The Gazette reported that singer-songwriter Janis Ian was first asked to write her autobiography when she was 16 - a year after she recorded her first big hit. She turned 55 on Friday and has decided the time is right to get something about her life on record. It will happen next year, she said.

"I was talking to a young musician and Jimi Hendrix came up," she explained in a telephone interview. "I said something about Jimi, and he just looked at me and stared: 'You knew Jimi Hendrix?' And I thought, 'Well, yeah, most of my contemporaries knew Jimi. We all knew each other. And it occurred to me that maybe I actually had something interesting to say at this point, that there's been three or four or five generations who didn't live through that era and who don't know a lot of those things."