Folk singer Judy Collins will perform at the Lied Center at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 24.

Judy Collins, the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter behind classic covers of Joni Mitchell and Stephen Sondheim tunes alike, feels young.

She looks young, her famous blue eyes as piercing as ever, and she sounds young, too. More than a half century into her career, Collins performs upwards of 100 live shows a year, and will make her next stop Saturday at Lawrence’s Lied Center. The show is slated for 7:30 p.m.

“Age is in the mind,” says Collins, who at 77 is still touring and churning out albums (not to mention books, her latest of which is slated to hit shelves in February) at an unrelenting pace. The Denver native, who got her start in the flourishing folk scene of early-1960s Greenwich Village, has released some-30 studio albums (plus a handful of holiday, compilation and live recordings) since her debut, “A Maid of Constant Sorrow,” in 1961.

Here, in a condensed and edited interview with the Journal-World, the folk icon talks work ethic, mental health and what keeps her optimistic for the days ahead.

I wanted to ask about your beginnings in New York City, where you lived during a very critical time for folk music, working alongside artists like Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger. At the time, when you were a young musician, were you aware of just how special that moment — and place — was for music?

Oh, I think so. It was pretty unusual and fantastic, and of course there were so many great songwriters. I had grown up in a very creative household among writers and performers and singers and authors, and so I was very keen on the whole nature of what was happening creatively. [It] was very exciting to me.

I was exposed to everybody from Shel Silverstein, of all people — who was a songwriter, among other things — [to] of course Dylan and Tom Paxton and Pete Seeger. It was just this flood of creativity and I was certainly part of it, in terms of listening and being an artist and singing the songs and also exposing those songs to other artists, I think, because I was immediately touring and recording them. So, I was contributing to the health of the industry and the ability of people to make a living doing this.

You just mentioned growing up in a creative household, and I know you’ve credited your dad — he had a radio show in Denver — with helping you develop your work ethic. What else did you learn from him?

I learned a lot about being a working alcoholic (laughs). I mean, being somebody who was always on time and always showed up, because that’s what he did. It didn’t matter that he drank. And everybody drank. I mean, not as much as he, maybe, but everybody that we knew drank.

We were a working family. Everybody worked and everybody did things toward their education as well, and we were always involved in some issue or another that everybody believed was something we could help by knowing about it [and] voting in the right way.

I also wanted to touch on your struggles with alcoholism and depression, if you’re willing to talk about it, since September is National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month.

Of course. Well, the key is education and people should know suicide has been around since man learned to read, I think, and write. Life on the planet is very hard, and it’s hard to make sense out of it and to reach an emotional stability in your life. That’s where therapy comes in and where education comes in and really learning what you can do. I always knew that I had a problem with alcohol, for instance. I always knew that there was an issue there, so I read and I talked and I got into therapy, where I didn’t get much help with (alcoholism) particularly, but I learned a lot of other things. I certainly learned about things that would help me in life and I learned to talk about things, and that’s part of the secret.

I think talking about issues in mental health is vital to the solutions and how to prevent suicide and how to maintain an emotional stability, how to find out whether you are a candidate for medication or whether you’d better use the natural healing processes, which are vast in number and which can help you in many, many ways that drugs cannot.

You yourself have attempted suicide, and your own son committed suicide more than 20 years ago. Do you think there’s been a shift in how we talk about and understand suicide since then?

Oh, yes. Yes, indeed. Certainly when my son died — almost 25 years ago now — people didn’t talk. There were not many books out. We knew a lot about Sylvia Plath’s depression and so on, but we didn’t have any idea about the solution there. Now, you can go anywhere online and you can find sections in bookstores that have to do with mental health [and] suicide prevention.

I was lucky in one sense because I knew I was battling depression early on and I also knew that exercise was the key. I exercise every day and I’ve done that since I was in my early 20s because I knew the pills were not going to help me. The pills make me dull and dumb and stupid. Maybe they are refined enough that people who need them don’t have that response anymore, but I also know that drugs are dangerous for alcoholics. Because when we depend on something that comes in a little white pill or a pink or a blue or an orange pill, we’re not depending on the talking therapy.

So, the talking cure, I would say, is relevant even more today than it ever was, and it does work.

You once said something along the lines of, “I don’t think I’ll ever grow up.” Is there a difference in your mind between what it means to grow up and simply just getting older?

No. Age is in the mind, first of all. I have a young mind and I have a young attitude and I have a youthful figure, you know. I’m safely and soundly on the shore today. I mean, it’s just for today. We might as well face it — we have no idea what’s happening in the future.

What do you make of today’s young protesters and activists? Do you see any parallels between the young people of today and the youth movement of your heyday?

I see Bernie Sanders, who certainly gained a lot of voters and hopefully whose forethought and whose very on-the-mark critique of what we need can be integrated and spread about by somebody who is, I think, going to be a very wonderful president. And we know who that’s not going to be. And I think that (the two generations of activists) have a lot in common — we all have a lot in common with one another.

It’s sometimes easy for the older generation to criticize the generation that comes after it, but you don’t see it that way, it seems.

I think we always have a lot of work to do. There’s never been a time in this country when we didn’t have a lot of work to do. Our job is to figure out how to get along, as Rodney King so aptly put it. And we still have to learn how to get along. My job is to look at what’s in front of me and try to do something about it.

So, let’s save the land from destruction by the pipelines and the emissions. Just getting the EPA to work would be a start, but of course we can’t get Congress to agree on anything because they’re all supported by lobbying moneybags. And they’re not on our side. They’re on the side of where the money comes from, and that’s a tragedy for us. If that’s not political, I don’t know what is.

But you remain optimistic despite it all?

I’m a born optimist. I think we have to be, individually and as a group, to do extraordinary things. And that’s what I believe.