But I was an alcoholic born into an alcoholic family. It's just not possible to go into life without challenges. Can you talk about how you've handled this?Ī: We all have things we have to deal with. And then I do a number of songs at the piano by myself, most of which I've written. We do a section of the show with him playing the piano and me playing the guitar. I will be with my pianist, who's wonderful - Russell Walden. Q: What of the songs you've written has the most meaning for you?Ī: The one I just wrote about my mother ('Twilight'). 'Amazing Grace,' which although I didn't write, I actually own my copyright on because it is traditional, is a song that has been part of my life for many decades and has moved many people and has become a very important part of our culture. Q: What was the most rewarding song not written by you?Ī: Rewarding in terms of fame and fortune would of course be 'Both Sides Now.' 'Send In the Clowns' was way up there. But then when I started to write my own, I needed to do. Writing a song was never in my vocabulary.

I said to Leonard I never thought of writing a song in my life until he asked me. Q: How do you feel being a songwriter versus singing other people's work?Ī: I've had tremendous hits with other people songs that led to their getting contracts, including Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. So everything and anything you can think of that belong in that name. Q: How would you describe your show at the Rrazz Room?Ī: I do everything I've done throughout my career.

She talked to The Chronicle by phone from her home in New York City. Right now, Bay Area enthusiasts can catch Collins at the Rrazz Room. Collins' new album, 'Bohemian,' and her book, 'Sweet Judy Blue Eyes' (a play on the late 1960s song 'Suite: Judy Blue Eyes' that Stephen Stills wrote about her), come out next month.

'We've been together 33 years - a record for a hippie,' she says. Her life has been marked with tragedy (her son, Clark, committed suicide, and she's a recovering alcoholic) but Collins has been able to beat her demons and find happiness with her husband, Louis Nelson. On a recently aired KQED special about the Greenwich Village music scene, Tom Paxton remembers that although she wasn't a prolific writer, when Collins wrote a song it was almost always a winner. Although she is mostly known for bringing such artists as Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell into the mainstream with such hits as 'Suzanne' and 'Both Sides Now,' Collins, 72, like so many folk singers of the 1960s, is also a songwriter and activist in her own right. The daughter of a Colorado radio personality, Judy Collins, a classically trained musician, fell in love with folk singing and started making the rounds when she was a teenager. Facebook Twitter Email Judy Collins is performing at the Rrazz Room James Veysey

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