For Joan Baez, the Tours Will End, but Not the Protests
WOODSIDE, California — She has been performing for six decades and until recently hadn’t released a new album since 2008, but Joan Baez has been picking up momentum.
Taylor Swift brought her onstage, and Lana Del Rey said “Lust for Life,” her most recent album, had “early Joan Baez influences.” Last year, Ms. Baez was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Her 1970 version of the Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” ( her only Top 10 single) was recently featured in the film “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.”
Just as Ms. Baez has unlocked a fresh reserve of cultural resonance, however, she has decided to step back. She announced that her new album, “Whistle Down the Wind,” would be her final recording and said the eight-month-long world tour that kicked off in Sweden this month will mark her farewell to the road.
“It’s a big decision, but it feels so right,” Ms. Baez, 77, said in an inter- view at her home here.
The crystalline purity of her voice rang out in performances from the 1963 March on Washington to Woodstock six years later, from Live Aid in 1985 to the protests at the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016. But it was changes in her vocal range that mostly led to her decision to retire.
“I asked my vocal coach many years ago when it would be time to stop,” she said, “and he said, ‘ Your voice will tell you.’ And it has — it’s a muscle, and you have to work harder and harder to make it work.”
The “Whistle Down the Wind” producer Joe Henry said Ms. Baez had adjusted to the limitations on her voice. “I was aware of her feeling out the colors she had on her palette, but the loss of that range has done nothing to diminish her emotional power as a storyteller,” he said.
Ms. Baez wanted the album — on which she interprets songs by Tom Waits, Josh Ritter and Mary Chapin Carpenter, among others — to be a “bookend” for a recording career that started with her 1960 self- titled debut, which has been added to the Grammy Hall of Fame and the National Recording Registry at the Library of Congress.
It was more important to her to have the album speak to the present moment than to make any kind of final statement. “What was more conscious was trying to make an album that was in some musical way trying to make some beauty in the face of — well, of evil, really,” she said. “But not blatant or I couldn’t do it. Two songs I had to let go were too topical, and I wanted this to have a more lasting feeling.”
She called the current political climate the result of “a battle with 40 years of think tanks for the right wing — conservatives learned how to talk, how to lie, how to switch things around in a way that liberals and progressives never did.”
But Ms. Baez expressed hope in the energy she saw at the women’s marches, and in the number of women who have decided to run for office. “I was pleased that they weren’t just actions and then everything died down,” she said. “The fear was ‘ Yahoo, a million women,’ and then everybody goes home, but I don’t think that’s what’s happening.”
Ms. Baez, who was honored by Amnesty International i n 2015 with its Ambassador of Conscience Award, warned against imitating or romanticizing the protest movement of the ’60s, which she helped to define and set in motion.
“It’s like trying to have a second Woodstock, which is really stupid, I think,” she said. “I can see where people want that — since back in the day I’ve heard from young people, ‘Boy, I wish I’d been there.’ ”
In January, Ms. Baez, whose father, a prominent physicist, was born in Mexico, went to the California State Capitol to help commemorate the 1948 Los Gatos Canyon plane crash that killed 32 people, including 28 Mexican nationals whose names went unreported. She sang Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee,” which told the story of the tragedy, to the descendants of those who perished. She said that she will never stop participating in that kind of action.
Later, in an email, she seemed still to be grappling with her role and her responsibility. “When I go onstage, I don’t make history, I am history,” she wrote. “Perhaps it’s enough for me to be up there reminding people of a time when we had the music, the cause, the direction, and each other.
“My foundation in nonviolent political action was set before I started singing, and both are second nature to me. So I do not preclude the possibility of civil disobedience and even going to jail. Someone will have to.
“Then again,” she said, “perhaps there is virtue to having carried the flame, and grace now in passing the torch.”