Legendary singer Judy Collins has been in the music business for six decades now. She got her start in New York’s Greenwich Village folk scene in the 1960s and in 2022, she released her latest album, “Spellbound.” KAZU’s Dylan Music spoke with Collins ahead of her upcoming show at the Rio Theatre in Santa Cruz and he began by asking Collins about “Spellbound.” (This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.)
Dylan Music: This is your first album of all original material that you wrote yourself. Is that true?
Judy Collins: That's true. So this is the first time that I've legitimately recorded in the studio an album of all my own songs, which I worked on during the pandemic. And slowly but surely, they turned into “Spellbound.”
DM: Well, I really love the album spellbound. It kind of seems like a mix of autobiographical sketches, biographical sketches of other people and places, and a little drinking of whiskey and other things throughout the album. I really liked track three off the album, “So Alive.” It seems to be about—
JC: Yes, I love “So Alive.”, I love it, yeah.
DM: it's about your early music career in folk music, and with someone else who was a musician and perhaps died too young. What can you say about that song?
JC: I wanted to picture the way it felt to be in the Village, and I was thinking about David Blue, with whom I had a very short, intense one night, or two night, or three night stand. David Blue was a wonderful singer and songwriter, and he did have a little, very narrow, bed, and he always left by dawn. So I sort of took some of the images and the feeling about being in the Village in the '60s. I moved there in 1963. And, you know, I began to hang out with all the singer songwriters.
DM: Shifting gears a little bit, though, you were also immortalized yourself in “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” by Crosby, Stills and Nash, arguably their most famous tune. Do you know how that song came about?
JC: Well, Steven (Stills) and I were having an affair in 1968, and I was getting out because I was not going to stay in California. I was coming back to New York. He brought it to me. I had a birthday in Santa Monica and he came to my hotel in 1969. He came and brought me a guitar for my birthday and brought me flowers. And then he sang—I hadn't heard it—he sang “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” and we both were weeping. And I said, “Well, it's beautiful, but it's not going to get me back.” And of course, that song came out of it, and, God, it's a good song.
DM: When someone says to me, Judy Collins, I automatically hear “Send in the Clowns.” Of those many songs that you've made famous, is there one in particular that you feel most associated with yourself?
JC: Well, I feel very associated with all of them, because when you get into a relationship with a song, it begs and pleads to be sung on stage. You can't do them all all of the time. You have to be selective, and you can't make people feel that every time they come to a Judy Collins concert, they're going to hear the same thing. That's not the case. You never know what I'm going to do because I never do the same show twice.
Singer and songwriter Judy Collins will perform songs and tell stories at the Rio Theater on Tuesday, September 10th.
