An octogenarian voice that defies time.
At a certain age, or so we have come to believe, a singer loses her voice. Her vocal cords stiffen and slow. Her high notes dry up. But that is not what has happened to Judy Collins.
At 80, the ethereal soprano who guided listeners through the 1960s — the “gentle voice amid the strife,” as Life magazine proclaimed on a May 1969 cover — still resonates.
When audiences come to see her perform, which she does about one out of every three nights, they are transported. “They’re thinking about their youth,” Ms. Collins said. “They’re thinking about their hopefulness. They’re thinking about their dreams, when they hear me.”
“It’s a time machine,” she said of her voice.
Ms. Collins was in her bewitching Upper West Side apartment, which she has occupied for almost 50 years. Clinton administration ephemera dotted the space, which she called “the environment.” It was lit by dragonfly stained-glass lamps and softened with pillows embroidered with messages like “Friends Are the Best Present” and “One Can Never Have Too Many Cats.”
Ms. Collins has three. They are Persian cats with luxurious coats and celestial orbs for eyes. She hunted them down, and when each was discovered — the tuxedoed Coco Chanel, the blue-gray Rachmaninoff and the all-white Tom Wolfe — Ms. Collins greeted the cat in a high, fluttering soprano. “Hello there,” she said. “Do you want to say hello?”
The hunt led into the bedroom of her husband, Louis Nelson, who was contemplating a large rendering of a dog. “I design memorials,” he said — he designed the Korean War Memorial on the National Mall — and now he was at work on a memorial for Samantha, a friend’s old dog, who would be laid to rest in a pet cemetery upstate.
Around Ms. Collins’s bedroom’s perimeter, an array of leonine wigs was assembled. Ms. Collins’s voice is unchanged, but the hair is new.
Two years ago, she had surgery on her hand, and when she awoke from the anesthesia, her hair fell out. “I had fabulous hair,” she said; silky hippie goddess hair. She was unimpressed with how it grew back, so now she has it all shaved off.
It is here, in the environment, that Ms. Collins does the work of maintaining her time machine.
“Most days, I do a number of things,” she said. “I practice. I sing a little. I write something. I do my crossword puzzle. I write in my journals. I try to do something exciting. I go to a funny movie. I get together with friends who are funny.”
Ms. Collins is always collecting jokes and stories and curious observations to fill out her sets. She used to stand onstage and close her eyes and just sing songs one after the other, but when she got sober, in 1978, she began to speak.
“I found out that I had an awful lot to say, which I had not realized,” she said.
Ms. Collins’s latest album, “Winter Stories,” is a collaboration with the Norwegian singer Jonas Fjeld and the bluegrass band Chatham County Line.
On it, Ms. Collins sings Joni Mitchell’s “The River,” her own “Mountain Girl,” and “Highwayman,” Jimmy Webb’s song about a man who is reincarnated as a thief, a sailor, a dam builder and a starship captain, which was later covered by Glen Campbell and then the country supergroup the Highwaymen. She had contemplated recording it for many years.
“I never really had the nerve,” she said. The song seemed to be owned by “the guys,” as she put it. “And then I thought, what the heck?”
Ms. Collins’s version is unlike any other. In translating the masculine country anthem into her gossamer voice, she has dismantled and rebuilt the song into a testament to female resilience. After hearing it, the recordings by the other versions sound somehow muted. It’s Judy Collins’s song now.
A whole generation of artists has fallen silent, but Ms. Collins is still singing. She is transforming old songs through her voice, and through that process she doesn’t just revive them, she remakes them.
“I notice that in old cultures, when someone is ill, they say we have lost our song,” Gloria Steinem, who has known Ms. Collins since the ’60s, wrote in an email. “Judy’s magic is that she gives us back our songs.”
There is a tendency to cast older artists as shadows. We go to their performances and listen for an echo of the star in their prime. But Ms. Collins is the thing itself. “I’m a better singer now,” she said. “A much better singer.”
Recently she kicked off a stretch of shows at Joe’s Pub in New York City with Mr. Fjeld and Chatham County Line. When they launched into “Mountain Girl,” the men onstage looked as if they were engaged in a strenuous form of exercise.
But Ms. Collins was still. Her guitar appeared to be made of air. She chased the song’s highest high notes with the relaxed air of a woman in her environment, summoning her cats.
In her ‘environment,’ enjoying wigs, cats and 120 shows a year.