Joan Baez
Joan Baez
Joan Baezis an American folk singer, songwriter, musician, and activist whose contemporary folk music often includes songs of protest or social justice. Baez has performed publicly for over 55 years, releasing over 30 albums. Fluent in Spanish as well as in English, she has also recorded songs in at least six other languages. She is regarded as a folk singer, although her music has diversified since the counterculture days of the 1960s and now encompasses everything from folk rock and...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMusician
Date of Birth9 January 1941
CountryUnited States of America
The hardest song to write is a protest song, a topical song with meaning.
I wish it was clear for me how it happened [stop writing songs], then maybe I could start writing again. But it's kind of an "it." It just submerged itself. Because the way I had always written was just that it came out. It just happened.
If it came back I would be thrilled. I would be delighted to write more songs. I need them now because I want to make an album and I have to depend on other people's music, which I've done for years. But still, it'd be really nice to be able to sprinkle it with my own.
I'd hear a tune in my head and the words would come. And then, very suddenly it just stopped. It seemed too stilted to try and learn how to write a song, to go to round robins and to learn things from other people on how to write a song. So I just stopped and did other things.
It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.
I was writing "Diamonds and Rust' and it had nothing to do with what it turned out to be. I don't remember what it is, but I think I was writing a song. It was literally interrupted by a phone call, and it just took another curve and it came out to be what it was.
Dylan made it pretty clear he didn't want to do all that other stuff,
I see a young man playing 'Plaisir d'Amour' on guitar. I knew I didn't want to go to college; I was already playing a ukulele, and after I saw that, I was hooked. All I wanted to do was play guitar and sing.
The only thing that's been a worse flop than the organization of non-violence has been the organization of violence.
I spend a lot of time with Buddhists. I'm not a Buddhist, but their relationship with death interests me.
I've never had a humble opinion in my life. If you're going to have one, why bother to be humble about it?
As long as one keeps searching, the answers come
If we dont sit down and shut up once in a while well lose our minds even earlier than we had expected. Noise is an imposition on sanity, and we live in very noisy times.
I didn't go through the routine of singing in small clubs and doing open mics and working so hard the way a lot of people do and did. It was just an overnight kind of thing.