November 6, 2008 in Features

Baez still has a voice of grace

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Associated Press photo

Joan Baez
(Full-size photo)

From the outset of her career a half-century ago, Joan Baez has possessed a distinctive, spine-tingling three-octave voice.

A vessel of purity and a tower of strength, her soprano helped spark the folk revival of the early 1960s and supported the decade’s civil rights and peace movements with transcendent versions of “We Shall Overcome” and “Amazing Grace.”

It enthralled hundreds of thousands at the Woodstock music festival in 1969; made pop hits of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and “Diamonds & Rust” in the 1970s; opened the U.S. segment of Live Aid in Philadelphia in 1985, and overcame a power outage ordered by communist authorities at a music festival in Czechoslovakia in 1989.

Baez is now 67, and in September she released, “Day After Tomorrow,” the 24th studio album of her career and her first in five years. On it, Baez applies her still-formidable instrument to 10 Spartanly arranged songs by the likes of Tom Waits, Eliza Gilkyson, Patty Griffin, Elvis Costello and Steve Earle, who produced and contributed three tunes, two specifically written for the disc.

In a phone conversation from her home in Woodside, Calif., where she lives with her 96-year-old mother, Baez says keeping her voice in singing shape “is a lot of work. Early in my career, nothing was difficult. Then gravity moves in.”

Before she performs live, Baez exercises for up to 30 minutes. “It’s always very humiliating,” she says. “I never used to have to practice singing when I was young. I used to just open my trap and out it came.”

Baez’s voice is more than up to the challenge on “Day After Tomorrow,” even though she admits having to work harder on some songs than others. “’The Lower Road’ (by British singer-songwriter Thea Gilmore), I loved it the first time I heard it, even though I still don’t know what it means,” says Baez. “But there were a couple of notes I had trouble with.”

Conversely, Baez notes, she was immediately attracted to the CD’s title track, written by Waits and his wife, Kathleen Brennan. “I knew it was right for me,” she says of the touching ballad about a young American soldier longing for home, “and it was easy to sing.”

Regarding working with Earle on “Day After Tomorrow,” Baez says that about a year ago, the roots rocker and her manager “had dinner somewhere. He came back and asked, ‘Do you two guys want to work together on an album?’ My answer was an immediate yes.”

Baez first met Earle when he opened a concert for her 10 years ago, “and after that I got to know him in little bits and pieces.” The casual relationship changed when Baez started performing Earle’s “Christmas in Washington,” which she recorded on her 2003 studio album, “Dark Chords on a Big Guitar.”

In choosing which songs to record, Baez says her manager, Mark Spector, “does the serious hunting. He goes through every single thing. I’ve learned over the years to trust him.”

The birthday bunch

Director Mike Nichols is 77. Actress Sally Field is 62. Singer Glenn Frey is 60. Actress Lori Singer (“Footloose”) is 51. Actor Lance Kerwin is 48. Actor Peter DeLuise (“seaQuest DSV”) is 42. Actress Kelly Rutherford (“Melrose Place”) is 40. Actor Ethan Hawke is 38. Actress Thandie Newton is 36. Model-actress Rebecca Romijn is 36.

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