Pages tagged “joan baez”

Joan Baez spent some time this past winter in Nashville working on her still untitled new album, due out sometime late this summer or fall. Steve Earle is producing the project, and thinks it is coming along nicely, according to Billboard.com.

Actually, correction, "It's a fuckin' great record, man," he told Billboard. “She's one of the great interpreters of songs alive on the planet. We started out with seven songs she brought to the table that she arrived at by hearing them. Some of them she'd already started performing, so we started out with songs she very much wanted to sing.”

Baez recorded her own version of songs by Eliza Gilkyson, Patty Griffin, Thea Gilmore and Earle himself.

Baez’s backing band is a bluegrass dream team, including Tim O'Brien and Darryl Scott, Viktor Krauss (yes, Alison’s brother) on bass and Kenny Malone on drums.

Baez has a slew of dates leading into the springtime months, including a special performance March 27 at Club 47 in Cambridge, Mass., where she first started performing 50 years ago. Then, on March 28, she will be presented with Club Passim’s lifetime achievement award at Sanders Theatre in Boston.

Related links:
JoanBaez.com
SteveEarle.com
ClubPassim.org

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Joan Baez hasn’t written a song in 10 years, but she maintains an unerring instinct for choosing good material. Dark Chords, her first studio album in six years, mines the work of non-mainstream writers, but all should be familiar to Paste readers, including Greg Brown, Gillian Welch, Ryan Adams and Caitlin Cary. Her amazing voice is still intact, and while Baez has lost a bit at the high end, it’s replaced with an emotional power that wrings subtle emotion from every word—and silence. The singer’s current touring band supplies a moody, shimmering background that makes the work of disparate writers sing with one voice. Duke McVinnie’s sustained power chords heighten the drama of Welch’s tale of attempted rape and murder in “Caleb Meyer,” Greg Brown’s cynical lullaby “Sleeper” is brightened by a chiming acoustic guitar, and Josh Ritter’s “Wings” is given an almost folksy reading with McVinnie’s acoustic licks complemented by a bowed double bass and George Favori’s sparse percussion.