Veteran folkie lives to sing

Judy Collins has no complaints about her hectic schedule.

Judy Collins is singing me a song called How Can I Keep From Singing? It's a tune that sums up the 66-year-old American folk singer's life.

Since the age of 3 - when she used to sing and play instruments with her father in the lounge of their Seattle home - she has always sung.

"What I do, and what I am looking for constantly, are songs that I love. And then I sing them," she smiles, looking out over central Auckland from the top floor of the Carlton Hotel.

The album that song is off, Portrait Of An American Girl, is Collins' 43rd in a music career spanning more than 45 years.

She continues to tour the world giving concerts and plays three here next week, including one at the ASB Theatre in Auckland on Wednesday.

"When a song really grabs you then that's when you can spend the time on it and that's been my entire life. I've been doing that since I was 3 years old actually. It's terrible to admit it," she laughs.

She was a child prodigy at classical piano but it was in folk music that she made her name during the the 60s.

But, she confesses: "I thought for a long time I wasn't a singer and I was a storyteller. I didn't think of myself as having a voice."

That all changed when, as a 22-year-old, she released her debut album, A Maid Of Constant Sorrow, in 1961. Since then she has sung renditions of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Joni Mitchell songs as well as recording famous versions of Amazing Grace and Send In the Clowns, among others.

Some of Collins' best-known works came from her collaborations with reclusive songwriter and musician Leonard Cohen.

"Oh well ... Leonard," she gasps. "Leonard is a great poet and also a great thinker. He is a profoundly gifted poet. And I would be happy singing nothing but Leonard Cohen.

"I was the first person to record his songs and I was the one who pushed him on stage and made him sing," she says proudly.

In the mid-60s Cohen brought some of his material to Collins (one of which was the song Suzanne) and she remembers that he didn't even know if they were proper songs.

Collins reassured him they were and recorded Suzanne a week later.

She doesn't see much of Cohen now since he became a Buddhist monk. "But he has got back [into music]," she says.

She reels off some classic Cohen songs like Bird On A Wire and Joan Of Arc. "And Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye - now there's a song."

"He's certainly a hero of mine," she smiles.

After so long in the music business Collins keeps things fresh by continuing to challenge herself musically.

"You keep moving out and trying to explore more of what your own voice is about. You have to find what's really yours and that's a lot of hard work. You need to keep finding ways to push it and you have to do what you love or you might as well forget it.

"My relationship with music has grown deeper, more broad, and more interesting. I don't specify if something is a folk song or an aria or an old 13th-century song, or something Joni Mitchell wrote or something I wrote.

"It has to do with how I feel about the music and how I feel about the song, so it goes very deep. That means the things I recorded more than 45 years ago I still sing."

One of those songs is John Reilly, from her first album, which she has just started singing again.

"I love it," she drawls.

Nowadays Collins lives in New York, where she has a home studio. She and her husband also have a place "in the country" where she goes to write songs on a special piano.

"I've written some good songs on that piano. I wrote The Blizzard [from The Essential Judy Collins] on it."

"I go to that house to really get away from everything. It's quiet and peaceful and we go up there and really get away from it all. We watch movies, I do some work every day, and maybe take a walk. But we work like mad when we're there too."

It's a great job though?

"It is a great job," she beams. You won't hear Judy Collins complaining about her busy lifestyle and hectic tour schedule.

"Yeah, it's hard. And I see 4am a lot. It's a long haul on the planes and you have to live like an athlete. But it's a great job."

* Who: Judy Collins
* What: American folk singer
* Where and when: Christchurch Town Hall, April 10; Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington, April 11; ASB Theatre, Auckland, April 12