Judy Collins: 'Usually I find songs are presented to me in a mysterious way'

At 84 the singer and social activist remains indefatigable. A UK tour, which starts tonight in at the Barbican in London, marks more than six decades of music-making, but even now she continues to break new ground. Spellbound, her 36th studio album, which came out last year, was her first to be entirely self-penned.

A simple maxim has sustained her all these years. “My plan has always been to find great songs and to be able to sing them when I fall in love with them,” she explains.

“Usually I find songs are presented to me in a very mysterious way. I think, of course, about being exposed to all the songs that I learned in the early years of the folk movement, when I went to the Folklore Centre in Denver and listened to all the singers singing Maid of Constant Sorrow and all the Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan songs...and also all the traditional songs which I started recording in 1961 on my first album. By the time I reached ’66 I had met Leonard Cohen and sung his songs, so I was gathering things along to add to my repertoire and to add to my knowledge. I was educating myself at the same time. That’s been pretty much consistent throughout my career.”

Born in Seattle, Collins and her family later moved to Denver, Colorado, where from the age of 13 she learned classical piano under the stern gaze of Antonia Brico, who frowned upon her young charge’s growing interest in folk music. “She would come to hear me sing and she’d say, ‘Little Judy, you could’ve gone places’ – that was her feeling, that I was a pianist that she could count on to bring her some attention,” Collins says.

Nevertheless Brico was a key influence on Collins, which she acknowledged in a 1975 documentary film which she co-directed and was nominated for an Academy Award in 1975. More recently, her piano teacher provided the inspiration for Tàr, starring Cate Blancett. Collins tuts at the latter film’s suggestion that Brico was only a “guest” conductor, pointing out that she had leadership of “a number of orchestras in her lifetime”, including the Brico Symphony in Denver. “Again, because she was a woman with an orchestra, I guess they forgot about saying anything about that in Tàr – I’ll send my disapproval of that in as soon as I get the time,” she adds.

Collins recalls that the turning point came at 15 when she was learning to play Rachmaninov’s 2nd Piano Concerto. “I turned on the radio and heard the Gypsy Rover – that was it, that was the start of my travel through the Great Folk Scare, as one of my brothers calls it,” she says. “Of course it led me in all kinds of curious and wonderful ways. I always say the songs sort of fly in through the transom – certainly Send in the Clowns, Amazing Grace, Both Sides Now and many of the other songs that I have heard suddenly me hit me as the thing I had to do.”

It was, she says, “the storytelling” in the songs of Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan that excited her, citing the example of Guthrie’s song Deportees which she “heard first in a mountain event outside of Denver – a young man, Martin Hoffman, was singing this song. I did not know until 50 years later that he had written the melody. Martin Hoffman killed himself in 1972, I wrote song for him called Song For Martin, he and I were in touch always, I didn’t know that he would be famous for writing the melody to this incredible song. It inspired a song that I wrote about three or four years ago, called Dreamers, about the problem of deportees and immigrants and dreamers.

“Everywhere in the world has an immigration issue; it’s not just here (in the US) and it’s not just there, it seems to be everywhere because of these terrible wars that go on, these famines, the fact that people have to move around in different ways that are disorganised and terrifying.

“So yes, I was always interested in the stories – and the melodies.”

It leads her off into a reminscence about Leonard Cohen, whose work she championed in the mid-1960s, helping him to find fame in his own right. “I couldn’t figure out for a long time how Leonard Cohen could write such melodies which were extremely different to anything we’d ever heard,” she says. “I then heard a story about this. He had two lessons on the guitar from a Spanish guitarist, and he then called the place where the guitarist was staying and the lady at the hotel or boarding house said, ‘Oh, he’s gone, he killed himself, he jumped out of a window last night’. Then Leonard said to himself, ‘E​​​​​​very song I write from now on is going to have those three chords that he taught me’.

“It’s upsetting but sometimes tragedies inspire us to do greater things. And some of that came out of the fact that he was raised in a temple, he had access to the kind of music that was different and unusual, but there was something remarkable about Leonard’s writing and I was lucky that he came to me with his first songs and that I was able to perform them and as he said, made him famous. Good, that’s one of the functions of doing this job: getting attention to other people.”

