[Text by Pamela Goddard] “You don’t get to choose how or when you’re going to die. You can only decide how you’re going to live. Now.” Joan Baez said this, sometime, somewhere. Her wisdom, part of a book of quotes from notable women, guides her own life after four decades as a singer and activist. Baez is celebrating 50 years of performing with a new CD, Day After Tomorrow, and a cross-country tour. Her only New York performance will be at the State Theatre on Friday, March 6.
After 50 years in the public eye, Baez tries not to assign meaning to her life. Instead, she plays with it. “It’s a ridiculously big thing,” she says. “It’s kind of a pleasure, at this point in my life, to be able to traverse that time period… especially in an evening of an hour and a half. It’s tricky and a good challenge, and I think we do it very well.”
The years have brought many changes to Baez and her music. Her voice has evolved from honey to dark chocolate. She finds she needs to work a bit harder to sing some of the old traditional ballads.
“We just added one with a totally different approach: Silver Dagger,” says Baez. “It’s wonderful to do, totally different. To add that to the repertoire is really a fun thing for me.”
Baez’s back up musicians are well-known to Ithaca’s traditional music fans. John Doyle sings and plays guitar and mandola in the Irish style. Bluegrass bass player Todd Phillips also adds harmonies. “And there’s one who’s enormously gifted,” Baez says. “He’s from Louisiana, plays mandolin, mandola, piano, fiddle, and his name is Dirk Powell.”
Many of the songs Baez is performing on this tour come from her collaboration with Steve Earle. Baez says that working with Earle on Day After Tomorrow was an exceptional experience.
“I’d been warned of all these things about him, because he can be gruff. But he was wonderful with me and it was very simple. He likes to work the way I like to work — fast. We made pretty much the whole thing in ten days,” she says. “He produced it and wrote three of the songs — he wrote two of them for me which I felt very puffed up about. ‘The Wanderer’ he’d written overnight. We tried it out in the morning and ‘bingo.’ It was amazing working with him.”
“I know that we were heading for something very acoustic and something that we wanted to have as a bookend to the very beginning. I think we accomplished that,” she adds. “I wanted it to feel, in a way, like the very beginning, but be totally contemporary.”
Baez has said that this recording speaks to the essence of who she is, reflecting songs that have been the “enduring backbone” of her repertoire for the past 50 years. As she defines that essence, Baez’s attraction to songs appears more instinctive than contemplative.
“What happens is not on a conscious level, for instance having three song about Mary. I don’t know what brought those songs to us,” Baez explains. “In the end it was quite a spiritual album. More spiritual than political. On the other hand, the song ‘Day After Tomorrow’ is political in the most beautiful way. That one is an obvious one that I would choose, on just one hearing. I learned it immediately and started singing it in concert.”
Over the decades, Baez has explored diverse musical ground — from traditional ballads (’Silver Dagger’) to Elvis Costello (’Scarlet Tide’) and Tom Waits (’Day After Tomorrow’). If there’s a thread that’s held her music together over the decades, Baez believes it must be the feeling of the songs more than their content. “A lot of times I don’t really know what they’re about,” she says. “For instance, ‘The Lower Road,’ I don’t really know what it’s about. Once I was singing one of Dar Williams’ songs, ‘If I Wrote You.’ I gave this long winded explanation about the song. It was so obvious to me. Dar was in the audience and afterwards she said she loved how I sang it but that the introduction had absolutely nothing to do with the song. So, I realized clearly how we have our own perspective on everything. That fascinates me.”
The songs Baez sings today revisit the creative territory she has travelled during her life. “A lot of the songs are reminiscent of the ballads, and a lot of songs are reminiscent of when I moved on into more socially conscious songs,” she says. “There have been a lot of home bases for me. The first one was ballads. The next was current song writers. One of them was the Diamonds and Rough era when I wrote my own things. Those are all different homes for me.” Baez’s voice rings with such honesty that it’s clear she is comfortable, wherever she is.