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“I have a very ambitious attitude about living and learning,” she said in an interview last week from her home in Manhattan. She’s on a break from her rigorous concert tour of about 125 engagements a year that take her all over the world, including a stop at Eastwood’s Palace Theatre, 2384 James St., on Saturday, Feb. 23, 7:30 p.m. “I can’t stand being bored. I’m always exploring something new.”
Now 73, Collins has been known since the 1960s for her eclectic musical tastes as well as her social activism. Named after Judy Garland (she was born in 1939, the same year the movie The Wizard of Oz was released), Collins started her career as a classical pianist in her teens. She soon became enchanted with folk, show tunes, pop, rock’n’roll and standards. Her most well-known recordings are “Both Sides Now,” “Someday Soon,” “Amazing Grace” and “Send in the Clowns.”
“It’s good to have anchors; they’re still fresh and timeless,” she said about the tunes, which she sings with a voice that remains as crystalline as it was when the songs were new.
Collins continues to make music, releasing live albums and studio recordings every few years. Bohemian, her most recent album, came out in 2011 on her own label, Wildflower Records. It includes a duet with Shawn Colvin on Joni Mitchell’s “Cactus Tree” and several of Collins’ own songs. She wrote “In the Twilight” in memory of her mother, Marjorie Collins Hall, who died in 2010 at age 94.
That’s where Collins said the good genes come in.
“She was a remarkable person, feisty, opinionated and strong,” said Collins, the oldest of five children. “There’s definitely a genetic component there. I learned from the best. The genes and taking care of myself. I take a lot of vitamins, I exercise, and I get plenty of sleep. I feel very lucky.”
But genes from her father, Charles Collins, likely predisposed her to some of the greatest demons in her life: alcoholism and depression. He made his living as a pioneer in the golden age of radio.
“Oh, no doubt he was a drinker and a rage-aholic,” Collins said. “But there was greatness there, as well. My new book is about my dad and his letters.”
Collins is unabashedly candid in the books she has written and in interviews about the laundry list of her difficulties: polio, alcoholism, bulimia, tuberculosis, rocky relationships and the suicide of her only child, Clark, in 1992 at age 33.
“I’ve had troubles like everybody else,” she said. She stopped drinking in 1978 and has 35 years of sobriety. She described the nine years that she and her son were sober together as joyful.
“But he relapsed, and he took his life,” she said. She approached recovering from the tragedy as she approached recovering from her other demons: one day at a time, with a lot of help from others. She took her sister on the road with her so she wouldn’t be alone, and she wrote. Writing, for Collins, has always offered great comfort, she said.
In 2003, she published Sanity and Grace: A Journey of Suicide, Survival and Strength, about losing her son. She also traveled extensively, speaking to hundreds of suicide survivors, mental health organizations and community service groups. In 2008, she wrote another book, The Seven T’s: Finding Hope and Healing in the Wake of Tragedy about navigating the stages of grief.
In all, Collins has written more than 100 songs and 11 books, two of them autobiographies: Trust Your Heart in 1987, and Suite Judy Blue Eyes: My Life in Music in 2011. The title of the second book is taken from the song Stephen Stills wrote about her in 1968; it became one of Crosby, Stills and Nash’s biggest hits.
“He wrote it to get me back, but it didn’t work,” she said. “But you know, we have been friends all these years, and he recorded ‘Last Thing on My Mind’ with me for my {2010} Paradise album.”
They rehearsed the album in her apartment in New York City with her husband, Louis Nelson, present. Collins and Nelson have been married since 1996, although they had been a couple for eight years before that. He has designed such diverse things as album covers and the Korean War Veterans Memorial’s mural wall in Washington, D.C.
Earlier this month at the Saban Theater in Los Angeles, Collins and Stills had a conversation on stage about their lives and her most recent autobiography.
“Unrehearsed and the absolutely most fun for us and we hope for the audience, it was awesome, we both loved being there and we had a great time,” Collins wrote on her Facebook page. “Thank you, Stephen, for agreeing to come.”
Books are important to Collins, nearly as important as music. She said she is as avid a reader as she is a writer. She is reading Winston Churchill’s autobiography; she said she reads “mysteries, histories and biographies” voraciously.
Of all that she does, Collins said she has no favorite – music, writing and public speaking each have their appropriate place and time in her life. It’s all about the diversity, which keeps life interesting, she said.
That and finding humor. She knows she is doing well when she can laugh at herself. Last year, at a show in Rahway, N.J., she forgot the words in the middle of “Both Sides Now.” The audience good-naturedly caught her up, and when she was finished singing, she thanked them.
“I guess that was a true senior moment,” she said. o
