For 60 years, Joan Baez traveled the world raising her clear soprano voice, in song and in protest. But in 2018 she toured for the last time, and came home to a little slice of paradise near San Francisco.
Along with singing, Baez has been drawing upside-down and writing backwards since she was a kid, and now she’s put her drawings in a book, “Am I Pretty When I Fly?” She’s also been painting portraits.
And she’s taking a fresh look at herself, in a new documentary opening in theaters nationwide next week, called “Joan Baez I Am a Noise.” She said it was suggested at the start to do a film about her last tour. “And I decided I really wanted to leave an honest legacy, you know, about everything,” Baez said. “And so, that’s when I gave the directors a key to my storage unit.”
Her mother had saved everything: home movies, letters, drawings. But Baez had never even looked at it. The moment in the film when she walks into the storage unit is, she said, the first time she’d ever been.
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