Diamonds & Rust

iTunes Review

Baez’s best post-political, post-protest, post-folk album, Diamonds & Rust found the clear-voiced soprano making music for the fun of it — and in the process creating one of the highpoints of a storied career. Setting civil rights and Vietnam aside for the moment, Baez proved both that she could folk-rock in the best 70s manner, and that she was just as gifted at writing her own material as at interpreting others’ work. The album’s centerpiece is the gorgeous title song, a rueful but fond look back at her relationship with Dylan, who sounds well-loved but not necessarily easy to like (“My poetry was lousy, you said”). Arguably Baez’s finest composition ever, it’s coupled with a song forgiving him for abandoning the protest movement (“Winds of the Old Days”) and an actual cover (“A Simple Twist as Fate”), done as thoughtfully as all of Baez’s Dylan covers are, but with a pretty wicked imitation tossed into the mix. She closes with a lovely medley of “I Dream of Jeannie” and “Danny Boy.” Unaccompanied except for piano, that famous voice with its precise phrasing sounds richer, deeper, lovelier than ever: it’s the Baez we thought we knew, just a few years older and more worldly-wise.