People have been constantly on me about weight. In a roundabout way. When Insensitive was huge and had gone crazy everywhere, the American president of the record company at the time was giving me a lift back from a function. He was a 300-lb. man, a total cliché, and he looked at me and said “You’re 30 lbs. away from superstardom in this country.”
Jann Arden, interviewed by Macleans in 2015
You may, like me, be old enough to remember Janis Ian’s original version, a hit way back in 1975. It was in heavy AM rotation at around the same time as Loving You – which, and apologies to any fans who might read this, I’ve always found singularly unlistenable – and somehow, maybe because they were both songs by female vocalists, the cringe I felt for Minnie Ripperton’s magnum opus rubbed off on the wholly dissimilar At Seventeen, which I therefore dismissed and forgot all about until Jann Arden released her sublime and obviously heartfelt cover in 2006.
Jann, no stranger herself to the stress of trying to conform to male standards of feminine beauty (is any woman?), has said that At Seventeen was the first thing she learned to play when she took up the guitar, which probably tells you something about her own experience of the adolescent high school dating scene. Her intuitive feel for the song is evident not just in her typically pristine vocal but also in the arrangement, which features some expert guitar work, and really emphasizes the relaxed, vaguely jazzy, bossa nova swing that lent the original its air of cool detachment, offsetting what could have come across as maudlin and self-pitying. At Seventeen is an adult’s remembrance of the way it was back when its singer was a naive and hopeful teenager, delivered at a remove, more rueful than bitter, more matter-of-fact than out of sorts. Some hard lessons were learned. It was what it was, and so it remains. The truth may be miserable, but she’s done crying about it.
I adore Jann Arden. She has a terrific voice, and she’s whip-smart and funny as hell. She supplied one of my all-time favourite Twitter ripostes when Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s spiteful and deplorably mendacious press secretary, announced to the world in a farewell post that she wanted to be remembered as honest and forthcoming, or something equally ludicrous. I want to be remembered as tall and thin came Arden’s immediate reply. It seems she inherited the quick wit from her mom, who, upon hearing the story attached at the top, told her daughter “you should have said you didn’t want to gain that much weight”.
The snappy comebacks always elude you in the moment, don’t they? Even when you’re Jann.
the needlefish 