photo credit: Brad Trent

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Judy Collins was walking around Newport Folk in 2019 when the festival’s founder, George Wein, stopped her in her tracks.

“He said, ‘God, it’s so great to see somebody whose face I recognize,’’ Collins says with a laugh of Wein, who passed away last year. “He was an old friend of mine, but the people who I was playing with were from all these fabulous young groups. I sang with Robin [Pecknold] from Fleet Foxes and Brandi Carlile. We did ‘Both Sides Now,’ which was quite exciting. There’s still the old spirit in it—it reminded me of the old days but very rock-and-roll and very modern. I thought it was wonderful.”

Of course, it makes sense that Collins, who turned 83 this year, is helping to bring the classic Newport spirit to some of the acts that have come to represent the historic festival in recent years. Pandemic aside, she has never really stopped touring—regularly turning in over 100 dates a year—and is currently in the midst of a particularly prolific period, having released six studio albums during the past six years. And her latest set, Spellbound, which was released in February, marks another milestone—her first collection of all original material during a recording career that dates back to the early 1960s.

“I’m always challenging myself to sit down and get more songs written,” she admits, while gearing up for a show in Portland, Maine, this spring. “I would do this for a period of weeks or months and, on New Year’s Day 2016, I said to my husband, ‘I think I’ll sit down and write a poem each day for 90 days.’ And he said, ‘Well, why don’t you make it 365 days, and then you’ll have a book of poems if you want?’ So that’s what I did and I kept at it.’”

Collins stayed, in her words, “fully committed,” to her writing exercise, while navigating a busy slate of concerts. After she’d whip a poem into shape, the veteran folk singer would print out the lyrics and bring them to the piano. At the end of the year, she found herself with 365 poems and, out of that batch, she was able to finish a solid core of songs. “It was a very active time,” Collins says, noting her 2017 collaboration with her old friend and onetime romantic partner, Stephen Stills. “I did an album with Ari Hest—we wrote songs together for a few months. I did an album with Chatham County Line, Winter Stories.”

At this point in her career, Collins guestimates that she has written around 150 songs, a remarkable 180 for a singer and performer who, unlike most of her Greenwich Village peers, preferred playing covers to working on her own material back in the coffee house days.

“I started writing songs, famously, when Leonard Cohen told me that he didn’t understand why I wasn’t writing my own songs,” Collins says. “This was 1966. And I ran home and wrote. I didn’t have an answer for him either. It had never occurred to me. There were just so many great songs to be sung—both traditional songs and by the city singer-songwriters, including Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. I would record songs by Dylan and Tom Paxton.”

Inspired by Cohen’s comment, Collins sat down and quickly turned out “Since You’ve Asked,” and has continued to include original material on her albums throughout the past 50-plus years. Yet, during all that time, she never conceived of writing an entire album.

“I was always finding wonderful songs that just seduced me,” she says. “But I kept writing and, after the pandemic arrived, I found more time. I was working on the songs, and it was pretty clear what I was going to do. I started performing the song ‘Arizona’ and a couple of the others when [live music returned], and I was getting wonderful responses. So I thought, ‘Well, why not give it a shot?’”

When COVID hit, Collins stopped “on a high note.” She had recently scored her first chart-topping album with Winter Stories and had traveled to Norway to celebrate that success with two sold-out nights at the Oslo Opera House. Those shows were recorded and picked up by PBS, winning the Bronze Award at the New York Film Festival last year.

While sequestered at home in Manhattan at the height of the novel coronavirus’ first wave, Collins continued to practice regularly and keep up her social life as best she could. “We usually have at least three or four dinners a week with friends and we kept that up—only we did them on Zoom,” she says. “We took walks, and I did things that amused me. I always take a regular vacation in January, but I hadn’t had 14 months off—or even two months off— in a number of years.

Before inching back on tour in May 2021, Collins also ventured into the live-streaming world, even recreating her landmark 1964 album, The Judy Collins Concert, at the venue where she originally recorded it, New York’s Town Hall, without an audience. “It was a real breakthrough album,” she says. “I did a couple of Dylan songs; I did Billy Wheeler. And I went back to the early Dylan songs that I recorded like ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.’”

When it came time to work on Spellbound, Collins’ mind drifted to her first quarantine— when she was hospitalized after contracting polio at the age of 11—and the dream journals she has kept for much of her life. “I started when I was first in therapy and, when I was in my early 20s, I started writing all my dreams down. I used to dream prolifically, and I always had something to say about my dreams. That went on for decades. And then, because of that, I developed the habit of journaling. Selectively, I am a very organized person with what I’m doing for the most part. So it’s more a matter of cumulative discipline.”

She also elected to include a 1989 original, “The Blizzard,” as a bonus track. Collins originally composed the cut for a concert she was doing for A&E at Aspen, Colo.’s Wheeler Opera House. Though she was raised in Denver, she didn’t have a “Colorado song” and wrote “The Blizzard” before heading to the show. However, the accompanying album from the presentation was never officially released in the United States. “There was a disagreement about that song, which is seven minutes long, and there were other disagreements,” she says. “But I think it is the best song I have ever written, so I thought that I would try to give it a rebirth on Spellbound.” Despite being fully back on the road, Collins has continued working on new song ideas and already has her eyes on another studio project.

“There are a number of songs that I didn’t get to record yet,” she says. “And I have continued to write in a more disciplined way. My discipline has always helped me keep up the work, no matter what. And because I’m type A, that’s why I do it.”