Judy Collins on the art of the farewell

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Set us as preferred When Judy Collins comes to Los Angeles, she likes to stay at the Beverly Hilton in part because “they serve a fabulous breakfast,” she says over coffee at the hotel on a recent morning.“That’s rare today,” she adds.

“Too often a place will just send up a cardboard shopping bag with the things you ordered in it.”Collins knows her amenities: At 87, the Grammy-winning singer and songwriter still plays about 120 shows a year, drawing audiences around the world with her high, clear voice and an expansive repertoire that blends the hits that made her famous in the 1960s and ’70s — Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now,” Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne,” Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns” — with traditional folk tunes and material of her own.Yet now she’s preparing to hang it up with a lengthy farewell tour she’s calling Sweet Judy Blue Eyes (after “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” the folk-rock classic her one-time lover Stephen Stills wrote about her for Crosby, Stills & Nash).The night before our interview, Collins played L.A.’s Ford Theatre; she’ll be back through Southern California for a Sept.

27 date at the Lobero Theatre in Santa Barbara and again next year for shows in Palm Springs and Aliso Viejo.After we talk, she plans to do a bit of tai chi, for which she uses an app on her phone and which she wishes more people practiced.“Maybe that would alter civilization,” she says.

“If we were all doing tai chi, we couldn’t be at war with Iran.” Then she’ll head to the airport for a flight home to New York, where she’s lived for decades — most of them with her husband, industrial designer Louis Nelson, who died in 2024.Music The veteran producer and manager is the subject of a new documentary.

At 82, he’s still got work to do.At breakfast, Collins is wear...