Folk musician Lucy Kaplansky brings new tour, new music to Cedar Rapids

If only summer truly could be endless. A number of songs capture the melancholy of the sun setting on arguably the greatest season: Buffalo Tom's wistful "Summer," Lana Del Rey's sadly beautiful "Summertime Sadness" and "All Star Weekend's clever "Blame it on September."

Add Lucy Kaplansky's latest, "Last Days of Summer," to that list. The tune is part of the folkie's next album, which should be released by June.

"I'll be finishing the album next week," Kaplansky said while calling from her New York apartment.

Expect Kaplansky to preview the material when she returns to CSPS Hall in Cedar Rapids on Saturday night, March 26, 2022.

"I'll be playing the new ones, including ‘Last Days of Summer,’ " she said. "That's a melancholy song that was inspired by my daughter starting at NYU last year. NYU is in our neighborhood so we see her all the time."

The forthcoming album is an eclectic mix of songs.

"I've mixed it up with this album," she said. "It feels good. This is the second album I'm self-releasing."

Kaplansky, 62, has made a fine career out of crafting poignant, plaintive and literate folk.

"I've always wanted to be a singer-songwriter," she said.

The soundtrack of her adolescence was Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and the Gershwins. Her father, Irving Kaplansky, played their material on the piano.

"My dad was a math professor at the University of Chicago, but he was a gifted pianist and he enjoyed playing the songs he grew up with — and they're such great songs. I learned to sing them. Those standards and contemporary music had such a huge impact on me."

At 18, Kaplansky moved from Chicago to New York to take part in the Greenwich Village scene. She met a number of future folk stars, including Suzanne Vega, Shawn Colvin and John Gorka. "

"Suzanne and I were both students at Barnard," Kaplansky noted. "She played around campus. I would see her poster around and be contemptuous. I would think, 'The nerdy folk singer.’ Then I walked into the student newspaper and I said, ‘I'm doing a real gig, a show at Folk City. Write an article on me, and they did, and Suzanne thought, ‘Who the hell does she think she is?'

“We were put on the same bill and we knocked each other out and became long term friends. I brought her down to the Village, and it's been great with each other all of these years. I can't help but look back at how special those years were at Folk City. I was surrounded by so many wonderful, talented people."

While her peers focused on folk during the mid-’80s, Kaplansky went the pragmatic route and earned her Ph.D. and became a clinical psychologist.

"I left music when I was 23 and I went into another direction," she said. "I loved my patients, but I had to go back to music and I did — and I never left."

She reconnected with Colvin, harmonizing on Colvin’s Grammy-winning debut album “Steady On,” honored as the best contemporary folk recording from 1990. Firing up her career, Kaplansky also sang with Vega on the “Pretty in Pink” soundtrack and with Nanci Griffith on “The Firm” soundtrack, and signed with Red House Records and released her first album, “The Tide,” in 1994.

In 1998, she teamed up with Dar Williams and Richard Shindell to form folk supergroup Cry Cry Cry — all of whom have been favorite players in Cedar Rapids and Iowa City venues. She also added her voice to the Greg Brown tribute album “Going Driftless,” also featuring artists familiar to the Corridor concert scene: Ani DiFranco, Iris Dement, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Lucinda Williams, and others.

Kaplansky now has more than a dozen solo releases and collaborations, before her latest recording. Some of the new songs on "Last Days of Summer" were inspired by the pandemic in New York, but she missed most of the early days of COVID in Gotham.

"We actually bought a second home on March 13, 2020, the day America went into lockdown," she said. "We spent the next six months in our home on Cape Cod and it was just dumb luck."

Most of the tunes, which were co-written by her husband, filmmaker Rick Litvin, were crafted during the pandemic.

"The songs are like a snapshot from a period," she said. "I try to write interesting and honest songs."

Now, Kaplansky is thrilled to be back on the road.

“There's nothing better," she said. "I missed it so much."