Judy Collins was not born on the stage. Although the folk singer remembers it, she was pretty close.
“I had my first stage appearance at the age of three. I was singing ‘I’ll Be Home for Christmas’, ”she told New Times on the phone. “But I was always musical. My dad had a radio show for over 30 years and he sang ‘Danny Boy’ and all these Irish songs to me when I was in the womb. And then I started learning the piano when I was five. ”
After getting her first paid gig as a musician at 19, she decided to take to the streets and has barely stopped performing in the 60 years since then. Her latest tour takes her to Parker, Fort Lauderdale on Friday, January 14th, where she promises to play all hits like “Both Sides Now” and “Send In the Clowns,” but she’s exceptionally proud to present a few too new tunes from. her upcoming album Spellbound will be released on February 25th.
She recorded Spellbound for over two years, starting in 2019 and throughout the pandemic. The album is the 29th of their career, but it is the first that Collins has written every single song on.
similar posts
I support
Local
Community
journalism
Support the independent voice of Miami and help keep the future of the New Times free.
Songwriting, she says, is now relatively easy for her, but when Collins started it never occurred to her to write her own songs.
“I’ve always been writing songs since Leonard Cohen asked me why I didn’t.”
tweet this In 1961, at the age of 22, she moved to New York and found herself in the Greenwich Village folk scene performing songs by a young Bob Dylan and Tom Paxton. It was a conversation with another legendary songwriter that eventually got Collins to write for himself.
“I’ve always been writing songs since Leonard Cohen asked me why I didn’t. The first song I ever wrote was ‘Since you asked,’ ”she says.
This track appeared on her 1967 album Wildflowers, along with her rendition of a trio of Cohen compositions.
“That first song was written in 1966 when I had already made half a dozen albums,” she recalls. “I learned a good taste in music from my dad by listening to the songs he put on his radio show. After recording all these great songs by masters like Bob Dylan or Woody Guthrie, something was embedded. But when you get creative want to be, you have to go your own way. “
When asked what inspires her songwriting, her answer is simple: “Life. You have to sit down at the piano, close the door and turn off the phone.”
She has a varied approach to writing, usually developing the music first, followed by the lyrics. Occasionally, however, it works the other way round.
“I wrote a poem every day in 2016,” says Collins. “I wrote 365 this year. Maybe all these poems turned into six songs when I took them to the piano to see if they fit musically anywhere.”
Although Collins has written texts on subjects as diverse as immigration and architecture, she also served as a muse, most notably for the Crosby, Stills & Nash classic “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes”.
Collins lights up when asked about this song.
“It was Stephen’s birthday two days ago. I sent him some flowers because he wrote this song,” she says. “You know, Stephen and I were on tour together in 2017. We did 150 shows together, just the two of us for two hours. At the end of each show we sang ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’ together but first verse because Stephen said it was too mean. ”
Collins had an interesting life that you might think her voice wouldn’t be as angelic as it sounded on her last live album, Live at the Town Hall, NYC, 2020. So what’s her secret to keeping her voice safe? Agility?
“I sing every day. I try to stay healthy. I don’t drink, I don’t smoke,” says Collins. “Even though I’ve done all of these things before, maybe I’m just lucky.”
Judy Collins. 8 p.m. Friday, January 14 at the Parker, 707 NE Eighth St., Fort Lauderdale; 954-462-0222; parkerplayhouse.com. Tickets are priced at $ 37 to $ 87 through ticketmaster.com.
Comments are closed.