There is a disconnect between the cover of Joan Baez’s 25th studio album, showing the 77-year-old folk queen beaming and radiant, and its 10 songs about mortality and war. Baez is a more playful character than is often painted (she is a wicked mimic of her ex, Bob Dylan), but her calling card has always been gravitas: earnest peace anthems, fearless campaigning in line with her Quaker background, not much in the way of personal candour.
On what she has declared her final record, she finds a just balance between private and public personae through a set of well-chosen cover versions ably, if austerely, produced by Joe Henry; picked guitars, thrumming bass, dabs of percussion, the odd wailing saw.
The years have added grain and intimacy to Baez’s magisterial voice, especially on songs centred on retrospection, regret and mortality. She finds the tenderness beneath Tom Waits’s gravel-voiced title track (“Can’t stay here and I’m scared to leave”) and Last Leaf, and the forgiveness in Mary Chapin Carpenter’s The Things That We Are Made Of. The President Sang Amazing Grace, Zoe Mulford’s account of the 2015 Charleston church shooting, hits a sweet spot, while the folk standard I Wish the Wars Were All Over concludes in simple, utopian style. A graceful bow-out.
