The album Linda Ronstadt waited a decade to make and lived to regret
If there’s one thing to be learned from Linda Ronstadt’s storied career, it’s that she never rushes anything. In fact, along with other parts of her craft, Ronstadt has always valued having the right amount of time and space to execute things exactly as she wants them.
“I have to be emotionally connected to a song, or I can’t sing it,” Ronstadt once said, a statement she very much adhered to across many of her hits and most career-defining moments. In fact, some of her more well-known songs, like ‘Alison’, for instance, almost didn’t make it into her discography, because she initially felt like it was a song made for another singer.
That said, Ronstadt’s definitive pivots have always stemmed from her desire to do exactly what feels right, whether it’s repurposing the sounds she heard as a young girl in her childhood home in Tucson or immersing herself in the eclectic sounds at the Troubadour. When Ronstadt feels inspired by someone or something, she’ll often absorb it into her own craft, even if that means doing a complete reversal on everything she thought she knew.
For We Ran, for instance, Ronstadt became fixated on the idea of doing “the opposite of everything I’ve done”. Covering classics by some of the scene’s biggest players, from Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen, Ronstadt leaned into a more accessible rock sound, which is partially credited to the additional contributions of Glyn Johns as producer.
While creating the record, Ronstadt’s love for sitting with certain ideas and letting them simmer was met with a different kind of resistance, namely in the form of Johns’ disciplined approach, which often saw Ronstadt pushing herself to abandon her usual slow-burn pragmatism. “Glyn does things completely the opposite from the way that I do them,” she once said, explaining how she likes to “craft things” and “sweat over them”, while Johns is hastier, recording segments and telling her to just “get on with it’.
Ronstadt already knew the intricacies of patience in different ways, not just in the studio with her knack for taking “a long time” to work her magic, but with waiting for the right time for projects to take flight… Years earlier, in the mid-1970s, Ronstadt attempted to join forces with two people she’d admired for a long time: Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris, but scheduling conflicts halted that dream until the late 1980s, when they could finally make the record they’d always wanted.
Trio was everything she’d imagined it to be, a soaring explosion of harmonious rock power that demonstrated the best of all their abilities. However, its follow-up, Trio II, proved to be far more difficult, with Parton citing Ronstadt’s inherent slowness as a major factor and Ronstadt subsequently clapping back at Parton’s unreliability. “Ronstadt loves to work in the studio and works so slow, it drives me nuts,” said Parton. “I wanted to say, ‘Wake up, bitch, I got stuff to do.’”
Ronstadt also once, rather diplomatically, said that they were great colleagues, but that the “sum is greater than the parts” and that, in the studio, Parton “does it her way and that’s it”. Trio II, therefore, was defined more by disagreements and fallouts than the harmonious magic they’d enjoyed during the first project, with such volatility almost resulting in the record not being released at all.
Little has been said about the records in recent years, at least from Ronstadt, but it’s probably safe to assume that it sparked a learning curve that even she hadn’t been prepared for. And while much of the material remains among her best, it also confirmed further why her way of working was almost always executed best without the additional strain and pressure of other people.
