Judy Collins To Celebrate Holiday Season At Live Concert In New York’s Town Hall Tonight

Judy Collins will celebrate winter and the holiday season with a one-time-only performance at the Town Hall in New York tonight.

At the concert—Collins’ first show with a live audience in New York since late 2019—the singer will be joined by Americana group Chatham County Line and special guest Toshi Reagon. Collins and Chatham County Line will salute the holiday season with songs from their album, Winter Stories, released in 2019. Collins will also debut original songs from a new album to be released in early 2022.  

Winter Stories is a collection of songs that capture the sounds and feeling of the winter season, as well as new originals and classics such as Joni Mitchell’s “The River.” 

Collins actually performed at the Town Hall in February of this year, though the venue was empty because of the pandemic. Her livestreamed performance was released as a recording in August, Judy Collins: Live At The Town Hall. In this concert, Collins revisited a very similar set list to the concert she played on the same stage in 1964, her first official solo headline concert in New York. 

Ever-prolific at 82, Collins has released five albums in the past five years, and in July launched a podcast, “Since You’ve Asked,” featuring conversations with guests ranging from Jeff Daniels and Clive Davis to Christiane Amanpour. 

In an interview earlier this week, Collins called her February Town Hall concert “great fun. It’s a wonderful hall, a beautiful hall to sing in. And the band laughed at my jokes.”   

Collins said she is accustomed to performing without a live audience, since she performed on the radio as a young child and later on TV, “where people were not in the audience often,” as well as in recording studios, where there were no audiences.

Collins has been performing for live audiences across the U.S. and in Norway since May; she said they have been “beside themselves, they’re so happy to be out and seeing a concert.”

She also has been working on a new album of her own songs, a first for her; it will be available in CD format in February, and in vinyl “when it can get out of the manufacturing centers.”

Collins also spoke about the late Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the song, “Send in the Clowns,” from the musical, A Little Night Music, that is one of her most popular recordings.

Sondheim, she said, “really changed the dynamic of Broadway. He opened up the arena for different kinds of writing, presentations.”