With a career as extensive and a repertoire about as wide-ranging as it gets, legendary songbird Judy Collins says a passion for music still comes to her naturally.
Collins calls it a basic operation: When she hears something she loves, she is ready to try and learn it.
“Yoko Ono told me a long time ago, she said songs have a life of their own. They know where they want to go. And I think that that’s true,” Collins shares in a phone interview with Orlando Weekly. “What happens with me is, if I hear a song that I fall in love with, I have to record it, no question. There’s no analysis that goes into this, it’s like falling in love with somebody.”
America’s 1960s folk-music circuit brought a series of powerhouse voices to the forefront of the country both musically and politically. Key figures in this movement — Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez — intertwined storytelling and social activism, inspiring artists to break barriers in their songwriting for generations to come. Collins was also one of the leading lights of this movement.
Seven decades after her initial rise to fame, the alchemy of live performance continues to call to Collins, who still carries a mix of delicacy and power in her voice with every note.
One of the unique charms of Collins’ catalog is that each record sounds uniquely her own, despite her pulling from a diverse array of genres, from folk standards to rock & roll to musical theater. The latter category includes one of her most popular covers, “Send in the Clowns,” a musical standard that won composer Stephen Sondheim a Grammy for Song of the Year in 1976.
“I’ve worked a lot with Jonathan Tunick, who did the orchestration originally of the song, and he’s worked with me on other things. His orchestrations are very clean and very, very magical, and that’s what he brings to the song,” Collins says. “He used that motif that Sondheim wrote on the piano on the English horn, that’s where the magic started.”
Collins received her own Grammy Award in 1969 for another popular interpretation: Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now.” She’s as prolific a recording artist as they come, releasing a total of 36 studio albums and numerous other live albums and compilation albums across the years, with multiple certified gold and platinum. (Did we also mention she’s an Academy Award-nominated documentary director, too?)
“I was born into a very musical family. My father had a radio show and he was always singing and practicing and reading and writing, and he’s just an amazing force,” Collins says. “I wrote all during my young years, I played the piano, I played with orchestras, I performed in all kinds of situations. It was very good training for what I do today. I got sucked into the business, really, in a big way. One way or the other, I was going to be doing this for a living.”
“If I hear a song that I fall in love with, I have to record it, no question. It’s like falling in love with somebody.”
Collins’ ability to interweave music and activism, alongside many of her peers in the world of folk music, helped to redefine what popular music could be. A song could be so much more than just a catchy beat and chorus, a song could serve as a protest against injustice.
“It’s so personal. It’s very down to earth, you’re telling stories and people, they have to have some way of processing what it is that they’re going through in their lives in some musical form,” Collins shares. “The folk music field, it’s there to help everybody.”
With each night’s performance, Collins prefers to mix up her setlist. Collins says that she takes about 40 minutes once she first steps into the evening’s venue to open her lyric book and choose what calls to her.
“The more that I can get into the choices, the better off I am. I’ll move into songs I haven’t been singing, things that are new to me or interesting to me or old to me. I always try to make it fresh,” Collins says.
“It’s magic when it happens, and it helps me to be focused. It’s been very interesting. I’ve done six concerts in various parts of the country since my husband died. And this thing that happens on stage is very healing, and at the moment, it’s working on me.”
When asked if her perspective on music has changed over the years, Collins replies that it has not. It’s still easy for her to fall in love with a song, for music to be both a physical and emotional process. Much of what she has learned throughout her career and held close as guidance, Collins shares with us to close out the conversation.
“Work hard, get as much pleasure out of your life as you can. Don’t be judgmental about other people. Sing only what you like. Don’t let anybody else tell you what to do. And hang on to that dream, because you’re the only person that can fulfill your dream. You have the good luck and the fortune to fill up your wishes and your desires, do it the way you want to do it.”
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This article appears in Jan 8-14, 2025.