After five albums of folky material, Collins recorded two of Cohen’s songs, Suzanne and Dress Rehearsal Rag, on her 1966 album In My Life, a record in which she also embraced pop influences from The Beatles and Donovan alongside Mittel European theatre. “America was swept away, like the world, was by The Beatles, and I loved hearing them,” she says, adding that another track, Marat/Sade, she spliced together after seeing Peter Brook’s staging of the controversial play in England. “Josh Rifkin did the orchestrations and we did Pirate Jenny from Threepenny Opera, we did the Marat/Sade music, we did In My Life and those were the first two songs of Leonard’s that I recorded. That was a phenomenally different album, it was like jumping off a cliff. Fifty years after that I saw a review from The Village Voice that was so horrible about that album, saying I’d gone crazy and it was inappropriate and how dare I sing this, so I’m glad I didn’t see it when it happened.”

Her next album, Wildflowers, featured several more of Cohen’s songs along with the first studio recording of Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now, for which Collins won a Grammy. She remembers hearing it “at three o’clock in the morning in 1967 – it was my luck that Al Kooper ​​​​​​​was my friend and he knew my phone number ​​​​​​​and he knew Joni Mitchell, she was at the club listening to Blood, Sweat and Tears, he was attracted to her because she was going looking and he said, ‘What do you do?’ and she said, ‘I’m a songwriter’​​​​​​​, so he ​​​​​​​said, ‘Are they any good?’ ​​​​​​​and she said, ‘Yes’, then he said, ‘Can I hear them?’ He followed her home and she played him two songs​​​​​​​ and the second was Both Sides Now​​​​​​​. Nobody knew who Joni Mitchell was, she was an unknow​​​​​​​n except Tom Rush who recorded Circle Game​​​​​​​. So she sang me this song at three in the morning on the telephone and I said, ‘I’ll be right over’. This song absolutely enraptured me immediately.”

The song has gone on to become a standard but Collins says that it “has been very clear” to her that Mitchell has “never been very happy” that she was the first to ​​​​​​​make it a hit. “Leonard expressed his gratitude to me his whole life, there wasn’t a moment where he wasn’t talking about the fact that Judy Collins had discovered him, sung his songs, particularly Suzanne, and made him famous, but I don’t get any of that from Joni,” she says. “So I feel there’s a kind of jealousy about the fact that it wasn’t her version that made it a hit, and it still is – what a remarkable thing to happen from this little phone call between these two innocent girls, one of whom was a songwriter and one of whom was a singer. It’s a funny story if it isn’t yours – it’s like having a certain illnes​​​​​​​s, it’s interesting if it’s not yours.”

In the late 1960s Collins worked with Stephen Stills and he famously wrote the song Suite: Judy Blue Eyes about their relationship. She says the gesture was was flattering but also heart-breaking as it came during their break-up. “It just wrecked me, it was so beautiful,” she says. “We’ve been friends for the whole time we’ve known each other, since 1968 when we recorded together then he wrote the song about it. It was (Crosby Stills & Nash’s) first big hit, they sang it at Woodstock and it was quite evident it was going to remain a huge hit.

“When we went out on tour together in 2017 and ’18 we were onstage together for two hours every night and sang everything together, except we each had one solo, and then at the end of the show we would sing Suite: Judy Blue Eyes ​​​​​​​and he said, ‘We can’t sing those first two verses because they’re so mean’​​​​​​​, and I had accused him of reading my journals – like Ed Sheeran, I’m sure there was some copyright invasion​​​​​​​. Every once in a while he’ll say to me, ‘You should have got some money for that song’ and I would say, ‘Oh yes, I agree’. Was I the co-writer or not?”

Throughout the 1970s Collins continued to tackle a broad range of songs, from Stephen Sondheim to Elton John. When considering which tracks to interpret, she says she is only looking for “just the way to sing it that I would sing it – I don’t think about anybody else or what they do with it, it’s only my own vision of what the song is going to be that comes out, and I have to turn it into a Judy Collins song, when you hear those songs you know who’s singing them”.

