Judy Collins: 'Activism is alive and well'

For Judy Collins, finding the right song to sing is "like falling in love, pure and simple. You can't explain falling in love. The guy may look like a Martian, but your heart's going like this."

Collins, 76, beats a hand against her chest and widens her still-startling blue eyes.

In truth, few would argue with the taste Collins has shown as an interpretive singer (and active songwriter) in a career spanning more than 50 years, during which she's championed greats from Woody Guthrie, Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell to Kurt Weill, Jacques Brel and Stephen Sondheim.

On Collins' new Strangers Again, out Sept. 18, she revisits Sondheim's Send In The Clowns, a pop hit for her in the '70s, and Cohen's Hallelujah, this time with partners. Fellow veteran Don McLean joins her on the former song, younger folk-rocker Bhi Bhiman on the latter. The album, which she describes simply as a collection of "duets of guys," also pairs Collins with Willie Nelson, Jimmy Buffett, Michael McDonald and Ari Hest, who co-wrote the title track.

"I gave everybody a chance to either sing something I had chosen or choose something," Collins explains. Old pal Jeff Bridges selected Make Our Garden Grow, from the Leonard Bernstein-scored musical Candide; Bridges has performed the tune at his own concerts, to help promote his charitable End Hunger Network.

New friend Jackson Browne was recruited for Randy Newman's Feels Like Home, after Newman himself declined an invitation to join her, Collins says, laughing. "Randy said, 'I can't sing with you -- I have the worst voice.' I said, 'No, you don't, you have a wonderful voice.' But he wouldn't do it."

Collins met Browne in 2012, when both performed at a Guthrie centennial tribute at Kennedy Center. "Jackson and I should have known each other forever," Collins says. "It would make sense, as we're from the same sort of genre...We knew each other in a historical sense, certainly, and we hit it off so well."

Collins doesn't fret about the lack of social consciousness shown by popular singer/songwriters who have followed her and Browne. Though the '60s and '70s are remembered as "a time of protest," she notes, "very few of those songs really stood out and developed a life of their own. Songs don't always jump out into the popular culture, but they become part of the fabric of the work of writers and singers."

She adds, "I think activism is alive and well. Young people and people in general are very mad about some of the things going on in this world, and they talk about it and tweet about it. They say that right now we're living in an oligarchy, and I couldn't agree more. Now one per cent of the people has everything."

Leaning back, Collins acknowledges she has "many soapboxes I could get on. I try not to bore my audiences with all of them. I certainly talk about things in shows," but she also makes humor central in her performances, which in recent years have included a number of cabaret stints at home in New York, where Collins has lived for more than five decades.

"I'll do anything to get an audience to laugh," says Collins, who considers live performance "something that has all kinds all kind of extracurricular benefits. We need to have music in our lives. Everyone does."