Two-time Grammy award winner Janis Ian joined host Kenneth Womack to talk about her creative process, Lennon and McCartney, her new album and more on "Everything Fab Four," a podcast co-produced by me and Womack (a music scholar who also writes about pop music for Salon) and distributed by Salon.
Acclaimed singer-songwriter Ian, whose father played piano, asked for lessons at a young age. She then moved on to the guitar at 10 and was writing songs by 12, though it didn't occur to her at the time that it could be a career. The next year, as Ian tells Womack, she was attending summer camp when a friend introduced her to the Beatles' "Please, Please Me." As she says, "It sounded so fresh. Almost like a folk song that wasn't a folk song." That same summer, a group of camp kids piled into a flatbed truck and went into town to see the band's first feature film, "A Hard Day's Night," and Ian "was hooked."
