Entertainment, Music - Army Times

Baez back in the spotlight with new album, tour

Like many of her fans, folk icon and social activist Joan Baez has a tough time grasping the fact that she has been performing for five decades.

“It’s hard to imagine when I listen to something from 45 years ago that it’s the same person,” says Baez, 68, who performed at the Lincoln Memorial when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I have a dream” speech, brought such folk classics as “House of the Rising Sun” into popular music and helped introduce onetime lover Bob Dylan to the masses in the early ’60s.

In many ways, the confident performer who is on tour in North America through March 31 to spotlight her first new album in five years, “Day After Tomorrow,” is quite different from the artist who was at the forefront of the early-’60s folk revival and popular music’s foray into social issues.

“I had such terrible stage fright [then] that it wasn’t much fun,” Baez says. “I was riddled with neuroses and sleeplessness and panic attacks and all this stuff.”

Not only was she trying to build a career and deal with her relationship with Dylan, Baez also was increasingly consumed by the civil-rights struggle and her opposition to the Vietnam War.

It took two decades of living through some of America’s more turbulent times, a period that included a six-year marriage to war protester David Harris, before Baez dealt with her inner issues.

“Twenty years ago, when I hired my wonderful new manager [Mark Spector], I started to tackle that stuff in a serious, therapeutic way, which I hadn’t done before, and I highly recommend it,” says Baez, who lives in Northern California.

“Most of those things have vanished completely — fear of flying, fear of this, that and the other. And so is stage fright gone. So in a sense, starting maybe 10 years ago, I began to really understand what it was like to just walk on the stage and have a wonderful time.”

Baez has described herself as a glass-half-empty type, and she doesn’t feel the need to be defensive about it.

The woman who founded the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence and the Humanitas International Human Rights Committee says, “Maybe [that description] was all to do with politics and social change, and I think I’m reasonable not being optimistic.”

A master at interpreting traditional folk and gospel songs, Baez has performed such classics as “We Shall Overcome,” “Swing Low,” “Sweet Chariot” and “Amazing Grace” at events supporting causes from environmentalism to pacifism to gay rights to fighting poverty to opposing the death penalty.

Despite her activism, Baez says she never endorsed a presidential candidate until November’s election. Given her stance on various issues, it’s no surprise that she backed Barack Obama over the more conservative John McCain.

“It’s fascinating to change the face of the world in a matter of a minute [by electing a new president],” Baez says. “It’s crazy, and it’s absolutely wonderful. I’m enjoying the ride.”

Baez also is enjoying a musical partnership with Steve Earle, a highly respected singer-songwriter in roots and rock music.

The “Day After Tomorrow” album, on which Baez interprets favorite tunes by the likes of Tom Waits, Patty Griffin, Eliza Gilkyson and Elvis Costello, is the pair’s third recording project.

Earle nudged Baez to include such instruments as mandolin, Hawaiian guitar, Dobro and harmonium, putting a rootsy spin on her folk inclinations. Baez sees the album as an updated way to bookend the storytelling and commentary that launched her career.

“That was the trick,” says Baez, who’s touring with a small acoustic ensemble. “ ‘Rose of Sharon’ [penned by Gilkyson], I would have sworn it was a 200-year-old English folk song.

“But we also realized (that), because of Steve, it had to be current and totally contemporary, which it is.”