Judy Collins is no stranger to songwriting.
Ever since Leonard Cohen challenged her to write more for herself back in the mid ’60s — which led to Collins penning “Since You Asked” for her 1967 album Wildflowers — she’s contributed songs of her own alongside her often definitive interpretations of other writers’ work, including songs from Cohen, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Stephen Sondheim and more. But Spellbound, coming out Feb. 25, marks Collins’ first release on which every song is from her own hand, an achievement that seems remarkable and surprising after more than 60 years of recording.
“Y’know, things happen when something shifts in your life and you put another discipline in, which leads you to dig out things that might never have happened,” the 82-year-old singer explains from her home in New York. “The pandemic gave me a chance to actually sit with things that were cooking and get them cooked so they were well enough to go into the studio and record them.”
Collins started work on Spellbound in 2019, though much of the “cooking” began three years earlier. During 2016 Collins assigned herself the task of writing a poem every day for 90 days, which at her husband Louis Nelson’s suggestion became a full year. That gave the album — Collins’ 29th studio release overall — a head start, and she reached into the trove of 365 poems to pull out lyrics for what became “Shipwrecked Mariner” and “Wild With the Mist.” When the pandemic hit, she says, “my job was to sit down at the piano and write a poem that day or try to finish the ones that were sitting there — if anything spoke to me as a song, write it. It’s the only thing I was doing.”
The 12 songs on Spellbound (plus a new version of “The Blizzard” from 1990’s Fires of Eden) cut a personal path for Collins, who dedicated the album to early influences Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. “So Alive” paints a lyrical picture of Greenwich Village during the 1960s folk explosion, while her sometimes wayward youth informs tracks such as “Grand Canyon,” “Hell on Wheels,” “Arizona” and “When I Was a Girl in Colorado,” which was written just before Spellbound‘s final recording session. “Prairie Dream” draws on her father’s roots with the Nez Perce Reservation in Idaho and “City of Awakening” is Collins’ love letter to her longtime home of New York City.
“I thought I should write a script around it,” Collins quips. “It could very well be a musical, a history of my life.
“They all surprise you. They come out of nowhere,” Collins adds about the process. “Dylan was frank about his writing. He said in Chronicles he doesn’t know where it came from — ‘I don’t know how it began. It lasted 10 years and then it stopped’…That’s about all the analysis I need, to be frank. We’re responsible for sitting down and closing the door and turning off the phone, but we don’t know where the hell it comes from. We have muses and we have DNA and we have disciplines. But all the analyzing doesn’t amount to much. It’s simply the individual sitting with their own persona, and they’re touched by angels. But we don’t know where it comes from.”
Spellbound was recorded during four sessions with co-producer Alan Silverman and a core group of musicians who have worked with Billy Joel, Elton John, Suzanne Vega, Joe Jackson, Duncan Sheik and others. Ari Hest, Collins’ partner on the Grammy-nominated Silver Skies Blue (best folk album) in 2016, was also on board, most notably for the track “Hell on Wheels.” Collins describes the sessions as “fabulous” even when pandemic protocols were in place, largely eschewing technology in favor of a more organic, in-person project.
“This is a live musician session with live everything — live vocals, live tracks, real people having to get coffee every three hours and be home in time for dinner — and the studios were so happy to have real people coming in,” Collins says. “They were so exciting and so full of personalities and jokes and regrouping, ’cause we’ve all known each other for years. It’s so much better than having files sent around from one person to the next and putting yourself on separately.”
With additional poems remaining from her 2016 exercise and, of course, other ideas that have come since, Collins expects there are more songs where Spellbound came from. They’ll have to wait in line, however, behind other endeavors she has planned, including a children’s record Collins predicts she’ll record “some time or another in the next six months,” another full album with Hest and possibly another duets project. Collins — who returned to live performing last year and has shows scheduled throughout 2022 — also has “hundreds of starts for a new book,” though she’s not sure what direction her next one will take.
Nevertheless, she says that, “There are all these songs that might have been on this album that have to find a home, so I’ve got a Spellbound II, maybe. I’d just like to keep writing. My hope is that I can keep the poetry coming, and from that the songs will come. I’ve gotten into a daily routine of writing something; Whether it’s a poem or a chapter that might be part of a book or a song, whatever it is I have to keep it coming. You never know when the inspiration’s gonna come along, and you don’t want to squander it.”
Collins is also among the many mourning the recent death of composer Stephen Sondheim, whose “Send in the Clowns,” originally from the 1973 musical A Little Night Music, became a top 20 hit for her in 1977 and won him a Grammy Award in 1976 for song of the year. She also released an entire album, A Love Letter to Sondheim, in 2017. “He was wonderful and funny and delicious and amusing, always — and so, so, so smart,” Collins says. “(Lyricist) Hal David and I became friends…He was the one who said to me, ‘You made the difference for Sondheim and A Little Night Music. Nobody else is gonna tell you this, but I will,’ and that was so wonderful to hear, of course. If I did anything that could be seen as helping Stephen Sondheim, that’s a true honor.”
