Joan Jett doesn’t do detours easily. For nearly five decades, she’s stuck to pure rock and roll like it was a blood type—no frills, no genre-hopping, no crossover pretensions. Which is why her new record, Changeup, comes as a jolt: 25 tracks of Joan Jett and the Blackhearts gone acoustic. No Marshall stacks, no walls of fuzz. Just the songs laid bare, stripped down to their bones, but still snarling.
“It was sort of unexpected,” she said. “During the Bad Reputation documentary screenings, we did a few songs acoustic because it didn’t make sense to set up electric. And it came off better and different than I expected.” Then the lockdown hit, and suddenly acoustic wasn’t a novelty—it was survival. “We all realized we wanted to slow down,” she said. “To be more intimate with the things we’re involved in. For me, that’s music.”
The results aren’t museum pieces. They’re rediscoveries. “Victim of Circumstance” became a whole new song, the melody bent into something moodier. “Cherry Bomb,” the Runaways’ teenage battle cry, emerged as sultry and haunted. “It still has the menace,” Jett said, “but in a different way. I wasn’t sure it would work. I was surprised by it. It makes me a fan all over again.”
She’s been allergic to acoustic gimmicks before. MTV once came calling. “I was the first one they asked to do Unplugged,” Jett admitted. “But I didn’t want to do it. I wasn’t comfortable like that.” Nirvana would later set the standard, and she doesn’t regret passing, but she acknowledges the irony now. “Back then I thought even playing acoustic was too far from what I was supposed to do.”
Changeup isn’t a greatest hits record in disguise. Sure, “Bad Reputation” and “I Love Rock and Roll” are here, but Jett dug deep into the catalog. “It was about going back and showing off some of those songs that maybe weren’t paid attention to the first time,” she said. That includes “You Can’t Get Me,” “Coney Island Whitefish,” and “Soulmates to Strangers,” the latter from a not-so-distant album. “It wasn’t just about the early stuff,” she insisted. “It spans the career.”
Even the overlooked corners of her career hover nearby. Asked about Fetish or the Evil Stig project (her tribute to Mia Zapata of The Gits, who was murdered in 1993), Jett nodded toward the future. “We were going to do ‘Fetish,’ but maybe that’s for volume two.” She still recalls the small tour she and The Gits did to raise money for a private investigator to find the person who killed Zapata. “We called it Evil Stig—Gits Live backward. It was such a cool name. Ten years later, they finally caught the guy.”
Nostalgia has a way of sneaking up on Jett whether she wants it or not. 2021 marked the 40th anniversaries of Bad Reputation and I Love Rock and Roll, a milestone she’d just as soon downplay. But the Light of Day film with Michael J. Fox recently hit 35 years, and she found herself revisiting it. “We formed a real little band for the movie, played some gigs at a corner bar in Cleveland,” she said. “Michael was a very good guitar player.” And despite his Family Ties-level fame, the paparazzi weren’t swarming. “Rock musicians weren’t celebrities then,” Jett said. “Not until social media and reality shows.”
That’s her line in the sand: celebrity vs. rock and roll. “Pure rock and roll,” she called it. “Like Chuck Berry. It fits with everything. Nirvana, Motley Crüe—it’s all derived from the great masters.” Which explains why she’s as comfortable sharing a bill with Poison as she was covering T. Rex’s “Jeepster” for last year’s AngelHeaded Hipster tribute. “Marc Bolan was one of my first crushes and a big influence on my guitar playing,” she said. She even copped his trademark howl. “That scream? I copied Marc. Listen to him on ‘Bang a Gong.’ He does it, and I just tried to imitate it. Eventually it became part of my DNA.”
The DNA metaphor keeps circling back. Jett’s genre stubbornness—her refusal to drift far from that pure rock and roll core—is why she can veer acoustic without it sounding like a gimmick. “I’ve done heavier songs, lighter songs,” she said. “It runs the whole gamut. Rock and roll is negative blood—it mixes with everything.”
Even her guitar obsession is rooted in that purity. She recently teamed with Epiphone for the Olympic Special, a stripped-down instrument that mirrors her own lifelong Melody Maker. “It’s very simple. Volume knob, toggle switch, no crazy nuts and bolts. We did it in white so people can mess with it themselves. Put stickers on it, beat it up. Hopefully you don’t have to mortgage your house for it.”
In the meantime, there’s the not-so-small matter of this summer’s postponed-then-rescheduled stadium blowout with Def Leppard, Mötley Crüe, and Poison. “It’s going to be insane,” she grinned. “We had to postpone it twice. I don’t know what to expect, but it should be fun.”
At 64, Joan Jett is still rewriting her songs, still finding new menace in old riffs, still capable of upstaging bands that once dismissed punk as sloppy noise. She calls it Changeup, but the truth is simpler: it’s just Joan Jett, proving again that pure rock and roll never dies—it just changes keys.
Watch the interview above and then check out the videos below.