In the 1970s Collins wrote a song about the Marxist icon Che Guevara. She says political activism has always gone hand in hand with her music.

Of that song, she says: “I was disgusted with the attitude that was prevalent among so many people about the people there in Mexico, in South America, in Cuba. They were so deprived, they were so left in the dark. There’s a line in that song: ‘Continue with your work, continue with your talk’ because no matter who’s in charge they’re not thinking about you, the people who are poor, the people who are separate, you have to go on and do what you have to do in spite of us. That’s why I wrote Che Guevara, I felt very moved by what had happened to him and how disastrous and complicated and unfortunate politics can be, and the differences between people who have power and those who have none.”

In more recent years, Collins has been frank about her problems with eating disorders and wrote the book Cravings about them. She says: “This is the big deal – eating disorders and prevalent, they’re out there, many people don’t talk about them, I wanted to share my story. England was what inspired this book because there was a man named (William) Banting, who in 1864 wrote Letter on Corpulance, Addressed to the Public, he was talking basically about eating disorders. He had been very heavy, he had earache and he went to a doctor who said you have to get off that weight and he gave him a very simple diet that included no sugar, no grain, no flour and he lost 70-80lbs and he celebrated it by writing this book and then Banting became a term in England for losing weight…

“Then of course Lord Byron was bulimic, he was a binger and Byron and Beau Brummel used to go to this shop to weigh themselves (on the scales) and the store kep track of their weight, so that was available for people who were looking for information to see. I looked into about 10 or 12 people that we knew about who were concerned about weight and did something about it, whether they started Weightwatchers or Dr Atkins, they all had ideas about how to control your eating disorder. I wanted to write that book and have fun with it as well as giving a message over.”

Last year, at 82 Collins released Spellbound, her first album of entirely self-composed songs. “It took a long time,” she shrugs. “I was always writing songs ever since Leonard told me he was surprised that I was not back in ’66. I started writing songs then and I have done ever since, but this time I had more time in part because of the pandemic and in part because it was time. I was writing a lot of poetry, harvesting songs out of those poems, so it was a matter of getting enough things together that I really thought would be appropriate for an album by me. I love some of these songs.

“Spellbound has become quite effective, I’m doing it in concerts, with orchestra sometimes, and I will definitely play it when I’m in England on a piano myself probably or with my band.

“I wrote a song about Thomas Merton (the Trappist monk, pacifist and social activist) that surprised me – I learned something about him that I didn’t know, that he was probably murdered in Thailand for a lot of reasons, and probably it was the CIA. He was a big embarrassment to the Catholic church, he was anti-war, they kept sending him notes saying stop talking about the war in Vietnam. He wrote The Seven Storey Mountain, which was a huge bestseller, he wrote it in ’43 or ’44 when he got to the monastery, then he wrote 40 or 50 more books and all of the proceeds went to Gethsemani and they were supporting five different churches around the country with his money. The day before he went to Thailand he signed off an agreement that everything belonged to the church and of course he would have the chance to change his mind at some point but instead he died.

“I read a book called The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton, the writers had done the research and found out that instead of being killed by a shock from a loose wire getting out of the bath in Thailand, they eventually discovered that there were bullet holes in his head, somebody wanted to get rid of him. Thailand was where we were flying all of our bombers to take care of Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia and the CIA was running round like crazy in Thailand.

”Anyway,” she chuckles, “not everybody writes about Thomas Merton. I turned it into a murder mystery. I’m very fond of murder mysteries, I read one every night.”

Collins is adamant that Spellbound will not be her last record. “I’m working on them right now, I’ve got a lot of songs that are coming out,” she says. “In fact, I just recorded one of David Crosby’s songs that he wrote after the split up for CS&N, which probably was written four or five years ago on an album called Croz. It’s a great, great song, it’s called Radio, and Graham Nash is singing on it with me. It’s like both of us making an homage to David Crosby.”

Judy Collins plays at Leeds City Varieties on October 10.