JOAN BAEZ Whistle Down The Wind PROPER 8/10

A full decade on, the legend returns, tackling songs written by other stars. By Graeme Thomson

SPEAKING to Uncut last month, Joan Baez served up the sobering news that Whistle Down The

Wind would likely be her final album. At 77, and with almost 60 years’ worth of recordings behind her, it’s not hard to fathom her reasons. Her new album may have taken only 10 days to make, but it arrives a full 10 years after its predecessor, 2008’s Day After Tomorrow.

If this does prove to be a last goodbye, Baez is exiting with an understated flourish. Produced with the kind of rootsy classicism that has become a hallmark of Joe Henry’s work, Whistle Down The Wind tackles 10 songs by a stellar cast of writers, among them Tom Waits, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Anohni and Josh Ritter. It offers astutely resonant personal ruminations at the same time as honouring Baez’s enduring search for material which speaks to the social condition of the age. Its ornery, sometimes weary defiance is summed up in a line from Eliza Gilkyson’s “The Great Correction”: “The light burns brightest in the darkest times.”

One of the motives for Baez’s mooted retirement – her world tour this year is titled Fare Thee Well – concerns the changes to her voice. While you still wouldn’t easily confuse her with, say, Marianne Faithfull, age has undoubtedly mussed up the edges of that crystalline soprano. Far from being a deterioration, however, it works as an extra weapon in her armoury. In her absolute vocal prime, Baez could sound almost annoyingly prim and perfect. The evolution of a whiskery rasp and low, murmuring gravitas perfectly complements the twilit tenor of the record.

Politically resonant without being preachy, the best songs here bear an allegorical weight. Only Zoe Mulford’s “The President Sang Amazing Grace” – commemorating the day Barack Obama sang the spiritual during a eulogy for the victims of the racist atrocity committed at a Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston in 2015 – descends into the kind of worthy, over-literal hymning that has sometimes marred Baez’s work. It’s an isolated offender. More characteristic is “Civil War”, a stately waltz written by Henry which paints, in impressionistic strokes, a picture of a country divided, and where Baez’s voice crackles thrillingly on the high notes. On “The Great Correction”, the pointed message plays second fiddle to the track’s easy country roll. “People round here don’t know what it means/To suffer at the hands of our American dreams…/They got their God and they got their guns.” Her version of Antony & The Johnsons’ “Another World”, meanwhile, arrives stripped of the original’s ambient noise and ghostly drama. What remains is a stark Dear John note to a dying planet, driven by percussive acoustic guitar and Baez’s intimate murmur, the sorrow held powerfully in reserve.

More personal reckonings lie elsewhere, not least on the pair of songs written by Waits and Kathleen Brennan. The title track is plain haunting. “I can’t stay here, and I’m scared to leave,” whispers Baez, a line which thrums with significance for any artist approaching the end of the road. “Last Leaf” is another survivor’s song, Baez cast as Old Mother Folk. “There’s nothing in the world that I ain’t seen,” she sings. “I greet all the new ones that are coming in green.” The same valedictory mood imbues Carpenter’s “The Things We Are Made Of”, a rueful reflection on memory and

experience, of alternate routes crossreferenced against chosen paths. Baez’s perfectly weighted performance is deeply moving.

Of two new songs by Josh Ritter, the lilting “Be Of Good Heart” is a tender, dignified farewell. The other, “Silver Blade”, can’t help but recall “Silver Dagger”, the classic American folk ballad which Baez recorded in 1960 on her debut album. In that song, the young female protagonist resolves to “sleep alone all my life”, having been warned by her mother that “all men are

false”. Ritter’s composition is a dramatic minor-key murder ballad. This time, she enacts revenge on a “Lordling” who abuses his power and “works his

will” before sending her away. Killing him with her blade, she buries the corpse in “a place even God don’t know”.

Whistle Down The Wind ends with “I Wish The Wars Were All Over”, an 18th-century sailor’s song retooled by musicologist Tim Eriksen. Rendered as a sparse Appalachian lament, it’s another song framed in the language of the past which resonates clearly in 2018, just as it would have at any point during Baez’s remarkable career. Now more than ever, its mix of sorrow and hope feels like an archetype of every song she has ever sung: idealistic but aware; optimistic yet grounded; crisp but compassionate. Timeless and true.