When she takes the stage at the Rialto Theatre on Thursday, March 3, it will be Janis Ian’s last Tucson concert.
Every stop on the North American leg of her “Celebrating Our Years Together” Tour will be a last and while it hasn’t quite hit her yet, she’s ready to embrace the finality of it all.
“If it was two years ago when I was on tour planning my last tour, it would be more real,” Ian said during a phone call from her Tampa Bay, Florida, home last month. “But with the two-year gap because of COVID, everything about this tour has taken on this slightly unreal (twist).”
Ian, who kicked off the tour with four shows in Santa Fe, New Mexico, last week, is celebrating a career that started with 1966’s controversial song “Society’s Child” when she was 14 and ends with her months-old album “A Light At the End of the Line” 56 years later.
The album is the folk singer’s farewell, 11 songs recorded in a single take that is as close to perfect as she could get, she said.
“When I look at the album, what I see … is a love song over and over and over again,” Ian said. “A love song to other women who have stood up. A love song to older women like myself who are standing up. A love song to gay people, transgender people, to whatever, but mostly it’s about the title: ‘The Light At the End of the Line.’ It’s OK to say I’m finishing this phase and move on.”
Ian’s next chapter will find her doing something she has never quite had time to do until now: write.
“I’ve been saying for years I want to write, I want to write, I want to write. Now I get to do it,” she said.
There’s the first draft of a book that is one chapter away from being finished. Songs, of course, and maybe a collection of short fiction. She’d also like to do a book festival like the Tucson Festival of Books, which she did in 2010 with her friend and Tucson suspense writer J.A. Jance.
“I would really like to spend a month off email. I would like to spend a month offline. I would like to walk on the beach without a phone,” she mused aloud of what retirement could look like. “And I would like to not have so many responsibilities.”
A makeup artist friend who worked on Cher’s farewell tour — and the six or seven versions of that tour that followed — asked Ian if this was the first of the last for her, as well.
“They said are you going to come back in two years? And I said no. This is my last North American tour,” said Ian, who turns 71 on April 7. “I’m not going to rule out the possibility of a festival and I’m talking to a couple of schools that want me to come out and teach. But in terms of going on tour, doing regular gigs, this is it.”
Ian plans to take the final tour to Europe and the UK in 2023.
