Marianne Dissard Covers Janis Ian

Tucson chanteuse Marianne Dissard covers folk singer Janis Ian's masterpiece At Seventeen from Ian's 1975 album Between The Lines.

Dissard and English producer Raphael Mann produced a version each (his, world-weary and hers, fresh and irreverent) of Janis Ian's teenage confessional. Recorded with Tucson bassist Thøger Lund (Howe Gelb) and guitarist Gabriel Naïm Amor, Mexico City cellist Belén Ruiz, and English saxophonist Terry Edwards (PJ Harvey), each from their respective lockdown homes, these two versions replace the lilting Bossa-Nova rhythm of the original, taking the song back thirty years before its release date and focusing the song squarely on its lyrics with traditional French chanson-styled vocal interpretation. Joe Mabbott from Minneapolis' Hideway Studios (Rhymesayers, Bones & Beeker) mixed Dissard's production (as he had her previous albums), while Mann mixed 'His' from Ramsgate, Kent.

The two music videos by Mann from an idea by Dissard juxtapose 1950s Technicolor-hued teenage girls with their TikTok-era counterparts in a heartbreaking commentary on the ongoing pressure of being 'seventeen'. 

French-born chanteuse Marianne Dissard wrote, recorded and toured worldwide with members of Tucson's alt-Americana bands Giant Sand and Calexico, and speed mambo big band Orkesta Mendoza. In 2013, after three decades in the American West, Marianne left her home in Tucson, Arizona, living for a spell on her wooden sailboat in Ramsgate, Kent.

Singer of desert noir baroque, art rock lyricist and producer, Dissard's critically-acclaimed music plays effortlessly with contradictions: "tender, yet abrasive; melodramatic, but vulnerable; comical and heartbreaking", writes BK-One in his liner notes to her Best Of album Cibola Gold 2008-2015.  

Equally so Not Me, her 2019 memoir debut, an impish and poetic exploration of trauma and the life of an eating-disordered touring musician praised by some of Dissard's favorite authors; Mitch Cullin (Tideland), Chris Rush (The Light Years), and Andrew Smith (Moondust).