I was in a garden centre yesterday (as you do) and caught the name tag euonymus on one of the plants. Immediately the first two words of this song (“Anonymous, autonomous,”) popped into my head. I realised I hadn’t heard it in ages. It took me a minute or two to work it through to the chorus (“Run too fast, Fly too high,”) before I got the title. I looked it up on You Tube as soon as I got home. It still sounds good.

According to Wikipedia the single of this wasn’t a hit in the US but it reached the dizzy heights of no. 44 in the UK.

Janis Ian: Fly Too High

Janis Ian’s other best known song came in the 70s. One for wallflowers of any age.

Janis Ian: At Seventeen

Astonishingly, Ian seems to have written this at the age of thirteen. It’s a precocious effort then. Dealing as it does with racial prejudice it was a bit ahead of its time in the 1960s and there were difficulties with her original record company and radio stations.

Janis Ian: Society’s Child