Portrait of an American Girl

For about a quarter century, through the 1960s and ‘70s and up to the mid-‘80s, Judy Collins released a new album nearly every year on Elektra Records, which began as an independent folk label and, during her tenure there, expanded into rock and was sold to the major label Warner Bros. Records. Collins' annual albums mixed traditional folk material with songs by the crop of new, up-and-coming folk-rock singer/songwriters and, as of her 1967 LP Wildflowers, one or more of her own original compositions, which tended to be piano ballads with personal, poetic lyrics that touched on her own family. After Collins left Elektra at the end of 1984, she recorded less frequently, and when she did she usually went in for thematic albums — children's albums, Christmas albums, live albums, songbook albums, albums of re-recordings of her hits, etc. Meanwhile, she drifted from label to label until founding her own label, Wildflower Records, in 1999. 2005's Portrait of an American Girl is her first album since 1990's Fires of Eden that might be termed a "regular" Judy Collins album in the sense that she used to make them, a newly recorded collection of varied material. She begins it with the first of five original compositions, "Singing Lessons," which is also the title of a memoir she published in 1998 and, in song form, is a prayer and invocation setting the tone for the record. The strongest tie to her old LPs may be the next track, "That Song About the Midway," a Joni Mitchell song of the same vintage as "Both Sides Now" and "Chelsea Morning," which Collins made into hits and standards. She has written that, since the suicide of her son, Clark Taylor, in 1992, every song she writes is about him. Certainly, that is true of "I Can't Cry Hard Enough," as it may be of "Voyager" and definitely is of "Checkmate," all songs in which she laments the absence of a loved one. But Taylor is not the subject of "Wedding Song (Song for Louis)," except by his absence from Collins' wedding to her long-time partner Louis Nelson, which this a cappella performance commemorates. In addition to these originals, she further strengthens her long-lasting ties to folk music by covering the works of Bruce Cockburn ("Pacing the Cage") and Pete Seeger ("How Can I Keep from Singing"), and evokes her classical background and sense of Americana by reciting the text of Aaron Copland's "Lincoln Portrait." The album's least effective tracks are the ones in which she tries to rock out a little and be contemporary, covering the old Jaynetts hit "Sally Go ‘Round the Roses" and the more recent Train hit "Drops of Jupiter (Tell Me)," neither of which benefit from her considered interpretations; but at least they provide changes of pace. These false steps aside, Collins remains, at 65, in possession of excellent musical taste and a wonderful voice on an album that will remind old fans of what her records used to be like.