Folk singer Joan Baez’s iconic album Diamonds and Rust still resonates today as an ode to memories past despite approaching its 50th anniversary.
Titled after the fan-favourite single, “Diamonds and Rust,” Diamonds was released on April 1, 1975. The album opens with its namesake, a song born of an experience of Baez where she received an unexpected phone call from former partner and fellow folk artist Bob Dylan, whom she had dated for four years a decade earlier.
“He read me the entire lyrics of ‘Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts’ that he’d just finished from a phone booth in the Midwest,” said Baez. “I don’t remember what I had been writing about, but [the original song] had nothing to do with what it ended up as.”
“Diamonds and Rust” sets the thematic tone for the album as a retrospective meditation into a former relationship. Opening with the lyrics, “well, I’ll be damned, here comes your ghost again,” it becomes clear that the resurgence of memories will be explored by the song and album alike.
The theme of memories sits at the core of Baez’s sixteenth album, with the title track referencing the different types of memories one is left with after the end of an emotional connection.
In the song, Baez explains that memories bring diamonds, representing an idealized version of the good times spent with someone, but they also bring rust, representing the memories that aged poorly and all the most painful parts of the relationship.
Currently Baez’s most streamed song on Spotify, “Diamonds and Rust” essentially prefaces the rest of the album’s subject matter, almost as though Baez placed it as a deliberate warning to the listeners of the general theme of the album, the beauty and pain memories can bring, before delving into more specific stories on the track list.
While other songs on the album are written by Baez (“Children and All That Jazz,” “Winds of the Old Days” and “Dida”), the album also features covers of songs from Jackson Browne, Stevie Wonder, Bob Dylan and more.
Despite the more solemn tone Baez takes in “Diamonds and Rust,” much of the album is quite upbeat, even if the lyrical content is more serious.
For example, the second track, a cover of Jackson Browne’s “Fountain of Sorrow,” has a more theatrical sound than its original recording, with punchy piano notes and Baez’s clear voice reaching many high notes throughout the song.
Other lighter tracks include her cover of Dylan’s “Simple Twist of Fate” — wherein Baez does a teasing impression of Dylan’s distinct voice in the second half of the song — her cover of Dickey Betts’ “Blue Sky” and her collaboration track with Joni Mitchell, “Dida.”
The 50th anniversary of Baez’s album comes at a fitting time, occurring in the same year as the release of Bob Dylan’s biopic A Complete Unknown, which in part explores the conflicting relationship between the two iconic musicians played by Timothée Chalamet and Monica Barbaro.
Despite Baez’s recent return to mainstream conversation with the release of the film, her music has remained endlessly relevant in the folk sphere.
Dubbed “the queen of folk” by fans in 1959, Baez undoubtedly continues to live up to this title, even 50 years after her most popular release.