Collins Still Exercising Her Optimism : Pop: The singer, who’ll perform in Irvine, has been re-embraced by the industry since writing her hopeful ballad, “The Blizzard.”

Most pop stars would regard a six-year gap between major label recording deals as an exile, a sentence to hard labor in the musical hinterlands. But Judy Collins says she felt nothing of the sort during the long stretch between “Home Again,” the last of her 20 albums for Elektra Records, and “Fires of Eden,” her just-released major label comeback on Columbia.

Collins--who sings tonight at the Irvine Barclay Theatre--began her 1987 autobiography, “Trust Your Heart,” with a brittle account of how Elektra dropped her. Maybe, she mused in her book, she should have tried wearing a black leather jacket and recording a punk-rock version of “Both Sides Now.”

But on the phone last week from her home in Manhattan, Collins said she remains what she has been since the late ‘60s, when she evolved from her earliest incarnation as a pure acoustic folkie into a pop diva who draws on a variety of sources, ranging from traditional folk songs to Broadway tunes, from “Amazing Grace” to soft rock.

“I’ve always fit in,” Collins, now 51, said of the years when major labels had no interest in her. “The audiences were there. The concerts were there. I have almost continually toured, with very few breaks. (I didn’t) have any doubts.” Still, with the Columbia deal, “It’s nice to have my optimism reconfirmed.”

Collins’ recording career didn’t lapse entirely between Elektra and Columbia. She released two albums--”Trust Your Heart” (1987) and a 1989 live recording, “Sanity & Grace”--on the small, independent Gold Castle label, which also has served as a haven for such ‘60s folk-boom veterans as Joan Baez, Eric Anderson, Peter, Paul & Mary and Bob Neuwirth.

But that’s not a chapter Collins cared to discuss. “It was fine. It was just kind of short-lived. I don’t know much about what happened with those projects.”

One of the key steps back to the majors, Collins said, was writing “The Blizzard,” the long, narrative piece that opens her album and returns at the end as a brief coda. “It is one of the things I’m most happy with,” she said. “It’s what (the Columbia) people were excited about.”

The song focuses on a troubled woman who spends a night stranded in a Colorado diner, waiting out a blizzard. She confides in a stranger, telling him about her collapsing relationship. The next morning, with the sky clearing, she experiences an epiphany that leaves her certain she can survive any romantic blow.

Collins recited the climactic line of the song: “‘I knew you might leave me, but you’d never break me.’ That’s the core of the whole album. It’s a matter of faith and inner courage and determination.”

Actually, Collins said, she never has been stuck in a blizzard, although her early years in Colorado left her well acquainted with the tricky aspects of driving wintry mountain roads. “You know what they say about poetic license--you use your feelings and memories, not of a particular event, but of something that triggers a whole story. I can’t say that I have (been caught in a blizzard), but I have been emotionally.”

Many of Collins’ best-known recordings have been interpretations of other people’s songs: the hymn “Amazing Grace,” tunes from Joni Mitchell (“Both Sides Now”), Leonard Cohen (“Suzanne”), Sandy Denny (“Who Knows Where the Time Goes?”) and Stephen Sondheim (“Send In the Clowns”). With “Fires of Eden,” the focus is more on her own writing: She wrote or co-wrote six of the album’s 10 songs. The ‘70s soft-rock duo of David Buskin and Robin Batteau served as her collaborators on five of them.

The overriding tone--except for “Queen of the Night,” a moody, firmly rocking song about a bag lady--is forthright idealism that comes out in songs that often swell into anthems and affirmative hymns. The album “has a tremendous jolt of energy because I feel very optimistic,” Collins said.

Her optimism extends to the state of the music business, which has re-embraced the folk-based singer-songwriter since the successes of Suzanne Vega and Tracy Chapman.

“Suzanne is a terrific poet, and I like a lot of what Tracy is doing,” Collins said. “From time to time we see a big shift in the listening patterns of people. There was something going on that prompted people to want to hear stories and poetry and lyrics. I think it has to do with the value system changing. People are listening to words that have meaning.”

To give her major label comeback some extra meaning, Collins has set up an environmental organization called the Garden of Eden Planet Foundation. Through it, part of her album’s proceeds (as well as money donated by her tour sponsor, Mutual Benefit Life) will be used to plant saplings in deforested areas of Colorado.

The idea is related to an ecological issue that confronts the record industry: whether to continue packaging CDs in the disposable, oversize cardboard “long boxes” in which they are typically sold. Critics say the boxes are a waste of paper and therefore a drain on the forest environment.

But “this is not a protest” over CD boxes, Collins said. “It’s just a good idea to plant trees, replanting (to replace) what you use. It’s just the idea of giving back to and regenerating and being conscious of the ecosystem in which we live. After so many years of having so many albums out, it’s not a bad idea.”

Judy Collins sings tonight at 8 at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. Tickets: $25 and $21. Information: (714) 854-4607.