Already holding the record for the longest gap between successive Grammy nominations – there were 42 years between Silver Skies Blue and 1975’s Send In The Clowns – if Spellbound takes the prize for Best Folk Album in Los Angeles, it would mark an incredible 54 years between wins.įirst, though, the bright lights of the Hackney Empire are calling. Mitchell’s own recording didn’t appear until 1969, on her first Billboard charting album Clouds, which won her a Grammy too.įast forward to 2023, and Collins is in the intriguing position of potentially setting a new Grammys record when this year’s ceremony takes place a week Sunday (5 February). Not least because it also catalysed the career of Joni Mitchell, whose now classic “Both Sides Now” became a Top 10 hit in the US and Canada, and later won Collins a Grammy. Released the following year, Wildflowers was a landmark album, not just for Collins and Cohen, but for the wider folk movement at the time. As she recalls, “Leonard said to me in '66, ‘I don’t understand why you’re not writing your own songs’, so I ran home to my Steinway piano and I sat down and wrote my first song, 'Since You Asked', in about 40 minutes.' Collins pushed Cohen into his own limelight and he, in turn, pushed her to write.

Intrigued by the depth and complexity of both his voice and his words, Collins went on to not only record many of Cohen’s songs, but also played a large role in convincing him that he was a fine singer in his own right.įor a while, the two artists worked in a kind of symbiosis. Then in his early thirties and an acclaimed but poorly selling poet and novelist, Cohen arrived in New York to try and sell some songs that he had written. The story of how Collins found her own voice as a songwriter is the stuff of folk legends, and it all started in 1966 with a visit from Leonard Cohen. Especially when you consider that it wasn’t until her sixth album, Wildflowers, that she started to compose. “That’s not a bad bet at all,” she tells me proudly over the phone from her hotel room in Chicago. She counts around sixty of her own songs over the years, scattered across her various albums. Not that Collins has been a slouch in the songwriting department. It’s a purple patch that started with 2017’s Silver Skies Blues, a duo project with Ari Hest, and continued with last year’s intensely personal Spellbound – her 29th studio album and, incredibly, the first to include entirely her own songs. Now 83 and still touring relentlessly, the folk icon is in the midst of a particularly dazzling career renaissance. Collins made her first live appearance 70 years ago, performing a Mozart concerto in Denver, Colorado, where she studied piano under the critical eye of classical music pioneer Antonia Brico.

Judy collins blue album