JOAN BAEZ

‘This Is a Life Well-Lived’

- By DAVID BROWNE • Photographs by ULYSSES ORTEGA

Pull into the tree-cloaked driveway of Joan Baez’s home south of San Francisco and roam around her house and the first thing you’ll notice are oversize portraits she’s painted of Volodymyr Zelensky, Martin Luther King Jr., Anthony Fauci, Gandhi, and the late congressman John Lewis. For years, Baez would display two at a time in her front yard, but now they lean forlornly on a porch. "Just after Trump got elected [last fall], somebody tattled to somebody in the city, who says, 'Does she have permits?" " Baez says. "It was clearly a snitchy kind of thing." While one of her friends cut the paintings down, While one of her friends cut the paintings down, Baez went into the tree house in her front yard and blasted recordings by soprano opera singer Renée Fleming. “It was my way of civil disobedience,” she says with a mischievous grin. “Just to do something.”

For decades in the public eye, Baez has been doing something in the name of music, social justice, and civil rights. She’s been lionized, condemned (even sometimes by the left), mocked, dismissed, revered, and occasionally rediscovered. That part of her life seemed to start winding down six years ago, when Baez wrapped up a farewell tour that, she insists, is genuinely final.

"Courage Is a Funny Thing.... It's Being Willing to Do Stuff, Even if You're Scared."

At that point, Baez, now 84, entered what should have been her chill-out years, devoted to painting and writing poetry, dancing daily around her property to the Gipsy Kings, and spending time in the rambling, funky-but-chic house where she’s lived for 55 years.