would want to go out with [laughter]. I had to fashion a certain character, or at least I wanted to. A lot of that is natural. Songwriting springs from a place where you just have to do it.

Ian: Yeah, songs lead you. The trick is learning to accept that and then have the craft to bend them and mold them. But Stan is right: If you become an older writer — and by that I mean if you have someone who starts writing at thirteen and is now eighteen, even — your world broadens past keeping track of every single song you write and gloating over them. It broadens past creating a catalog. You broaden past your home town and your family. And the more your world broadens, the more you tend to have a universal outlook on things anyway, and you begin to feel like a citizen of the world rather than a prisoner of your times.

Your song ‘Hunger’ is entirely universal, except for that one line, “I hunger for you like a whore for a man to call a friend.”

Ian: When I wrote ‘Hunger’, I had written ‘Ride Me Like a Wave’, which ‘Hunger’ stands on. I had been listening to a lot of Brazilian music and a lot of older music, and I realized that in the past thirty years there’s not a lot of sex in songs. There’s a lot of dirt sex, a lot of “I want to do this and do that to you,” but not a lot of overt sexuality in songs, especially in American songs. English is a very hard language to use to write sexual imagery that isn’t just bludgeoning people. It really surprised me how uncomfortable the audience was, listening to those two songs. Because for me as a writer — and I think Stan probably agrees with this, judging from his recent work — there’s a point where it’s good for an audience to be uncomfortable. You want to shake them out of their complacency, but you don’t want to threaten them to the point where they stop listening. And you try to find avenues that allow you to do that.

In ‘Knife and Fork’, Stan, you pull off metaphor — “I’ll be the knife and fork/You be the plate” — that’s about as blunt as what Janis wrote in ‘Ride Me Like a Wave’.

Ian: It’s difficult to find metaphors for sex that are understandable and not offensive, and at the same time sexy.

Ridgway: It’s hard to write a song about sex, and when that one came along, I said, “My God, I’ve written a song about sex!” I’d never done that before. Not that way. I find writing songs about sex to be really difficult. What was that Boyz II Men song [sings]: “I want to take a shower with you”… [laughs]. I couldn’t believe it, just totally absurd. Songs fulfill certain rituals for people, but the subtlety of language is leaving us, so they cut to the chase very quickly.

Ian: It works for some people.

Ridgway: And the rest of us wonder if anybody even knows what we are talking about. This is a world filled with blasting sensations. People get numb. Sometimes the thing that really gets people’s attention is extreme sensitivity, or a sensitive statement that is expressed in a way that makes you think someone is opening up their soul. The problem is that people are asked to become personal writers so quickly that I think they confuse honest writing with telling the truth. And sometimes telling the truth is just a bore.

Ian: Yes, they confuse vulnerability with bleeding all over somebody. It’s irritating to hear someone go on and on about their navel.

Which takes us back to the idea of the universal song. It’s a real accomplishment to write something that’s specific in its details yet still transcends gender and other barriers.

Ian: It’s a real accomplishment because it means that you face your dragons and put them out into the sunlight and make that understandable to the people who are listening. But there is a lamentable tendency that goes back, unfortunately, to when ‘At Seventeen’ was a hit. There were a number of female singer/songwriters at that time who wrote about their therapy. Personally, I am not interested in those details.

Ridgway: It becomes voyeuristic.

Ian: Exactly. And as a writer you end up cannibalizing your own life rather than living. I think it’s brilliant to go back to the [old] songs and spend a while singing them, because you do tend to write from your own experience and your world starts to narrow. If you can go back to those writers who wrote with no thought of singing it themselves, you can train yourself out of it.

Ridgway: Absolutely. I’ve been going through all these old standards, old Sammy Cahn and Johnny Mandel songs, just singing them and getting them into my body. Singing songs by other writers is great: It’s like reading a great book or going to a museum. If you take that in, a lot of it starts to work its way into your work.

Ian: It’s a double-edged sword there, because if you’re only listening to garbage, that’s what you end up absorbing.

Ridgway: Garbage in, garbage out. That’s absolutely true.

Ian: I don’t know if you would agree, Stan, but that’s something that people really underestimate. If you can spend some time going back to the basics, whether it’s poetry or literature or songwriting, and put it into your body in some way, it makes all the difference. People forget how much of this stuff in the arts is mechanical; it’s body memory, it’s voice memory, it’s emotional memory. It’s much like teaching somebody guitar: You can teach somebody all you know, but there are times I go back to boom-chuck-boom-chuck. Because it reminds me of a lot of stuff that I’ve forgotten.