Who was Saturday Night Live’s first musical guest?

The show premiered in October of 1975. No, the answer is not Fleetwood Mac, or Stevie Wonder, or Simon and Garfunkel (though the duo did feature in the second episode). It’s not Queen, or Billy Joel (he’s on season 3).  

A 24-year-old woman took the stage that night, timid yet graceful. She began to play the piano. 

She exploded.

Janis Ian was a folk singer, first and foremost. She didn’t indulge in the typical 70’s theatrics, or follow the new trends in production. Her biggest single to date, “At Seventeen”, had come out just a few months prior. It’s a bossa nova lullaby, a heartfelt song about the pain of adolescence. “At Seventeen” hit number three on the Billboard charts; a year later, she’d earn a Grammy for it.

To be fair, the resulting album was far from a critical failure - in the month before her SNL debut, “Between The Lines”, which also happened to be her seventh album, hit number one on the Billboard charts. But looking back, something seems to have gotten lost in translation.

On Spotify, “At Seventeen” sits at a respectable 24.5 million streams. That’s more than the rest of the album combined. Over 3 times more.

So, what’s the deal? Is Ian rightfully a one-hit wonder? Or is there an enduring reason for the album’s 1.9 million copies sold? 

Can the folksy musings of “Between The Lines” really carry to our present day? Or does the album strictly belong to the era it was born from?

Between the Lines is, admittedly, a bit of a lull. 

A lot of the album sits calmly in the corner, absentmindedly tugging at its shoelaces or tapping its nails on the desk; not much happens.

But even in the quiet, muddled continuity, Ian finds a way to break your heart.

Look to tracks like “Light a Light”, where Janis pleads “lover / am I coming home again?”, or to her beleaguered resignation on “Tea and Sympathy”:

“And when the guests have done/I'll tidy up the room/I'll turn the covers down/And gazing at the moon/I’ll pray to go quite mad/And live in long ago/When you and I were once/So very long ago.”

The whole album is Ian reeling, and the mellower moments of “Between The Lines” reflect that deep, subtle ache without musically lifting a finger. You can hear it in the way her timbre changes, the small lilts in each phrase - it’s the emotion catching in her throat. It hurts her to tell you this, but she wants to; on other songs, though, she seems to actually take pride in sharing.

The tracks on the album with the most replay value break up the monotony with showstopping turns; “Bright Lights and Promises” twists into cabaret, a piano and clarinet fluttering around each other, almost mocking as the instrumental section builds. The song melts itself back down to its base melody, and then Ian changes key for one last refrain. “In The Winter” swells between tense strings and an anxious Ian to triumphant percussion and a joyful voice, each chorus preceded by a harsh descending piano line. The Cat Stevens-esque “From Me To You” is slowly rousing, like a sunrise coming through your curtains. The album’s title track begins eerily and floats into a polka waltz, later devolving into complete musical chaos. 

Throughout all the instrumentation, Ian’s lyrics strike deeply. In “Watercolors”, your “stagehand lovers have conquered” her; in the album’s biggest hit, she remembers “valentines that never came”. Everything is affecting and nothing feels out of place.

Through spiraling piano and muted strums, through calm, one-note musings and cries of love and loss, it’s clear that “Between The Lines” has a lot to say.

And after nearly 50 years, maybe it’s time for us to try and listen.

Listen to Charlie Koster on Take It To Heart, 10 pm Thursdays on KANM.org