The 1989 album Linda Ronstadt will always regret: “I didn’t do well”
Artists like Linda Ronstadt can sometimes be their own worst enemies when it comes to their own music.
Some of the biggest singers in the world can always come out onstage and be almost effortlessly perfect whenever they sing, and while Ronstadt was certainly one of those examples, she could only see some of the blemishes on every one of her vocal lines every single time she performed one of her songs. There were a lot more frustrating pieces of her discography than most people realised, and when it came to her albums, Ronstadt was beside herself listening to some of them in retrospect.
Then again, that’s only because Ronstadt was so used to making the magic happen onstage. She didn’t like the idea of being tied to one specific take for the rest of her life, and even when she was singing some of her favourite songs live, it was out of the question for her to throw in something new depending on how she was feeling that day. In fact, Ronstadt figured that most of her best songs didn’t eventually come until the 1980s.
She had spent so much time dwelling on the little intricacies of what her voice could do for the longest time, so when she had someone like Nelson Riddle to coach her, she had the perfect voice that she was looking for. That was all well and good if she was going to be singing standards for the rest of her life, but Ronstadt wanted to see what she could do if she used that same approach on traditional pop fare.
Her voice definitely got a shot in the arm after she started singing Spanish songs, but when you listen to her contemporary voice after What’s New, she had a lot more depth to what she was singing. She knew that she could make music that sounded a bit more refined than whatever else was on the radio, but even if she was outshining her competition, Cry Like a Rainstorm Howl Like the Wind was the moment where she started to really understand what all of her songs needed.
She fell in love with doing every one of those tunes live, but given how she performed on the record, Ronstadt wanted nothing to do with the recorded versions that she put out in 1989, saying, “I didn’t know how to sing then. I was doing songs that I really didn’t relate to. I didn’t do them as well on the record as I did them on stage after I had them in my mouth for a while, but it’s always like that. I didn’t know what I was doing yet. And I wasn’t good at picking material for myself.”
It’s not like Ronstadt was singing well out of her range or anything, but the songs that she chose here needed a bit more refinement before she could really inhabit them right. You have to remember that all singers are like sonic actors in a way, and having all of the strength that Ronstadt had on this record, she seemed to have all the right tools, but for the wrong kind of execution whenever she walked into the vocal booth.
She could definitely inhabit the tunes better whenever she worked out her own arrangements, but it’s the same way that an actor does the right preparation for the wrong role. Anyone could try to bulk up to do their own stunts like Tom Cruise if they hear that they’re going to be in a Hollywood blockbuster, but if their character is supposed to be scrawny, all of that work was in service to the wrong project.
But Ronstadt wasn’t going to let all of that training go to waste, either. She had been one of the greatest singers that the rock world had ever seen, and even if she had left country and rock behind by this time, she was willing to do whatever she could to bend her voice in a way that served those songs the best.
