Down to arrange the songs and to sing them. Well, I knew that Dylan songs very well. And I knew The Beatles songs very well. But I also, by the time I recorded this on time, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. And I'd been working on it since probably did in 2016. So it was 15 years later. But I had really absorbed that group of songs that I loved, and that I had to sing, and I had to sing them with an orchestra. And they were the most challenging, these are works which have great depth and great demands to make on The Voice as well as on the heart. Jimmy Webb says to me, you know, you always record the most difficult of my songs. One of which I have struggled with, but I finally think I can sing it. Is his song about Gauguin, which is one of those mountain climbs of a song, but it prepared me actually learning Gauguin and singing it in concerts. And kind of absorbing it. And then it recording. I think prepared me to do this on time album, and it is really satisfying and really exciting material and really brings you up to the point where you have to say, wow, I don't know how I did that. What is it that's challenging about his songs? Is it the leaps? Is it the rhythm? Is there just something about singing them that makes them difficult? They're often some other realm that is not customary in songs from the great American songbook. Most of which have been taken out of Broadway shows. You don't sing along with Sondheim when you walk out of the theater pretty much. You are given an architecture that is unusual, surprising, very moving, intellectually challenging, and at the same time melodic. He holds the papers. He has signed off on something that other people can not really copy. I don't think. Do you think you have a talent for making them accessible to your audience? I hope so. And that's really the point I do think that my ability to clarify and to articulate to be clear and to phrase. And that's what you have to do with those songs. You must phrase them so that they are understandable to the listener, and that you use that melody to carry you through to your audience so that they get it. And that they are as excited about the song when it comes to an end as you are. I'm wondering if some of that for you comes from your early career, but it was very much traditional folk music, Irish, Appalachian, that was really the stuff you learned and the stuff you first recorded. Absolutely. But when you perform it, it doesn't sound old timey or nostalgic. You make them feel very contemporary. Yes. A song of yours that I love and seems almost like a folk song at times is my father. Can you tell me about writing that? It was in April that I wrote it of 19 68, and he died in May. It was just an easy access. It came very easily, you know, that they don't all come so easily. And that's how they get you, though, took me about 40 minutes to write since you've asked. And the same thing was true as my father, but then in between you have these months and months of struggling with a song, but they hook you by getting you to be able to write my father and since you've asked. I knew he was sick. In 1967 at Christmas I had been for the first time I'd been making some money. And so I gave my parents a trip to Hawaii as a present. And when they got there, he got sick, and he got sick there in the hospital, and then he came back and for months, they didn't know what was the matter with him, but I knew he was in the hospital. And so the song came very easily to me. But he never heard it, which is the sad part of it. I called an old friend Tom glazer, and I sang it to Tom on the phone. I would have done that with my father. I'm sure, but it's not something that probably a person who's on his way to dying would want to hear. Necessarily. Because the opening of the song describes your father, promising you that you would live in France. Yeah. Is that something your father actually did? Well, it was in 68. It was that summer. I met Steven four days after my father's death, and I was writing this song in the first line was my father always promised us that we would live in Spain. I couldn't rhyme it with rain. Or pain. So I had to change. My fair lady killed that one for you. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. We'll be right back after a quick break with more from Judy Collins. Geico asks, would you love a chance to save some money on insurance? Of course you would. After all, who doesn't love a great deal, right? And when it comes to great rates on insurance, for all the things in your life, Geico can help. 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This is the biggest boldest vacation on land or at sea. We're back with more from Bruce huddle and Judy Collins. Can you take me back to 64 where you were and how the first town hall concert came about? Because it became a famous album of yours. It did become a famous album and I signed my contract with elector in 1961 on a handshake with Jack holtzman and he became my champion and I had opened for Theo Michel at Carnegie Hall, so had sort of broken into the big stages in New York, but now I had a full tilt solo concert at town hall, and that was after my first three albums, and so Jackson, we got to record this. That was a big deal in those days because there was a big truck outside and a lot of people with a lot of real to real tapes going on. I'd found Phil ochs song in the heat of the summer and a couple of Dylan songs primarily the lonesome death of petty Carol, which I had heard him sing actually on the town hall stage in 1962 and Billy Ed Wheeler song, one of which had two, I have sung consistently from then on. It's the best song about people who've been in a job that doesn't exist anymore that I know. So it was really interesting to go back and do that. We did this album in a virtual environment. So there was nobody in town hall when we recorded it in January. And I didn't actually know they were going to put it on a vinyl and a CD. But they did, which.