Judy Collins finds her voice as a songwriter

Ironically, given Collins’ brilliant singing voice, she took more than a decade to find her voice as a songwriter. She’d dabbled with an original song or two on earlier albums, but for this 1973 release she wrote over half the album’s tracks, selected “So Begins the Task” from the catalog of her former paramour Stephen Stills, and opened with Valerie Carter’s intimate and homey “Cook With Honey.” The years that she’d been carefully selecting and sympathetically interpreting others’ material paid off in the imagination of her pen. She paints a colorful portrait of Long Island fishermen, shares wistful memories of her grandparents, and offers an admiring observations of her younger sister. Collins’ rendition of Tom Paxton’s “The Hostage” seethes with the prison guard narrator’s indictment of Governor Rockefeller’s handling of the 1971 Attica riot, and a pair of requiems, one for a friend who committed suicide, the second for the slain revolutionary “Che” close the album on somber and deifying notes. Musically, Collins consolidates the variety of sounds she’d explored up to this point in her career, including straight folk, country-rock and orchestrated pop; but unlike her previous studio album, 1970’s Whales & Nightingales, this one flows smoothly and creates a pleasant album experience. [©2010 hyperbolium dot com]