POP MUSIC REVIEW : Janis Ian Gets On With the New, and Quite Well

Some pop performers act as if they would rather throw Fluffy and Fido into a pool of piranhas than risk playing unfamiliar songs to a concert audience.

But Janis Ian took the plunge with well-justified confidence Friday night at the Coach House as she began her latest comeback.

It helped that the veteran folk-pop singer was playing to an intimate house nearly filled with supportive fans who were probably hungry to hear her play anything. Ian hadn’t made an album since 1981, and she had toured just once, in 1989, since pulling out of a recording contract 12 years ago to kick back and concentrate on songwriting.

Also in her favor were two strong backing players, bassist Chad Watson and drummer Jim Brock, who gave plenty of heft and dimension to her material. Ian was no slouch either, doing a solid job on guitar and throwing in some nice little rhythmic adornments and bluesy licks.

But the fresh material was her chief asset. Ian’s new album, “Breaking Silence,” due out Tuesday, is well-stocked with melodies that stick, and lyrics that get across with only slight and occasional reversions to the schmaltz and self-pity that mark some of her best-known catalogue stuff. She played all of it in a 90-minute set that included only four well-known oldies.

One of those, “In the Winter,” from her platinum-selling 1975 album, “Between the Lines,” found Ian seated at a digital piano, emoting her way through a chilly tale of loneliness and woe that ended with a blow-it-out, look-out-Liza, pop-diva vocal display. It drove the fans wild. But the subtler approach that Ian brings to her new songs is more rewarding. Singing from a more experienced point of view, Ian brings a wider perspective to painful episodes, rather than merely nursing inner hurt.

Of the oldies, it was her 1967 hit, “Society’s Child,” that stood out. Its trove of hooks (the original recording sounds like prime mid-’60s throwaway pop, and that’s not bad) remains hard to resist, and its indictment of racism remains unfortunately relevant more than a quarter of a century after it made Ian, at 15, into the youngest protest singer of them all.

She joked that her bassist made her play “Society’s Child,” but she sang it with respect and full conviction. The rueful old ballad, “Jesse,” received a lovely treatment; “At Seventeen,” her biggest hit, wasn’t exactly tossed off, but the song hasn’t worn that well. Ian served those nuggets up in sequence early on--a way of pleasing old fans while signaling that her main agenda calls for getting on with the new.

Not known for musical levity, Ian mustered what humor she could. One instance was her segue into a chorus of “doot-da-doot-da-doots” from Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” during her wistful but bouncy ‘60s recollection, “Guess You Had to Be There.”

(She might have been using Reed’s song to suggest that the ‘60s were themselves a walk on the wild side, or she may have been wryly and obliquely underlining her recent public coming-out as a lesbian, which she briefly noted later in the show, without getting on a soapbox about it. “Wild Side,” you’ll recall, was Reed’s tribute to New York City’s gay demimonde. Reed, by the way, is Ian’s classmate of sorts: he made his debut with the Velvet Underground on Verve Records in 1966--same year and label as Ian.)

Ian, who lives in Nashville now, also had a little fun with “Walking on Sacred Ground,” pronouncing the oft-repeated word “walking” in the exaggerated New York accent. Her encore included a broadly comic tune about a woman who reads Cosmopolitan magazine religiously and winds up romantically the worse for it.

Ian paced the show intelligently, including several thematically alert segues. But there wasn’t quite enough variety in her repertoire to avoid a long, six-song, mid-set sag into dark, mainly downbeat songs in which the subject matter ranged from the Holocaust (“Tattoo”) to sexual betrayal and domestic violence (“This House” and “His Hands”). Switching from guitar to piano midway during the sequence helped; so did the edgy blues guitar that she played on “His Hands.” Ian’s sliding bass-note licks conjured images of the tale’s abused woman reeling from one of her drunken husband’s blows.

She rose out that trough with “Days Like These,” an anthem of endurance she sang on the soundtrack of John Mellencamp’s 1992 film, “Falling From Grace.”

“Breaking Silence,” which closed the pre-encore set, was the show’s stunner, its jolting dynamics leaping from tense whispers to thundering releases, and back again. Brock’s drumming, though inventive and usually apt, had been intrusive at times during the set. But here his power paid off, and Ian’s voice had more than enough force to ride it. At 4-foot-10, she is just a wisp of a woman in curly hair, a colorful jacket with coattails and black Spandex tights. But the song’s moving, high-powered declaration proved that she isn’t limited to playing the pining diva or the demure folkie. As Ian mounts her comeback, both live and on record, she is walking on very solid musical ground.

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Opening was Opus Dei, a Huntington Beach trio consisting of a guitarist and two harmonizing female singers dressed like gypsies (the trio’s name, in Latin, modestly declares it to be a “work of God”).

Marshaling the rangy, high-impact voices of Deannie Isham and Lisa Panzarella, Opus Dei performed mystical songs that sounded like stripped-down Heart, a swelling Christian anthem and a bouncing blues about a cute baby. A narrative about the hard-knocks life of a runaway teen-age girl was cast in a smooth, sophisticated pop-R&B; setting that recalled Sade or Oleta Adams. The baby song was fun, but most of the others were too high-blown in their imagery to suggest a personal vision and songwriting voice.

The singers are undeniably powerful, the presentation confident and professional-bordering-on-slick. The talent is there, but at this point its application isn’t that involving.